Older blog entries for olandgren (starting at number 188)

Life

Note to self: Just don't open your mouth. Your comment license has been revoked.

Her: Describes harrowing New Year's Eve. Really, really bad mojo. I've only come close to that kind of thing once in my life.
Me: "At least you had more fun than I did."

God, I'm an asshole sometimes. I got called for it, but I still wish there was a way I could apologize. Why do I always do stuff like that to the people I care about the most? It seems like my brain and mouth are never connected when they need to be these days.

Oh, and I weighed 190 today. Fuck. My license for food has been revoked for the next month or two as well.

School

My grades finally came through - - three A's and the A-. Now that I've finally gotten the "get all A's" monkey off my back I can go for the "get a 4.0" monkey next semester. The fun never stops. In other news, requested letters of recommendation from my professors for the scholarship application. Hopefully it goes OK.

Life

I got to see a couple of my friends from high school today -- that was a lot of fun. We stopped by, looked at the senior class picture and played "Where are they now" for 15 minutes. Sadly, the answer in a lot of the cases was "dropped out of school, drugs" or working at Spencer's Gifts, or any of a number of bleak futures. The class reunion is looking scarier than I first envisioned it. I guess I had this weird dream that people who go to college tend to finish it.

Just when things were going smoothly, it looks like another bump may be appearing in the road. It sounds like one of my roommates might be interested in things I would personally rather not he be interested in, even though my reasons are rather selfish. Drat.

Listening

Nirvana -- Nevermind -- Lithium

School

So far, so good. I know 2 of 4 grades. A in Databases, which isn't too much of a surprise. A- in International Econ, which is slightly disappointing, but considering how badly I flamed out at the end, not horrible. The rest I find out on the 2nd.

Life

Got tipsy with my parents on excellent champagne. We toasted the New Year and hoped that it would be as personally rewarding for us as the previous one. It was nice to be able to celebrate without worry of conflict.

Things that I would like for 2002:

• To see Parrot do well and Perl 6 come alive. There's so much cool stuff going on here, and I love Perl to bits in a funny way I can't really explain. The idea of a more streamlined, neater Perl with stuff like hyper-operators and the other cool binding constructs and computer-sciency features in a production language makes me happy.
• To achieve a better personal understanding of programming languages and why I enjoy them so much. I can't explain why I love futzing around with them so much, and I need to crystallize that enjoyment into something concrete if I expect grad schools to accept me. I also need to figure out how to make a living when I'm not the next Larry Wall, Guy Steele, Paul Graham, or Guido Van Rossum.
• To see a larger acceptance of Scheme as a programming language which can do real stuff. How to Use Scheme is a great start -- it will be interesting to see what happens with that.
• To play with Arc and find out if it really is as neat as it looks. The idea of combining my two favorite languages into one package is just happy.
• To actually have an interesting idea for my honors thesis when it comes time to declare it
• To be able to look in the mirror and see a version of me sans the 15 or so pounds I've put on over the holiday season. This one may take a couple of months.
• To see my friends graduate happy people and be successful in the world. Since this is most of my friends, I'm really hoping hard on this one.
• To be me.

School

So it's over for this semester. I did a really half-assed job on the Compilers take-home final, but I figured that after 11 hours of work that I just really couldn't do much more in the way of understanding or correction to make it a better product. At least not as sleep deprived as I am. It's amusing how well I write when I'm sleep-deprived, though. I stop second-guessing my word choice, don't need an outline, and the paper just sort of flows out of my hands. I haven't done that in nearly a year, and it felt really good. *sigh* I guess I conditioned myself to writing papers late at night in HS and the definition of "late at night" just kept sliding back.

I'm really curious what my grades will end up being this semester. I went into finals week with 4 A's, all above 93%. I really hope that I keep all of them -- it would be a very nice boost to the GPA, and would get me out of the 3.70 danger zone I've been flirting with.

Diet

Time to start paying attention again. Wonderful. I wonder how much damage has been done?

Hacking

Now that I'll finally have some(albeit not much) time on my hands, I intend to take on more learning scsh to see if I can automate some of my other basic tasks on the computer. Fun little stuff like that.

Life

As soon as I see my professor and turn in my papers, I'm going to turn off like a light. It will be glorious. After doing that for 4 or 5 hours, I will then proceed to wake up and go about life as normal. Should be fun. I need to do some laundry, but that can wait until tomorrow morning. Life is good when you're done stressing.

Other interesting things are starting to crop up, but I'm steadfastly avoiding analyzing anything and am instead just enjoying the company. If something happens, it happens. Life is just a mystery.

School

Question:What do you do when you have tons of stuff you should be studying for the two tests you're least likely to do well on the next day?
Answer:Anything else.

That's pretty much summed up the experience that has been today. I did my compilers final presentation, which was loopy but OK, and went to an economics study session. So there are now only 4 things left on the todo list. Unfortunately, all of them are final exams of one sort or another.

Assuming that I don't burn out in the next three days, I will then have a period of approximately a week(up until the 1st) in which I have nothing to do. Then the fun starts again -- design a research proposal for a Goldwater, work on the research with Susan over J-term, go to work, etc. ad infinitum. It just doesn't stop.

I think that fact, and the addition of the fact that the person who doesn't like me very much at all is going to be my preceptor for Economics of Gender(benefits of a small school, wot wot) triggered a depressive attack. It was the first one I've had in a long time, and I was just sitting at my computer doing some studying and suddenly wanted to just give up on everything. And seriously considered doing it for about 15 minutes. Ugh. Oh, well. Three days. Only three days.

Life

Not much going on here. Expanding a social circle is an interesting exercise, but one which I suspect is good for me. Talked with two different sets of people tonight -- some senior econ/math majors whom I've known by reputation but not by name, and a couple of Lilly's roommates and a girl from Econ. Very random, but a nice change of pace.

School

So the culmination of an entire semester's worth of work comes down to (+ 1 2 3) returning 6. However, the intense satisfaction of seeing that number on the screen makes me a very, very happy man. Now all I have is the presentation, the paper, the take-home final, the econ final, the calculus final, and the databases final. Of these, I have a lot of rote practice and learning to do for the calc final, the econ final just needs some practice and review, and the databases final is something I don't really need to worry about. Moreover, the compilers take-home will take probably 6 hours, and the paper maybe 8-10. So I have my work cut out for me over the next five days, but it will be a lot of fun. I think I'll survive.

Hacking

Since my love affair with scsh, I've had the time to do precisely nothing with it. Oh, well. There's always time after finals.

Life

A couple of interesting things went on this evening, which I feel like thinking about. First, I went to a movie with Lilly, her friend Julia, a girl named Cammy, and Lilly's ex, Tim. This felt rather odd because it was one of those things where you're not really sure if it counts as a date or not... Very odd. *shrug* The whole "don't analyze, just accept" policy has worked wonders so far, so I'm not going to deviate.

The other fun event of the evening was the chocolate party some of my friends hosted. It was a truly amazing event -- they had everything from irish cream truffles to a delectable chocolate torte to other random things like hot chocolate and Cadbury fingers. All of it was yummy, and the company was excellent as always. Got to finally see Katrina again, and it wasn't even mildly weird. This was very happy. Lots of people will be around during January, so that should be a lot of fun. There's not much better in life than lots of friends with chocolate.

School

Currently procrastinating terribly -- I suddenly decided I needed clean laundry, and now I'm writing a journal entry. I think it has something to do with the fact that Compilers is due tomorrow and my Economics final paper worth a whopping 20% of my grade is due Friday. Always fun.

Incidentally, the homework I stayed up all night doing I got a 95 on. Go figure. Now all I have to do is survive one more week of classes and I'll come out of the semester smelling like a rose(hopefully one of the deep rich red ones that starts being fragrant about 5PM at night).

I find that the people I admire most in life tend to be those who just have copious numbers of tuits and either don't procrastinate much or don't need to worry about whether or not a task is procrastination because they've got so much on their platter. I guess I sorta wish I'd never picked up the propensity to loaf -- it would make life a good deal more simple. I'm sure graduate school will either burn it out of me or burn me out, so that's fun.

Life

On the procrastination note, instead of staying up and working like I should have been, I stayed up and had one of those long college BS sessions that go on for hours with Isaiah, Ho Ying, and Lilly. It was fun being reminded why Ho Ying and Isaiah are my friends after all the stuff that's gone on this semester, and Lilly has some very interesting takes on everyday occurrences. The conversation spanned the typical gamut from the ethics of vegetarianism to the virtues of laziness to an hour-long "how do less socially-adept people deal with relationships and the acquiring of those?" dialog. Very fun, and completely the destressor I needed. Of course, I pay later, but whatever.

School

Whee, didn't sleep getting my Econ homework done. We'll have to see how it turns out. Four days until the paper is due, and I'm about 1K words short. Fun. I don't remember if I mentioned that my advisor got tenure, but she did. I'm absolutely thrilled -- it couldn't have happened to a better person, and Macalester couldn't have made a better investment in the future.

trs80, you've run into one of my rather annoying quirks -- I've been fairly good at school all my life, and expect myself to get a minimum of 90% on any given assignment or test. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't, but it frustrates me when it doesn't. I study enough that I usuallly come through, so it makes me even more frustrated when it doesn't. The real reason I was torqued at myself was because it happened in Multivariable Calc, which is more or less my "fun" class for the semester. *shrug* Pay no attention to the neurosis behind the curtain.

Hacking

So I really shouldn't have been, but I decided to look up scsh after seeing a pointer to it on the ll1-discuss list. And of course, as fond of Scheme as I am, I just had to try it out, and the following script resulted.

#!/usr/local/bin/scsh -s
!#
;; Copy the mp3s in the cwd over to /home/olandgre/iso/burn/
(for-each
 (lambda (arg)
   (& (cp ,arg "/home/olandgre/iso/burn/")))
 (glob "*.mp3"))

 
 ;; Turn the mp3s in /home/olandgre/iso/burn into the
;; equivalent .wav files.
(for-each
 (lambda (file)
   (let (
         (wavname (replace-extension file ".wav")))
     (begin 
       (run
        (mpg123 -q -v -w ,wavname ,file))
       (delete-file file))))
   (glob "/home/olandgre/iso/burn/*.mp3"))

 
 ;; Check if it was fed the -n or --normalize switch,
;; currently the only switch it has. Change this to a 
;; for-each through a cond on the arglist in the future?
(let ((flag (car command-line-arguments)))
  (if (or
       (equal? "-n" flag)
       (equal? "--normalize" flag))
      (for-each
       (lambda (arg)
         (run
          (normalize -m ,arg )))
       (glob "/home/olandgre/iso/burn/*.wav"))))

I should probably be ashamed of it, but it works quite nicely at doing what I want it to, and is much more aesthetically pleasing than the version I had in bash. I need to figure out exactly when I should be using run, &, and exec-epf, but I suspect that's just a matter of playing around with it. I love being able to iterate over the contents of something with for-each -- I know it's basically the same as iterating over using for i in *.mp3 do <blah> done, but it's just the way I think, I guess.

Life

Having malts with someone at the Broiler is a lot of fun. Don't analyze, just accept.

School

So the todo list is somewhat shorter than it was, and a lot of stuff is done. This is good. The Calc test I was worried about last time was sadly justified -- I ended up getting 83% on it, knocking my overal test grades down a whopping 6%. Ugh. Now I have to worry about being in A- territory, or worse if I screw up the final. I don't need that. Most of my other classes are going well, though there's a lot of work that needs to get done. It's just a matter of chugging through it, I guess.

Weight

*sigh*

Work

No further noise on anything yet, but I'm hoping. Filling out applications for summer employment -- there are three equally cool possibilities, any of which I would jump at.

Life

Not all that terribly much going on in it, sadly. This week was devoted almost solely to school, with the exception of the Player's Ball last night. I truly love that, as it gives everyone an opportunity to dress up(something which is rather rare at Macalester) and go out and dance to good music, not the typical thumpa- thumpa-thumpa crap they tend to play at dances. Don't get me wrong -- I love techno in many forms, but the sort of generic stuff they play at dances just drives me nuts. It's good for rubbing up and groping and not much else. So swing and slow jazz was a refreshing change of pace, to say the least. Danced with a lot of different girls, which was fun, even though all of them are off limits. Dancing with Katrina wasn't nearly as awkward as I was expecting -- I guess I'm just lucky I have such wonderful friends.

I also found a really cool Christmas present for my little sister(well, it might by schlocky crap from her perspective, but I think it's cool). It's a minature wooden chest, roughly 6x3x4, which has a butterfly carved into the top and a cute little lock. I figure I'll fill it with chocolate and tell her that by the time she's finished with the chocolate, she might have found a use for it.<grin>

School

*sigh* The Calc test I had today went really badly, but that's life. I just don't function all that well that early in the morning(an hour before I normally wake up). Hopefully it won't be fatal to my grades in the class. I'm currently working on the paper for the class, and the lab needs doing too. And then there's all the other stuff I have. Woohoo! My todo list is about 2.5 pages on my Palm at this point.

Weight

I've decided to worry about it at the end of the semester when I can afford to do something about it. Until then, nothing doing.

Work

This one is sort of interesting -- did a business lunch with the guys I worked with this summer at Honeywell -- it was a lot of fun catching up and hearing how the projects are doing -- another guy from my class and I will be going out to Camden Labs next week to explore. Should be interesting stuff.

Hacking

Did a bunch of quick Perl stuff to update a script that runs through the /var/mail partition and emails people(both users and administrators) when their INBOX is over 10 MB. It's fun seeing the kinds of day-to-day things that SAs need -- now I get to work on my Macalester::Auth module that will let username/password pairs transparently authenticate so that you don't need to worry about what it's using to make sure that the person has authorization (since we have about 4 different ways of IDing a person(thank you heterogenous networks)).

I've also been having fun reading the LL1 mailing list. It looks like there are some excellent discussions going on, and hopefully the fact that the only people who seem to be talking are the really smart ones will keep the signal/noise ratio fairly high. Maybe I should ask Guy Steele for a job this summer. <grin>

Life

Actually doing fairly well. The weather was beautiful today and I was just happy -- I didn't even care that I completely fucked up the math test - - I think the letting it out and getting on with life thing worked to a tee. I went in my room, closed the door, screamed, swore, hit the wall with a pillow a couple of times(with feather pillows, it makes a *very* satisfying noise) and went on with life.

Also some other stuff going on that I'm just thinking about. Not really sure how to interpret things, so I'm not going to bother. Go with the flow and all that jazz.

Oh -- two days ago I shaved off my goatee for the first time in about 11 months. It feels very weird -- I'd lost the skill of shaving my chin, so I got some nicks this morning. Other than that, it's colder, and I look about 5 years younger. I suppose in 5 years I'll kill for that particular advantage, but right now it's bad enough I'm probably going to get carded for movies for a while. Most of my friends had "Oh, my god!" reactions when they saw it -- I didn't think it was that big a deal, but it was very amusing.