Older blog entries for olandgren (starting at number 203)

Meta

Trying something different -- staging my diary entries so that the personal nonsense goes in first, and then the stuff that would interest the community, modulo how interesting anything I ever do is.

Hacking

Installed the MS .NET SDK and CSDE. Well, I tried the latter, anyways. There are still a lot of bugs in their transcription over, and though I hacked the elisp till it actually loaded withouth triggering the debugger on Emacs 21, it wasn't syntax coloring any of the stuff that it needed to be, and the auto-insert templates were wrong so it wasn't really useful. I guess the authors only tested with XEmacs or something.
Fought with LDAP and Perl at work today. The module is really nice, and limited only by my complete lack of a)documentation and b)general understanding of LDAP. I grok the concept fine, but the implementation and lack of documentation is giving me fits.
Actually ran into a use-case for aspect-oriented programming today. We needed to do a lot of statistics gathering for our networks simulation, as well as a lot of formal verification. The problem being, we've encapsulated too well and can't get at the data that the prof wants us to get at because we've wrapped it up and abstracted. However, I realized that we could have just defined an aspect based around the cutpoint of a spawning Event and checked there that everything was working right. Oh, well. Can't win them all.

Listening

Kosheen - Resist - Harder

School

School is going OK, though I don't get to sleep tonight. *sigh* Always fun when that happens -- I've got a response to Taivalsaari's overview of Object-Orientation techniques to write and chances are it's not going to flow like water from my fingertips.

Diet

I've been a bad, bad boy, and have started eating some of the junk that got me into trouble in the first place(things like smoothies and a portabella mushroom) due to warped time schedules. Very bad, but hopefully I'll be able to curb it before it gets out of control and I gain another 10 pounds. The weird thing is that I look in the mirror and I don't really look the weight the scale says. Very odd.

Life

Lots of interesting stuff going on which may or may not be good. I had a phone interview today which went well, and resulted in me getting an invitation to fly out and do a second-round interview. It should be very interesting -- I didn't expect that I would be able to do all that well on the phone, but nervous energy tends to do odd things.
My great-uncle George died last night. It seems that I'm losing older relatives faster and faster these days. He went fairly peacefully, a heart attack in his sleep. I'll miss him a lot -- he was one of those people who was always just quietly happy, watching Anajean go about life with her usual zest and exuberance. And I can't even go to the funeral because of school. Such is life, I guess.
Saw Emilia tonight, which was fun. She's always in motion towards the completion of something, even when just doing the simple stuff like buying food for a friend. I wonder what she's like when she relaxes completely? I really hope I don't fuck this up as much as I have the last ones. I suspect that whatever will happen will happen regardless of what I think here, as that's just the way life works. I haven't truly scared one off for nearly a year, and somehow I don't think Emilia is easily scareable.
In general, this semester is not nearly as good as the last. I'm not sure why, but it's very disconcerting.

Placeholder

Lots of emotional nonsense and only a little hacking. See Progress Quest for the best new technology in games ever.<grin/>

School

Working your heart and soul out on something and then getting a not-quite-good-enough grade really sucks. Happened in Econ -- I submitted two drafts, didn't sleep the night before the paper was due, and still ended up with an A-. I guess I shouldn't complain, but it's just frustrating to fight so hard for a good grade and then miss it by just a little bit.

Hacking

Lots and lots of SML code. It's fun, and I'm seriously considering something like "Compiler Implementation in a Strongly-Typed Functional Language" as my honors thesis in CS. I don't know if there's enough research there for it to be an honors thesis though. We'll have to see.
I've been thinking a lot about how much Unix I use on a day to day basis -- Cygwin/Emacs/Perl on Windows, and everything under the sun on my Linux box. What's really interesting is how many more annoying little tasks I've had to do since the Linux box went under(video card fan,which has yet to be replaced). I really miss scsh on Windows.

Diet

So I've been attempting a "eat normally, exercise" approach to weight loss. It hasn't worked at all. I weigh the same or more than when I started. Yeah, I'm a little fitter, but the point of the whole endeavor was to lose the last inch of fat so that I look decent again. Argh. I don't really want to start dieting again, but if there's not another way to get the job done...

Life

Life has been interesting and all that. Went on the date with Emilia, though not the movie like I expected. We went skating at the Depot instead -- I got to teach her how to skate, which was a lot of fun. She'd never seen an ice rink before that night. By the end she was able to do forward movement under her own power, and had only fallen down three times(and only once when I was helping her), so things seemed to go well. Much fun was had by all, at least as far as I can tell.
Other than that, had another self-recriminatory episode while under the influence. This seems to be something of a pattern, which is bad. I've thought about it a lot, and realized that there's a consequence for bottling stuff up while sober: it comes out when you're not. Katrina recommended that I see a professional therapist, and I guess I'm inclined to agree. I assume that normal people don't look in the mirror in the morning and say "Ugh -- how do you expect to go anywhere?" So that should be interesting.
The interesting part about it isn't so much going to be therapy itself(I've done that before) as it will be getting the money for therapy out of our insurance company without my mom finding out. I'm pretty sure that my father will be fine with it, but my mom would flip. *sigh* Oh, well -- you take the cards you're dealt and play them the best you can.
Other than that, though, life is fine. My great-uncle is recovering from his heart attack/aneurysm combo suprisingly well, my friends seem to be coping well with their upcoming graduation, and I've managed to make peace with my addiction to computer games. My room-draw number sucks, but that's life. Hopefully I can get in on a triple with a couple other people I know, but if not, then I guess a single will be fine. I'm not exactly going to have large amounts of people around to socialize with.

Listening

Richard Bone - Etherdome - Plateau to Level 30

School + Hacking = Yo La^H^H^H^H^ Happy Owen

I finally got to combine these two categories tonight. I had one of those nights that you're just really, really happy to have, the ones where you're coding, enjoying coding, and doing it some more.
It all started off with me going to the Konhauser this morning. That was a lot of fun, even if my team really, really sucked it up. 15/100 is just embarassing. Then, after about a two hour conversation with other math people who are friends(always fun), I got to go back home. Going back home inspired a "play with the XML that we're now generating" kind of mood, and so I did that for a while. XSLT is "supa-hella-cool," to quote my Oregonian roommate.
Then, off to the team meeting, and three straight hours of TeX. Writing math papers in LaTeX is fun because they look so incredible afterwards. The event was slightly marred by the fact that I couldn't convince it to go to PDF, but life goes on. So that was fun.
I then came back and started hacking at the stylesheet again. It's really a lot of fun - you essentially get an event-driven parser system written for you, and you just supply what you want out of it. I like it a lot, and I'll probably end up doing more after this.

Life

Today was an so-so day as far as life outside of computers go. I had fun at the Konhauser, specifically the part after. The real reason to do those isn't to win(that's what CS is for), it's to socialize with the cool people.
Lots of interesting conversational topics came up over the time we were talking -- everything from being a man in Victoria's Secret(the secret is apparently looking at the perfume the entire time), the art of fast seduction(be an asshole in a nice way, then leave her to stew for a while), and how to compliment a smart girl(emphasize her looks, not her brains). The question of what to do when a girl is both smart and pretty didn't really get answered, sadly. The advice would have been useful.
Also asked someone on a date, semiaccidentally. Emilia is cute and smart as a whip, so I'm sort of in for it. We(a group) were discussing movies, and more specifically were talking about movies we would like to see. It turns out that we both wanted to see Amelie, so later in the day I asked if she'd like to go this evening, mostly as a joke. To my surprise, she took it seriously, and said that while she couldn't go tonight, next weekend. So now I have a commitment for next weekend, I guess.
Let's see. What else? I had a fairly bad night on Friday -- I got stuck in self-recrimination mode, so my friends chewed me out for that. I've been being much better about that kind of thing, so I guess some sort of cork just popped. The other interesting news of the weekend is the fact that my roommate Isaiah officially has a girlfriend, and she's absolutely picture perfect for him. Couldn't have asked for a better match. They're just like a Hallmark card when they're together, though of the rather messed up variety that tosses insults back and forth as much as cutesy comments. If I could somehow convey delighted chortling, I would. Hopefully this works out for at least a month -- perpetually happy people are fun to be around.

Listening

Biosphere - Substrata - Poa Alpina

School

Whee. Round 1 of nastiness is done -- on to Round 2. I need to start thinking about an Honors Thesis(yes, the caps are appropriate.) I'm currently thinking about trying to combine my enjoyment of functional languages with my enjoyment of compilers and see if I can't do some sort of thesis on the advantages of compiler implementation in functional programming languages. Of course, I sincerely doubt there's any original research there, so I'll have to come up with an angle which would make it worthwhile. I don't want to just do another "this is my toy language" thing: it seems like cheating, and I'm not good enough to be designing my own language yet anyways.

Hacking

Learning about the joys of the Perl module system. The authenticator module is making steady progress, mainly because I'm actually writing unit tests for the thing as I go so that there will be honest-to-god proof that the damned thing works when I leave a year from now. The IMAP module is mostly working, and I need to bump some stuff that I implemented there into the superclass, but all goes well otherwise. LDAP will be next on the list, followed by who knows what. NDS, maybe?

Diet

I've been making purposeful attempts to avoid thinking about this stuff so that I could let exercise do some good. Three weeks in, I'm feeling ok. Step Aerobics is definitely good for me, even though I feel like a complete twit sometimes. However, I don't hyperventilate anymore, and the shade of purple I turn isn't quite as alarming. Probably means that I need to cut back my eating habits some more.

Life

Life goes up and down, but mostly it just goes. I have no idea whatsoever where I stand with Lilly. Saturday night was very interesting -- the Ks threw a big party, which I attended. Rest of story whited out, so those who don't want to read don't have to
The party was great -- everybody was seeking entertainment, and was quite cheerful. There was a good mix of people there, and everyone seemed to be having a blast. So was I, for quite a while. Then, something just switched on. For some reason, "happy" married couples, or engaged couples in this case, seem to encourage excess drinking on my part. I got really piss drunk(thankfully didn't say anything too horrible), and then worshipped the porcelain god for an hour or two. Not something I'm particularly proud of, but it happened.
The worst thing about the whole experience, I think, was the fact that I know perfectly well that I'm happier and luckier than I ever deserved to be in life, and I give thanks daily that I ended up at Mac for undergraduate. While these places will be incredible once I'm a grad student, they wouldn't have been at all good for me as an undergrad because I had some serious maturity and self-discovery issues which needed to be worked out. Yeah, I would have been fairly intelligent wherever I went, but I wouldn't be as diverse a person as I am. Being able to socialize is fun, even if I'm only mediocre at it.
Anyways, that aside, things have been going fairly well. I had a complete and utter "Far North" moment at my grandmother's birthday. We celebrated at a restaurant, and a bunch of steel/manufacturing workers all spiffed up for a retirement party for one of their crew came in and sat down at the big table across the aisle. My grandmother, upon seeing this, said "Ah... Look at all the men." I suspect you have to have seen the movie to see it, but I just had to look over my shoulder for warpainted ladies attacking.

Listening

Radiohead - The Bends - Black Star

School

Ok, I spoke to soon about classes going well. Combinatorics is going to destroy my soul if I'm not careful. *sigh* Why am I so bad at advanced math?

Hacking

Not much, sadly. Live, learn, and go on...

Life

So it's V-day, the most miserable day of the year to be single. Once again, it's nothing more than a sunny Thursday for me. *sigh* My parents are getting increasingly desperate about the fact that I've been supremely unsuccessful on the meat market. I'm not normally that cynical about it, but I guess in the end that's what it really comes down to. People might like your personality, share common interests, and enjoy your hobbies, but when it comes down to it you still end up as nothing more than a friend because they're just not physically attracted to you. Friends is fine, I'm just wondering why I seem to never find one where there's actually chemistry.
Oh, well. Enough being bitter for me for today.

Listening

Pulp - Common People

I wonder if I should be dumping these in a div tag so I can extract a "What was I listening to then" history from this diary in a couple of years?
12 Feb 2002 (updated 12 Feb 2002 at 18:13 UTC) »

School

Classes are going well. We turned in an excellent paper for the Math modeling competition. The model itself that I wrote was not exactly the most wonderful thing in the world, but it provided us with some numbers to put into the report. Stochastic modeling is fun. Other than that, I now have a LOT of reading and homework to do to catch up. Such is life.

Hacking

Well, not really hacking precisely. First I thought that the CPU fan was the problem. Then I thought that the power supply was the problem, so I got a nice new one from Enermax. Still makes the noise once in a while. It doesn't appear to be the fan on the video card, since when I change the pressure on that fan the noise doesn't change. Rargh. Very frustrating.
Edit: Hah! I decided, genius that I am, to unplug the vid. card fan while it was running to better test my hypothesis. It's the videocard fan, alright. Sheesh. All that work for nothing.
It will be nice to go to work today and just program Perl for 5 hours. It's been a while since I've gotten to do that, and I think I may have forgotten how much fun it really is to be able to use a language with no restrictions other than the ones in your head. I wish I could remember where on the Net I found this, but it's funny all the same
Perl is the only Bondage and Discipline language that has safewords.

Life

I got to know a couple of people much better as part of the competition. Both Stephen and Erla are a lot of fun. Erla was completely not what I would expect in a female computer science major, but it was a welcome wakeup call that not all people interested in CS are necessarily squares like me who can rhapsodize about their desire for closures in a programming language. So hopefully I can keep that up, if for no other reason than she cracks me up.
Stephen is another example of the ways in which I've screwed up at college. He was in my firstyear course freshman year, has been in various other classes, is friends with one of my friends, and yet somehow I've never managed to be more than an friendly acquaintance with him. I put the blame for that one squarely on my own shoulders. Anyway, he's great. The man is the master of the deadpan line.
Other than that, it's time to repair my rather fragmented social life. The combination of having a bad week(and thus never seeing anyone) with the competition has pretty much toasted my knowledge of what's going on in friends lives, and I feel out of touch and alone. Probably a precursor to next year, but whatever.
Other than that, not much is going on. The dreaded day of Saint Valentine approaches and once again I'm bereft of the ability to give flowers to anyone. I want to be able to actually use my knowledge, dammit. What's the use of knowing that you give yellow roses(to another American) to someone you regard as a friend but can't actually give them because society requires that flowers --> significant other. Feh.
For those curious, yellow roses mean two different things depending on which side of the tub you're on. Americans tend to interpret them as friendship, where in Europe they're jealousy.

Listening

Boards of Canada - Rue the Whirl

School

God, I love my classes. They're just a lot of fun. I spent most of this evening doing Networks homework -- en totale, about 300 lines of Java, and a working framework that we can turn in for the first assignment. Always a happy thing.
Tomorrow evening at 7:00, the most intense 4 days in a long time start. It's the annual math modeling competition, and I decided that it was a lot of fun last time, so I'd do my part and try it again. I've got a good team, but it's scary as I'm the primary implementor. Guess I'll have to walk the walk.

Hacking

Lots of more sysadminy stuff -- setting up environments and the like. The PS on my Linux box decided to go flaky on me, so I need to fix that up. Have been following but not doing too much with the new SCSH release. The recent discussions on source-code control mechanisms have been interesting, and I downloaded and played around with Perforce. BitKeeper is next on the list, followed closely by arch. I should probably also rebuild myself a new Subversion client.
Do you ever notice that it's the little things that torque you off the most? I discovered that on my Windows box, ssh2 doesn't authenticate via keys. So I don't have auto-commit and the like to the CVS repository, which means I can't use PCL-CVS mode in emacs, which translates to one frustrated developer. I never quite realized how important being able to do that was.
Tomorrow is the acid test -- I go into work and find out whether there has been massive breakage of my CGI scripts. I guess there hasn't been something critical, since I didn't get email.

Life

It goes. Social life is a bit weird right now. No more car: parents reclaimed it. Twas fun while it lasted. Now taking tetracycline to fight my systemic acne in addition to using Differin. Maybe this will clear stuff up. Agonizing over whether I should interview with Microsoft tomorrow -- I know Java really well, C++ marginally, and C I can read. Thus, the chances of my being productive are extremely good. There are other factors, though. I guess I'll interview and see.

Listening

Mozart - Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Minor

Hacking

Well, of a sort. My first piece of production code went into use today. Let's see how long it takes for them to break it. It's not the first code that I've written that's in something important, but it is the first code that I and I alone am responsible for. Which, to me, is a big deal, because anything that's wrong with it I pay for.
Not that a set of three CGI scripts that set and remove vacation messages and forwarding is really a big deal, but I worked really hard on them, and I'd like to think that I did a good job.

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