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