Older blog entries for olandgren (starting at number 211)

Work

One option down and out. They're not going to extend me an offer at this time. Who knows how things are going to work, but I guess I'm of two minds about it. Part of me thought the job would have been really interesting, but the other part of me was shuddering inside. I guess that since the decision got made for me, I don't have to worry about it. Oh, well. Off to celebrate the weekend.

Hacking

In the I-really-shouldn't-but-I'm-going-to-anyways department, I set up advodiary and emacs to work on my Windows box. The process involved the following for me:

• Setting two environment variables ($HOME and $EDITOR)
• Installing the new version of ActiveState Python(because I couldn't figure out how to make my Cygwin install correctly spawn a shell before running scripts when double-clicked)
• Stripping down my .emacs file to the absolute bare-bones stuff I need(CUA-mode, HTML-helper-mode, bindings for home/end/, parenmatch stuff)
• Setting emacs to not use an init file and instead load this new barebones .emacs with the -l commandline option when invoked as EDITOR
• Defining a function which will insert the skeleton of my diary into the buffer when called

I didn't particularly think I had it in me, but it ended up working great. Advodiary is quite cool, though I must admit it's a pity the emacs-mode I saw only works with emacs 20.7. 21 is just so much nicer on Windows. Yaay for sleep-deprived hacking.

Edit: Not only did I do that, but I was on such a roll I decided to set up Ispell as well. So now I can spell-check my entries before I submit them. Thanks to cmiller for such a cool toy. Whee!

School

School is going fairly well, such as these things go. It's crunch time, and I really should be working on combinatorics right now, but I haven't made an entry in a while. My last couple of exams have been a lot of fun, in that I kicked ass on them. High score in the class, and the teacher liked my paper enough that it was the one that got sent around(sans name of course). I guess that's a sign of a good job.

Hacking

Aside from some more work with AspectJ, not much has been going on. It's really rather sad -- I quite enjoy programming, but other homework has been getting in the way. Lots of papers to read in my senior seminar class.

Life

Life has been overall excellent, modulo some minor annoyances. Most happily, I've been able to talk with Emilia -- things seem to be going well there. I dropped by intending to stay ~15 minutes and ended up talking for three hours, which was a lot of fun. Put me a little behind the curve, but hey, that's life.

I feel really silly sometimes -- I wish that I could explain to girls in words why they're so incredibly cool/sexy/beautiful/attractive/<adjective here>, but the words just never seem to come out. Or when they do, it's at the wrong time or phrased wrong and I end up coming off smarmy rather than just nice like I was trying to. Oh, well.

Listening

Pete Namlook - Airport Freak

School

School is slowing down, as the nasty homework winnows out the chaff that is busywork. I'm not entirely sure if this is a good thing. I did my presentation on Aspect-Oriented languages today in Sem, which was fun. I really need to learn to tone down the hyperkinetic presentation style I seem to have developed somewhere along the line. That and the fact that I draw a diagram, get halfway done, see that my audience gets the point, and stop, leaving an orphaned diagram or scrap of code, is always fun. We apparently messed up part of our proof for the combinatorics homework assignment, so that's pesky. It'll need to be a fast fix, too. Econ of Gender is fun, though I paid for making a sarcastic comment by being asked a fairly difficult question. Oh, well -- sometimes you're just grumpy. You pay your dues.

Hacking

Retrofitting a school project with AspectJ is really interesting. I've been thinking about how I want to do the design for a while, and it's getting to the point where I think I've got what I want in my head. I wonder if there's an Ant build task for it?

In sadder news, my RSI has been getting worse. I'm a college student -- I'm not supposed to be getting RSI this early in life. I've got a better set up wrist braces, and upgraded to an ergonomic keyboard on my work machine, so hopefully that will stem the tide. I suspect stress to some extent -- I wasn't bothered at all last semester.

Life

Life is proving interesting, as always. As of about 12 hours from now, there will be exactly two months until my entire social life graduates and leaves for parts unknown. It should be incredibly interesting -- I'm reminded how much I love my friends every time we do something. Parties over the weekend were mostly good, with some untoward incidents I wasn't directly involved in, but on the whole much more positive than negative.

As far as the female front goes, I managed to ask her on a date, but ended up not getting it due to scheduling conflicts. She did agree, though, which is at least a positive sign, and she doesn't seem to be repulsed by my company. Hopefully I don't mess this one up. One odd thing: I fixed a friend's computer(the power supply was overheating), and on my way back to my room walked past her house. Emilia was sitting in her living room, face in her hands. I just wanted to give her a hug and tell her that she was beautiful and smart and everything would work out. Funny how that works..

Making peace with the fact that your friend is dating another friendly acquaintance, and that you're really, really jealous about it is hard to do. I understand why Katrina is doing what she is, but there's something that just hurts deep inside when you ask "so why is he good enough now, and I wasn't then?" I guess that's one of those nasty little questions that you can't really answer, because it involves looking at stuff inside yourself that I would rather not. I'm sure that she's right and that it would have ended up a complete disaster, but I guess I tend to be more of a damned if you do type of person. Rejection always hurts.

Listening

Tom Heasley - Monterey Bay

Yes, I am listening to Ambient Tuba. You got a problem with that?

School

Not too much on this front. We get the networks test back on Friday. My Econ of Gender paper got butchered and I'm going to need to resurrect it for tomorrow afternoon so that the preceptor can look it over. What else is going on? Combinatorics went well -- I got a good score(95%) on the last homework to make up for the one I failed. My programming languages seminar remains the coolest thing walking -- we're looking at continuations and the formal denotational semantics which surround them.

Hacking

My Linux box is live again, after a horrible episode with the video card. All is better now, and I've got a shiny new GeForce II MX 64. Damn, those things are dirt cheap right now compared to what video cards were a couple of years ago. Redhat 7.1 also impressed me by autodetecting it and automatically configuring everything.

Work

<sings>Leavin' on a jet plane...

Life

But screw your courage to the sticking place, and we'll not fail.

Let's see, what all is interesting. Still haven't managed the above -- I'm currently dying of inaction. *sigh* Bad Owen, No Cookie. A girl I know through a mutual friend contacted me to let me know it was ok to talk to her, which was interesting. I guess I'd never thought about that particular behavior pattern of mine, but I guess that's just the way things are. I purchased, at semi-ruinous expense, a new pair of wrist braces which will hopefully alleviate some of the newly resurgent carpal tunnel. Fun and games.

Listening

Eels - Beautiful Freak

Hacking

Lots of thinking about Aspect-Oriented Programming. It's really cool stuff, even though I'm still having some issues wrapping my head around how some of the more general cases are used. I understand specific stuff, like abstracting out logging or errors, but the idea of a more general cross-cutting concern is still escaping my grasp.

Perl 6 is going to be incredibly cool. It's sorta like the language that I have fun and do stuff in is slowly converging on all of the neato features out of functional languages that I miss. Though I suspect it's probably a little much to ask for pattern matching sub, eh?

Off to break code I wrote two years ago. Should be an exercise in learning how much I've learned, or not.

Oh. Is there a better(read smaller) way to perform a fork bomb in Perl? A friend and I are carving trays of fork bombs in different languages in our cafeteria, and this was the best I could think of for Perl:

perl -e '`"$0 | $0"`;'

Scheme, of course, gets the Y combinator.

School

School has been being more interesting, and slightly less depressing than it could have been. I've adapted, and I think I'm over my case of the blues. Extra credit on failed Combinatorics homework assignments helps a lot.

Work

Lots of interesting stuff going on in the possible summer job front.

Life

Lots of interesting stuff has gone on. Let's see. Last week was sorta bad, but I figured I would make up for it with the weekend. No such luck -- while walking to supper I slipped, fell, and sprained my right ankle quite badly. Hiking boots that only decide to have traction halfway down aren't very useful. So the rubber band is now all stretched out, and I can't put pressure on the ball of my foot without shooting pains up the Achilles tendon. Nurse Bob says that I've been very sensible about the whole thing and shouldn't suffer any permanent damage, so it's all good.

Let's see. On the girl front, not much. My friend thinks that a girl in my Econ of Gender class has a crush on me. Sadly, she's not the right girl in my Econ of Gender -- I'm currently interested in Emilia. Communicating that interest is proving somewhat entertaining, but I'm trying. I keep getting distracted by her eyes. And smile. And sense of humor -- it's hard to ask someone out when you're cracking up. Pity I can't really ask her dancing now. Meh. Isn't it funny how that kind of thing works? The one with a crush on me seems nice enough, just not really my type.

Other than that, my dad should be calling for a nice uninterrupted talk, so that should be good, provided that I actually manage to wake up. We've got some stuff to discuss, mostly about finances and medical insurance and stuff like that.

I accidentally offended Katrina with a email mean t to be a simple joke. It seems I'm destined to constantly screw up there. I keep trying, though. The road to hell and whatnot...

Listening

Miles Davis - Autumn Leaves

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.