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