![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
"... wait for it."
Jan. 12th, 2003 02:47 amI get the feeling that not a lot of other people in this world live the sort of life that I'm living. Today, my alarm went off at 9:30, and I was considering heading out with Running Wreck to do their... long run... but only if I was feeling really frisky. Well, I wasn't feeling particularly frisky, and I went back to bed for a while, then hung around for a bit in the room and got brunch with Corey. I need to get into the habit of waking up quickly again; my rhythm is off, I think.
Anyway, we did brunch, and not too long after that, I got a call from the Parking Department, informing me that they wanted me to Move My Car. It was about 1:50PM at this point, and the fellow on the other end specified "before 2PM". I was rather indignant; my car was in its assigned parking lot over on the other side of the universe, and they hadn't said too much about this earlier, just a cryptic email in which they never specified much of anything. I wished in my baseness and desire to cause pain to call the guy an automaton (but had already hung up) and quickly skated over to put the car somewheres else. When I got there, a bunch of the "Event Staff" folks were hanging around in a nearly empty parking lot, and I rather sarcastically asked them about the situation... why do I do things like this? Why do things like this upset me so much? It's easy to get upset at people behind desks, and forms, and rules that seem arbitrary (and very possibly are) ... and then there's the anger there, so who gets the brunt of it? The innocent Event Staff guys (who rightfully said "It's your school" and absolved themselves), or the office workers behind desks, or... whoever it is. Anger isn't helpful. Then again, people who act like soulless automatons aren't helpful. The trick, I think... is to try to get people to stop acting like soulless automatons, find the common human-ness, love and try to relate to the people who're "just doing their job"... and maybe move to England, where the airport workers are friendly and helpful. Supposedly I don't get angry at people anyway... I should live up to the image.
So I moved my car. It was another really beautiful day, and it was rather a shame that I didn't feel like being outside moving around in it... I'd been meaning to go and run today, but didn't get around to it. What I did do... was write Hello World in LC2200 assembly, read up for Systems and Networks, get started in on the homework for that, sleep for a bit, drive Corey over to Psi-U where he's doing a 12-hour LAN party, go to Publix with Marty (got more random soy products, including Canadian Veggie Bacon, yay!), talk with the paternal unit, and have a little coding competition with Marty and Tim.
This was interesting, and this is the unique thing that happened today. We've done this a few times 'round these parts, and I get the impression that it doesn't happen too terribly often elsewhere. Tim had mentioned that a friend of his had written a webserver in Scheme in some obscenely small number of lines (9 lines in Scheme, I think), and we got to talking about this problem... and not long after, we'd effectively issued the challenge and scurried off to our respective machines to hack out a small-as-possible webserver as quick as we could. My personal results come in a readable (not too ugly) and a disgusting and condensed version, for anybody interested. Yay for 34-line web servers in C. Ooh, and I made a really hackish version with a 1-line shellscript that calls netcat. Tim did his in Java, and it's something like 20 lines of pretty Java code. I love this place, and these people :)
I should probably do some more S&N homework tonight...
Anyway, we did brunch, and not too long after that, I got a call from the Parking Department, informing me that they wanted me to Move My Car. It was about 1:50PM at this point, and the fellow on the other end specified "before 2PM". I was rather indignant; my car was in its assigned parking lot over on the other side of the universe, and they hadn't said too much about this earlier, just a cryptic email in which they never specified much of anything. I wished in my baseness and desire to cause pain to call the guy an automaton (but had already hung up) and quickly skated over to put the car somewheres else. When I got there, a bunch of the "Event Staff" folks were hanging around in a nearly empty parking lot, and I rather sarcastically asked them about the situation... why do I do things like this? Why do things like this upset me so much? It's easy to get upset at people behind desks, and forms, and rules that seem arbitrary (and very possibly are) ... and then there's the anger there, so who gets the brunt of it? The innocent Event Staff guys (who rightfully said "It's your school" and absolved themselves), or the office workers behind desks, or... whoever it is. Anger isn't helpful. Then again, people who act like soulless automatons aren't helpful. The trick, I think... is to try to get people to stop acting like soulless automatons, find the common human-ness, love and try to relate to the people who're "just doing their job"... and maybe move to England, where the airport workers are friendly and helpful. Supposedly I don't get angry at people anyway... I should live up to the image.
So I moved my car. It was another really beautiful day, and it was rather a shame that I didn't feel like being outside moving around in it... I'd been meaning to go and run today, but didn't get around to it. What I did do... was write Hello World in LC2200 assembly, read up for Systems and Networks, get started in on the homework for that, sleep for a bit, drive Corey over to Psi-U where he's doing a 12-hour LAN party, go to Publix with Marty (got more random soy products, including Canadian Veggie Bacon, yay!), talk with the paternal unit, and have a little coding competition with Marty and Tim.
This was interesting, and this is the unique thing that happened today. We've done this a few times 'round these parts, and I get the impression that it doesn't happen too terribly often elsewhere. Tim had mentioned that a friend of his had written a webserver in Scheme in some obscenely small number of lines (9 lines in Scheme, I think), and we got to talking about this problem... and not long after, we'd effectively issued the challenge and scurried off to our respective machines to hack out a small-as-possible webserver as quick as we could. My personal results come in a readable (not too ugly) and a disgusting and condensed version, for anybody interested. Yay for 34-line web servers in C. Ooh, and I made a really hackish version with a 1-line shellscript that calls netcat. Tim did his in Java, and it's something like 20 lines of pretty Java code. I love this place, and these people :)
I should probably do some more S&N homework tonight...
