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bipolar sort of day...
Mar. 21st, 2003 03:23 amUp until this afternoon, for today I was feeling like a leaked memory reference, just waiting for universal garbage collection to come along and mark my space as unused. I'd considered getting up at eight to do some miles, but I slept in for another hour instead -- that was a lot of sleep, relative to how much I normally get... I was really unmotivated, but for some reason, I went to Squeak anyway.
Squeak lecture generally doesn't do a lot for one's meaningful-ness index. Nobody shows up, and that's really telling -- today wasn't terribly different from the general-case lecture, from which you walk out feeling like nothing important was said. Today he dropped another probable final exam question, just to reward those who did show up... which was on the order of thirty people out of a class that's supposed to have more like 150. I'm wondering how he must feel, as a professor, if nobody shows up to the lecture...
After that, I came back and sat in the dark and worked on hackmode (it's up and running, just not hooked up to the outside Internet yet -- and Tim's going to get an extra IP address for this), which went rather slowly... apparently gentoo provides some pre-made binaries, if you ask nicely and use this one feature, but I was silly and just let it update itself on a 200mHz processor, which was... very slow. I went back to sleep around noon, and Corey (he's a wonderful friend) convinced me that I should go to S&N, which proved to be really uplifting.
Ken Mackenzie is my new role model. He's absolutely amazing, this springy, cartoon-esque, ambiguously aged sort of guy who gives off this incredible aura of energy and eliteness. He speaks in programmer in-jokes, one-liners and puns, he's excited about what he does, he apparently uses twm and emacs and codes in straight xlib and speaks some large number of assembly languages and has used all sorts of obscure old machines and does this obscene research involving parallel processing systems...
Today in class, he's trying to get these chalkboards (the ones where there's more than one chalkboard, and they roll over each other on tracks) to stay put, but they weren't staying... so he finds a nearby chair and shoves it underneath the upper board (balancing said chair on the chalk tray) to try and hold the thing up -- only this wasn't quite tall enough... so he took an eraser and stuck this on top of the chair, thus successfully holding up the upper blackboard for a while. People come to his lecture -- it's also somewhat later in the day, but I think it's just interesting in and of itself.
After classes today, I was feeling rather better, and I hung around in a little courtyard near our building, where I proceeded to juggle, just enjoying thinking about the physics of falling balls (I generally find this comforting -- parabolas are nice) and the damp concrete under my bare feet. This went on for rather a while, and I remembered how much fun juggling is... this needs to be done more often, maybe while walking places...
After classes, I continued working on hackmode (and elrond as well), sort of ambiently hung around, ate things, realized that Slack9 was just released (!!), tried to get something to read the old homefiles on hackmode (they're on a UFS filesystem on a strange sort of partition scheme, I think), spoke with Esther (she sounded less-than-ecstatic about the prospects for her summer... it was interesting discussing Just Being At Home, in that it didn't sound like she thought of that as a valid option. "... and do what?" Maybe I should get a job for the summer...), got my UML diagrams from last week all revised, squared away, and turned in, wrote about stuff, yawned...
I'm not quite sure how I feel about Slack9 at this point... I love Slackware, and elrond is still using it, and it's what I've grown up on as a Linux user... but Gentoo is just so freaking cool. Slack is much simpler, much more hand-configuration-centric, more BSD-ish... but Gentoo has portage. You really can't argue with portage.
I dunno -- I suspect that this discussion is only interesting to a very small number of readers. That's alright, though, because this is my journal and I'll yammer about darn well whatever I feel like yammering about... or something...
*laughs* If you want to read about something more interesting, go make it up and put it on your own journal!
... with that really brilliant thought, I think I'm off to pass out.
Squeak lecture generally doesn't do a lot for one's meaningful-ness index. Nobody shows up, and that's really telling -- today wasn't terribly different from the general-case lecture, from which you walk out feeling like nothing important was said. Today he dropped another probable final exam question, just to reward those who did show up... which was on the order of thirty people out of a class that's supposed to have more like 150. I'm wondering how he must feel, as a professor, if nobody shows up to the lecture...
After that, I came back and sat in the dark and worked on hackmode (it's up and running, just not hooked up to the outside Internet yet -- and Tim's going to get an extra IP address for this), which went rather slowly... apparently gentoo provides some pre-made binaries, if you ask nicely and use this one feature, but I was silly and just let it update itself on a 200mHz processor, which was... very slow. I went back to sleep around noon, and Corey (he's a wonderful friend) convinced me that I should go to S&N, which proved to be really uplifting.
Ken Mackenzie is my new role model. He's absolutely amazing, this springy, cartoon-esque, ambiguously aged sort of guy who gives off this incredible aura of energy and eliteness. He speaks in programmer in-jokes, one-liners and puns, he's excited about what he does, he apparently uses twm and emacs and codes in straight xlib and speaks some large number of assembly languages and has used all sorts of obscure old machines and does this obscene research involving parallel processing systems...
Today in class, he's trying to get these chalkboards (the ones where there's more than one chalkboard, and they roll over each other on tracks) to stay put, but they weren't staying... so he finds a nearby chair and shoves it underneath the upper board (balancing said chair on the chalk tray) to try and hold the thing up -- only this wasn't quite tall enough... so he took an eraser and stuck this on top of the chair, thus successfully holding up the upper blackboard for a while. People come to his lecture -- it's also somewhat later in the day, but I think it's just interesting in and of itself.
After classes today, I was feeling rather better, and I hung around in a little courtyard near our building, where I proceeded to juggle, just enjoying thinking about the physics of falling balls (I generally find this comforting -- parabolas are nice) and the damp concrete under my bare feet. This went on for rather a while, and I remembered how much fun juggling is... this needs to be done more often, maybe while walking places...
After classes, I continued working on hackmode (and elrond as well), sort of ambiently hung around, ate things, realized that Slack9 was just released (!!), tried to get something to read the old homefiles on hackmode (they're on a UFS filesystem on a strange sort of partition scheme, I think), spoke with Esther (she sounded less-than-ecstatic about the prospects for her summer... it was interesting discussing Just Being At Home, in that it didn't sound like she thought of that as a valid option. "... and do what?" Maybe I should get a job for the summer...), got my UML diagrams from last week all revised, squared away, and turned in, wrote about stuff, yawned...
I'm not quite sure how I feel about Slack9 at this point... I love Slackware, and elrond is still using it, and it's what I've grown up on as a Linux user... but Gentoo is just so freaking cool. Slack is much simpler, much more hand-configuration-centric, more BSD-ish... but Gentoo has portage. You really can't argue with portage.
I dunno -- I suspect that this discussion is only interesting to a very small number of readers. That's alright, though, because this is my journal and I'll yammer about darn well whatever I feel like yammering about... or something...
*laughs* If you want to read about something more interesting, go make it up and put it on your own journal!
... with that really brilliant thought, I think I'm off to pass out.
