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May. 13th, 2003 12:12 amToday, I've been feeling generally up, generally energetic, and generally as though all's right in the world. It's a good feeling.
I think the feeling started on Sunday (hrum, that was yesterday -- apparently I don't quite have a sense of time yet, but aside from that...) -- the full impact of home-ness didn't hit me until I went back to my home church (my mother's in the band for our lovely Rock 'n' Roll Church Service, and that's always a good experience) and found myself confronted with a room full of happy people and a sound board that needed my attentions, as David the Normal Sound Guy was off somewhere else for the day. So I popped back into the booth, said hello to Elizabeth (who runs the projector -- she's a 10th-grade geek-ette who stepped up to the plate to fill in the job I'd had before I left for tech... she's mad clever, reads a good deal, gets tremendous grades, and runs) and proceeded to happily push sound-board buttons and try to get everybody's mics turned on and off at the appropriate times -- independent of the Church Experience itself (which was beautiful -- Reverend Willis delivered a really interesting sermon about maternal-ness and Mary and how she figured into Jesus's life, and the music was beautiful), it's just good to feel wanted and useful.
... and then today... today, I headed out to FSU, managed to locate the building the Linux Kernel Class was in without too much trouble, and then managed to locate the actual room within the building (with a minimal number of trials and tribulations)... so that was good :) I felt like I was in the right place -- Dr. Baker gave a little quiz at the beginning of the class, just to see where everybody was, and it was something like "Tell me about hardware interrupts, processor modes, system calls, scheduling, and hardware trapping and how they're all related in about a page and a half" ... so I busted out my CS2200 and all went well. Thank you, kenmac. Thereafter, he proceeded to talk about the course and what he plans on doing with it, and he seems like a very cool, reasonable, grizzled veteran research hacker who wants us to have fun with this :) He's pretty clearly got a passion for what he does, and thinks that making software do weird things is entertaining -- the homework for this week involves breaking kernel modules in whatever strange ways we can contrive.
The class ended up running over a while (he thought it ended at a time that it didn't...) and I didn't end up going to the weight training class -- he talked about stuff until after the weight training had already started, and after that, Brett (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
zip4096)and myself ended up hanging around in the lab downstairs, trying to set up network interfaces, talking to some cool (and Indian, no less -- it seems like there are rather a lot of Indian CS grad students at FSU) grad students, and getting me Officially Signed Up For The Class. Yaaay! :) It didn't seem super-important to get over to the gym, for whatever reason... I found myself thinking that it'd be much better to get the CS squared away before trying to do any weight training.
So this is going to be cool :) We're planning on doing a chapter out of Linux Device Drivers every day from here 'til six weeks from now, writing a few kernel modules along the way, and coming out of this with rather bigger hacker muscles. I think it's going to be pretty involved, but somewhat like a happy programmer summer camp. FSU just feels summer-camp-y, for whatever reason. It's just odd... showing up in a place full of young people with a gender-ratio that's about even, and the culture of the place feels rather different from Tech -- people (girls especially) seem to be generally more preened, and it's much less common to run across slightly-confused-looking, unshaven guys wearing tshirts with "#!/usr/bin/perl" on the front. Inside the building the CS classes happen in, this effect was somewhat mitigated.
I had a really excellent run this evening :) It probably helps that just beforehand, I'd downed a whole pot of coffee and got a happy happy email from Esther (yaaaay! :) :) It looks likely that I'll be going to Spain, w00t!), but I went at a pretty quick pace, through the woods, out to the Forest Meadows trailhead and back (up the connector, backwards through Blair Witch, 'round the long way, and back the way I came after the two-mile-loop merging, in case anybody reading happens to know where I live, the Forest Meadows Trails, and the canonical Maclay Track Team names for things), and it felt excellent. I think this counts as me being officially into my Summer Training.
Ooh -- and I found a copy of Linux Device Drivers for $20 at books-a-million, which normally is very much not my favourite bookstore, but they're right across the street, and they had what I wanted. Score!
Hrumm... I think... that this is that. I might start posting (behind lj-cuts, so you don't have to read them) summaries of LDD chapters, because I'll be reading them, one-a-night (or two-a-night, tonight) and it might be a good review for me, but only a handful of you out there would care -- if you'd like that, comment about it :)
So that ... is rather a lot of words about relatively few events. I guess I'll go and read Chapter 2 and then maybe get to sleep at a reasonable hour tonight.
I think the feeling started on Sunday (hrum, that was yesterday -- apparently I don't quite have a sense of time yet, but aside from that...) -- the full impact of home-ness didn't hit me until I went back to my home church (my mother's in the band for our lovely Rock 'n' Roll Church Service, and that's always a good experience) and found myself confronted with a room full of happy people and a sound board that needed my attentions, as David the Normal Sound Guy was off somewhere else for the day. So I popped back into the booth, said hello to Elizabeth (who runs the projector -- she's a 10th-grade geek-ette who stepped up to the plate to fill in the job I'd had before I left for tech... she's mad clever, reads a good deal, gets tremendous grades, and runs) and proceeded to happily push sound-board buttons and try to get everybody's mics turned on and off at the appropriate times -- independent of the Church Experience itself (which was beautiful -- Reverend Willis delivered a really interesting sermon about maternal-ness and Mary and how she figured into Jesus's life, and the music was beautiful), it's just good to feel wanted and useful.
... and then today... today, I headed out to FSU, managed to locate the building the Linux Kernel Class was in without too much trouble, and then managed to locate the actual room within the building (with a minimal number of trials and tribulations)... so that was good :) I felt like I was in the right place -- Dr. Baker gave a little quiz at the beginning of the class, just to see where everybody was, and it was something like "Tell me about hardware interrupts, processor modes, system calls, scheduling, and hardware trapping and how they're all related in about a page and a half" ... so I busted out my CS2200 and all went well. Thank you, kenmac. Thereafter, he proceeded to talk about the course and what he plans on doing with it, and he seems like a very cool, reasonable, grizzled veteran research hacker who wants us to have fun with this :) He's pretty clearly got a passion for what he does, and thinks that making software do weird things is entertaining -- the homework for this week involves breaking kernel modules in whatever strange ways we can contrive.
The class ended up running over a while (he thought it ended at a time that it didn't...) and I didn't end up going to the weight training class -- he talked about stuff until after the weight training had already started, and after that, Brett (
zip4096)and myself ended up hanging around in the lab downstairs, trying to set up network interfaces, talking to some cool (and Indian, no less -- it seems like there are rather a lot of Indian CS grad students at FSU) grad students, and getting me Officially Signed Up For The Class. Yaaay! :) It didn't seem super-important to get over to the gym, for whatever reason... I found myself thinking that it'd be much better to get the CS squared away before trying to do any weight training.So this is going to be cool :) We're planning on doing a chapter out of Linux Device Drivers every day from here 'til six weeks from now, writing a few kernel modules along the way, and coming out of this with rather bigger hacker muscles. I think it's going to be pretty involved, but somewhat like a happy programmer summer camp. FSU just feels summer-camp-y, for whatever reason. It's just odd... showing up in a place full of young people with a gender-ratio that's about even, and the culture of the place feels rather different from Tech -- people (girls especially) seem to be generally more preened, and it's much less common to run across slightly-confused-looking, unshaven guys wearing tshirts with "#!/usr/bin/perl" on the front. Inside the building the CS classes happen in, this effect was somewhat mitigated.
I had a really excellent run this evening :) It probably helps that just beforehand, I'd downed a whole pot of coffee and got a happy happy email from Esther (yaaaay! :) :) It looks likely that I'll be going to Spain, w00t!), but I went at a pretty quick pace, through the woods, out to the Forest Meadows trailhead and back (up the connector, backwards through Blair Witch, 'round the long way, and back the way I came after the two-mile-loop merging, in case anybody reading happens to know where I live, the Forest Meadows Trails, and the canonical Maclay Track Team names for things), and it felt excellent. I think this counts as me being officially into my Summer Training.
Ooh -- and I found a copy of Linux Device Drivers for $20 at books-a-million, which normally is very much not my favourite bookstore, but they're right across the street, and they had what I wanted. Score!
Hrumm... I think... that this is that. I might start posting (behind lj-cuts, so you don't have to read them) summaries of LDD chapters, because I'll be reading them, one-a-night (or two-a-night, tonight) and it might be a good review for me, but only a handful of you out there would care -- if you'd like that, comment about it :)
So that ... is rather a lot of words about relatively few events. I guess I'll go and read Chapter 2 and then maybe get to sleep at a reasonable hour tonight.
