(no subject)

You know, when I see Frank The Goat (the happy happy LJ mascot), I'm reminded of the goats from The Divine Invasion, from Philip K. Dick. See, there's this planet, and it has these goatlike creatures living on it, and every so often the sentient inhabitants on the planet (who're generally described as rodent-like) sacrifice a goat or two to the local mountain deity, who turns out to be called Yah, and ... well, anyway, towards the end of the book, Satan takes the shape of one of these goats and comes to this guy who's very much like the biblical Joseph and speaks to him in his mind, and it's freaked out. And it's a really crazy book, and unless you have some sort of bizarre aversion to Philip K. Dick, you should read this one -- can't nobody mix up science fiction, theological weirdness (although Christian propaganda, it's not), multiple levels of dream/reality/time/causality like PKD. I'd meant to do a longwinded discussion about this and Stranger in a Strange Land (Brett, I still have your copy of SiaSL :) ), both of which I ended up reading on the trip to Europe...

Also, today, a replacement credit card came in the mail because my old one was expiring. You know what I like doing? Chopping up credit cards. I took this one a bit farther, though, and I ended up chopping up the image as well. Thank you, the gimp :)

In an fairly characteristic act of extreme geekness, I went back and did homework numba four from last fall semester 2002's CS2130. Back in September of 2002, I didn't manage to get this one to work (you know, I was in Houston the weekend that was due, which probably had something to do with that...), but this afternoon I knocked it out in a coupla hours. This means a number of things: a) Tech's CS curriculum and whatever else I've been doing seems to be doing a good job, b) I have either no life, or a very strange one, to be going back and doing old homeworks on lazy summer afternoons, and c) Brett's (zip4096) recent programming adventures have been endlessly more interesting -- I mean, he's still working on the device driver, and now it works with freaking Linux 2.6. Go Brett! :)

What I should do, because I'm a dork and it would be good practice, is go back and do 2130 homeworks in Perl. ... or perhaps in a language that could only be described as a mixture of Perl and COBOL ... hrmm...

Also this afternoon, I went running, which was lovely, if somewhat muddy -- on the order of seven miles (assuming I was doing eights...), today, out around Lake Overstreet and up on the Two Mile Loop. Very, very exciting. Tomorrow, I'll likely see what the Maclay kids have on tap, because today, I was emphatically sleeping in (after waking up with a rather unpleasant crick in my neck from sleeping on the couch while the grandparentals had been granted use of my room) after some late-night AIM activity... I think the twisted wreckage of that conversation has been showing up in the_glory_girl's journal as of late.

... goin' to Ohio and the UP. Yes :)