alexr_rwx: (withtux)
Alex R ([personal profile] alexr_rwx) wrote2004-01-09 08:32 pm

"... when you could be with me..."

Roaming ’round your house
Wasting your time
No obligation just
Wasting your time
So why are you alone ?
Wasting your time
When you could be with me
Wasting your time

I’m a waste like you
With nothing else to do
May I waste your time too?

- Green Day, "Sassafras Roots"

It's sort of a strange day. Dunno exactly what to say about it... I'm not... lonely... so much, there's just this weird feeling that I could be doing something else that I'm not. Like some different way in which I could be being social. Perhaps leaving the apartment or the campus would help.

You know, it's not that there aren't any young ladies around (there are a few) it's that we're socially inept. Every so often, I'll posit to the roommates, half in jest, "you know what we should do tonight? Go pick up chicks!"

... except... where?

Today (after combinatorics and before AI, which is a Long-Ass Break) I hung around and wrote a program that I'd been meaning to write for years... a million years ago, I was trying to do a JUMBLE in the newspaper, and I just could not wrap my mind around "lawsur", which comes out to be "walrus". I thought to myself, in that highschool-minded sort of way that I thought, "Well, I'll just write a program to generate all the possible orderings!" Eventually, I did something that sort of bogo-reordered and then vgrepped on that, but that was Ugly.

It's not an obvious algorithm to come up with, generating all the permutations of a string. But I got one that asserts an order and then lets you calculate (with a n recursive calls for an n-letter word) the ith permutation, which is pleasing. And I coded that this afternoon :)

Tonight, I'm going to make it read /usr/share/dict/words, stick that in a big hash table, and then programmatically solve JUMBLE puzzles :)

... which is a really studly sort of thing to do, and obviously all the honeys (and perhaps the shorties as well) will come flocking.

Eh. Lo que sea.

[identity profile] eponis.livejournal.com 2004-01-09 09:41 pm (UTC)(link)
Dude!!!! A program to solve jumble puzzles????

Do me, you stud. Do me now.

::wink::

Seriously though, I haven't interacted with your other roommates as much, but Corey and certainly you are about as far from socially inept as they come. It's just that many young women aren't looking for social eptness, they're looking for superficiality and compatibility, and, well, you can't help that you're that much cooler than most of them. ;-)
ext_110843: (juggling)

[identity profile] oniugnip.livejournal.com 2004-01-09 10:30 pm (UTC)(link)
*laughs* Esther, at the bare minimum, you get +5 for coining "eptness".

Thank you, though... I think we understand this, at least on an intellectual level, but the feeling is still there, the disconnection-from-real-people thing. That probably doesn't go away... :-\

Yeah, it's a burden being awesome :)

[identity profile] eponis.livejournal.com 2004-01-10 09:43 am (UTC)(link)
::nod:: Probably not. It's especially hard for me because I'm happy in my little Rice bubble, where most people *are* cool and like me, so when I actually emerge, it's so easy to feel lonely, elitist, or (usually) both.

The Burden of Brilliance. Yes. ::nods sagely:: I sympathize completely.