This is the creation of this section. Here are a few of the things I'm currently in the middle of:
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I just received my membership confirmation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They're a civil liberties organization especially concerned with issues raised by modern technology, such as software copyrights and patents, electronic privacy and security, and trying to preserve free speech online. They also sent me a neat bumper sticker, which now sits on the side of Laura. If they sound interesting to you at all, I highly encourage you to check out their website, and to join if it sounds like a worthwhile use of your money.
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Hmm. I should update more often. Not that anyone actually reads this stuff... but it might sort of serve as a record for me... oh well. I've started going to Kung Fu and realized that going once a week, and doing nothing at all in between, will do me no good, so I think I'm going to start going on Sundays as well. I've been slightly sick and tired lately. Of course, 2/3 of a bottle of Jolt will keep someone as sensitive to caffeine as me quite awake for a few hours...
Max Payne is an amazingly cool game that I started playing on a friend's computer (since I don't have Windows installed, and according to the developers a Linux version is "unlikely", besides which my video card, a Matrox G200, probably can't handle it, and I don't want to buy an NVidia because of binary-only drivers for Linux). There's no better way to describe it than as an action movie made into a video game - and it works. It works so well. If your system can handle it (it probably needs a GeForce2 or a pretty recent ATI card to be reasonably playable), I encourage you to check it out. Unfortunately their website totally sucks ass. Well, actually, it just requires Flash, but that was enough to convince me not to bother with it.
I really ought to be working on my kernel... :-)
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This has been an exceptionally busy (4-day due to CMU's crazy vacation schedule) weekend. Friday was a relatively normal weekend day - I barely left my room. But on Saturday I went to a movie with Ren-Yi, Shion, Frankie and Ben (we went to a restaurant beforehand and I thought we'd never be able to finish in time, but somehow we did). The movie was Iron Monkey and was quite funny in parts (though unintentionally so) and had good fight scenes, especially the last which was conducted in what looked like the middle of a large fire on top of poles.
On Sunday at 1:00 (after yet another night of incredibly bizarre sleep schedules, sleeping from some time around midnight until about 4:30 am and then again from 8 or 9 something until almost 11) I went to Kung Fu. I started going basically on a dare from myself to prove that I could (so far I'm winning :-). I decided that it wasn't doing me much good to only go on Thursdays, so this time I went on Sunday as well. Right now I'm trying to build up strength as much as develop technique; I haven't really been in shape since varsity swimming senior year of high school. After kung fu I bought an instant-win lottery ticket; I won a dollar, with which I bought another ticket, which lost. I'm thinking of making this a tradition.
Then Sunday evening I went to Union Grill with Ben, Shion, Marcus, Frankie, James and Mark (who it took a bit of convincing to get to leave his OS for that much time). I thought the food was pretty good, and the portion was nicely sized for having eaten almost nothing all day, but Shion was pretty angry that they no longer had the peanut butter pie he had been looking forward to all week.
Monday I helped Priya understand and debug some SML code, then went to dinner with Sheila. It's been a long time since we've spoken, and I'm glad that she remembered me. We updated each other on academics and personal stuff while getting Indian food and playing a couple of games of pool (she won the first game and I won the second).
I did also do some work on my kernel, and downloaded a new version of gtk-gnutella, attempting to put in my own changes since I like the searching to be a little different than it is in the normal distribution, and discovering some problems with that. Overall, I rarely have a schedule this full...
I've been on another of my Invader Zim kicks lately (unfortunately, the site requires Flash). I'm trying to find all the episodes on Gnutella, but I've only got 14 or so, and I think there are about 22 so far. I actually have a few episodes on videotape that I don't have in digitized format - I wish I had a video capture card so I could get them there. Invader Zim looks like a kid's cartoon at first sight, but the humor is actually much more sophisticated than that and is really targeted towards late teens/early twenties (i.e. me and my friends). There are enough Invader Zim references in my speech to sometimes make me hard to comprehened if you've never seen the series (though of course I avoid them when talking to anyone who actually hasn't seen it). A very good fansite is The Scary Monkey Show website; unfortunately this one requires Javascript, for no good reason. GIR. (I love this show...)
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Today I ordered Chinese from the unilaterally excellent New Dumpling House, and I didn't get a fortune cookie. Seems like they only gave us two. Oh well...
I thought I might have a midterm in Ancient Philosophy today, but I thought wrong. Good thing, since I haven't actually read all the stuff that's going to be covered in it yet. I got back my OS midterm, on which I got an 86; the class average was a 61. Looking over the questions, I'm more or less happy with how I did, but I really want to get an A in the course; the professor, Greg Kesden, has been talking about curving or some other kind of "adjustment", but I have to hope that this won't affect the general bad-ass-ness that comes with OS. Speaking of which, my kernel needs work. Sigh.
I've been thinking a lot about the basic nature of the universe lately. Unfortunately, most of my thoughts on this topic are very hard to express to other people, doubly so in a medium which effectively allows only one-way communication. Speaking of which, I just received my first email specifically because someone had read my website today. I used to get tons back when I ran a Final Fantasy fan site (even though it was very rarely updated and had little content), but I guess not as many people are interested in my random musings.
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Rage. Pure, blind, uncontrollable, arational rage. That's the only word to describe the emotion that seized control of me a few hours ago. Triggered by the seemingly inconsequential - a friend's forgetting to ask me before leaving whether I was interested in attending a concert, which she'd said she would - it had me madly walking around campus thinking about physically harming anyone and everyone I saw. I'm okay now - at least if by "okay" you mean "unlikely to go out and choke anyone". I wonder how much of anger is physiological. I was conscious of and analyzing the effects of being so angry even as it occurred, but I'm not really sure what my results mean. I do know that being angry is not an unpleasant emotion - what usually makes it such is the guilt or pain attached. But I'm not sure pursuing anger per se is a wise course of action, either. In any case, it's one I have no intention of embarking on at this time.
Oh, and I missed both kung fu and the concert. Maybe I'll go to sparring tomorrow - although I don't think I have the ability to actually beat anyone, there's still some residual anger I should work off.
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One meta-level comment first. I remember first seeing Ed's LiveJournal (totally by accident, incidentally - I found it by searching Google for "ASCII porn", although Ed has now requested his LiveJournal be de-listed by Google) and thinking "hmm, that's an interesting idea, but it makes one's life too public. I wouldn't want to do that." Now I find myself doing seemingly the same thing on this page. However, I do have an explanation:
Not, of course, to suggest that I really need to justify my putting this page up :-)
On Friday I went to see Greg Kesden, my OS professor, twice. I got my grade on the midterm raised, twice. It's now a 94 - I originally got only a 2 on the last question (a 10-pointer), which according to Kesden was enough to convince him that the grader "hadn't read the question", and there was some other stuff that was marked as wrong that just... wasn't. Mark didn't get his grade raised despite valiant efforts (sorry, Mark), but we both had great fun talking to Kesden - finally, someone who actually knows as much as we do about Unix! (Well, actually, probably a lot more, but still.) We may have to make this a regular occurrence...
I did go to sparring on Friday, but didn't spar (which Shion insisted on arguing had been a mistake until I just kind of let the subject drop). I'm not really confident in my ability to actually fight yet. I know the purpose of sparring is to learn, and I intend to do so, but I do feel that I should be allowed to proceed at my own pace.
I also managed to get on a freakish sleep "schedule" and miss kung fu on Sunday as well. This means it's been way, way too long since I've actually done any kung fu. Yet this Thursday, my kernel will beckon, and it will once again take an act of will to make me go. Of course, that's what it's always been - and I'm not ready to give up yet.
On the plus side, I helped Marcus build his computer. It seems to basically work so far, and it's a lot faster than his old one. I hope he's happy with it - he's gone through a lot of hassle to get it and set it up, on top of his very busy schedule.
I've found myself getting increasingly irritated with Mark. I try to stop it at a lot of different levels. First is the rational level, where I argue to myself that I have no logical reason to be angry with him. (This almost never works). Next is the level of emotional suppression, where I just "shove" my feelings. After that I might simply physically leave the area for a while, or I might try to talk to him about it - but I've found that when I do talk to him about things, he seems to listen politely and then keep acting exactly as he already did (which, to be fair, is an accusation that at many times in the past could have been made of me as well). I find that when I get in arguments with Mark lately, our core values differ so much that I can no longer tell whether I've gained anything of value even when he "wins" the argument. I suspect not. I also suspect I'm not cut out to have a roommate. Well, maybe that's not the best phrase, as it suggests a specific defect on my part, which isn't really how I think of it - it's just that living with someone seems to almost directly make me pick out and magnify every possible flaw they have to the point where they become very hard to tolerate.
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I'm sick! :-( The only real symptoms so far seem to be a sore and dry throat and drowsiness. I think I caught it from Marcus, since he has something similar. Mark tried to get me up for Minds, Machines and Knowledge earlier, but I told him I was sick and didn't go, and let myself sleep for a few more hours. I don't actually feel that bad right now, but I can't afford to let it get worse, with the amount of work I have left to do on the kernel and the time frame in which that work has to get done. I'm thinking about how I often get to be a whiny bitch when I'm sick and how I wish I had someone to take care of me - usually I don't let myself get sick at college because there's no one to take care of me, but it caught me off guard this time. Oh well. Send get-well cards, get-worse cards, etc. (as always) to kenn@cmu.edu.
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I just finished watching Terminator 2. Mark both recommended it and sent it to me, and when I felt like starting a movie about 3 hours ago (incidentally, it's almost 6 in the morning now), he recommended it as a mindless action film that had impressive special effects for its time. Well, let me tell you, for most classics there's a reason they're classic, and it ain't special effects, since after 10 years even the best of those start to look commonplace. No, it's the fact that this movie was well-scripted that really makes it shine. Plus, whatever anyone tells you, Arnold Schwarzenegger is bad-ass, period. Needless to say, I consider that a few hours very well spent.
I had the in-class portion of my Ancient Philosophy midterm today (well, yesterday now, since even though I haven't yet slept, this really is too late in the night... err, early in the morning to still be calling Monday). I was neither terribly happy with nor terribly upset about it - I basically understood the material, which concerned a few of the Platonic dialogues we've been studying (I answered questions on the Sophist and Phaedrus today), but had no special insights. I expect my grade to be in the B range, though time will tell.
This past evening Mark and I made substantial progress on our kernel. I wrote over a hundred lines of code (including a fair amount of looking over for bugs and such) and I believe Mark did as well. Although we still haven't actually tested anything and debugging may be a huge pain in the ass, we have a pretty decent plan of attack sketched out. So even if it does end up costing us most or all of our late days for the semester, I'm starting to be more confident that we'll actually be able to get it done.
Lastly, notes on a few computer upgrades: Laura's been enhanced by the addition of both a TV tuner card and a Matrox G400 video card in the last week or so. The TV tuner card cost me $30 and the video card not a penny, since I got it from Ben (it had been sitting uselessly in his unused secondary computer, so I just swapped it (with his permission) with the G200 I had been using). They were both surprisingly easy to set up, except for 3d support for the video card, which I would never have figured out if I hadn't accidentally stumbled upon the command to activate the proper set of libraries. Oh well, I guess that's how Linux works sometimes... Now I need one more cable before I can start digitizing Zim at a decent quality (I could use coax cable, but the quality is far higher with RCA).
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Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Fri Nov 2 04:53:38 2001