I'm a Water Spirit
I can't honestly claim my birthday was terrible, like I can claim my 18th was. I gave the half of the formula I listed in an earlier entry - I was in the right mental state. The world didn't want to cooperate, though, and few took any interest in or even notice of my birthday. Mark got me some gloves which I'm wearing right now (they're typing gloves) to keep my hands warm. I got to talk to both of my parents, my sister, and my paternal grandparents, and I got presents from all of them as well as one of my mom's sister's families. And a fair number of people wished me a happy birthday.
Nevertheless, I am pretty disheartened by how little the rest of the world seemed to care. I made my own day as much as I could - I spent most of the day reading The Count of Monte Cristo and also watched The Neverending Story, thus digging myself into a hole of having gotten no work done from which it will take a long time to recover. I still don't know how I ever finished my Graphics homework in time for class; I do know, though, that that plus the very small amount of sleep I was able to get Wednesday night got me behind on grading terminal drivers, a situation from which I am still attempting to extricate myself.
The housing situation is complex. Basically, there are three singles opening up on this floor, but Mitch is probably going to take one of them. The plan is for me to get one of the others. There are a bunch of other issues, but I don't want to talk about them in a public forum, because they involve bending the housing rules a little bit. :-) Suffice it to say that I think the odds of things working out are reasonably good. I really think it would have been nice to live near Ed, since we saw each other almost not at all last semester (this semester Physics lab is where we typically meet), but I guess it's not practical. Nevertheless, I will finally be getting my own room - I tried to adapt to the roommate thing, but the more I did it, the less I liked it.
I finally got a good night's sleep last night, but now I have lots of work to do, so although there are more things I know I wanted to say, they're not coming to mind right now. I suppose that's okay, since I don't really have time to express them fully right now anyway. So I'll write more later.
Over the past few days I have been extremely - almost unacceptably - busy. Grading terminal drivers is a hell from which I have still not emerged (I've done all of the reviews, but have yet to write out the actual grade files). I've spent about 4 more hours grading homework and another 3 looking over the midterm late last night and waiting for it to print out. Then I helped proctor an exam for the first time in my life. (It went reasonably well; only a few students tried to get me to give them the answers.) Those will be graded Wednesday evening; there's no time to do it before then.
I am currently 4 pages into the writing of an 8-10 page Metaphysics paper, due in just under 12 hours from now. I'm not really concerned about finishing it - it's easy to make myself very wordy and write unnecessarily much - but I am worried about what the resultant quality will be. I also have midterms in Vision and Graphics coming up in 5.5 and 7 hours respectively, neither of which I am especially well prepared for. The good news is that midsemester break is on Thursday and Friday of this week, which may finally enable me to get out of the hole I've buried myself in.
The amount of work I've been doing lately has given me some insight into the condition of stress - insight which I've never really had before simply because I've never really had enough work to stress me. It's interesting to see the long stretches of work interrupted by so many breaks like this one. Then there are the times when I have to make the tough call that even though there's something that really needs to get done, I'm simply too tired to do it without sleeping first. I can't say for sure whether this semester will acclimate me to this level of work, and I'll find things to be a breeze when the stress lifts, or whether I'll find myself gasping for air so much that I'll overcompensate and become lazy. I will say, though, that this is an experience which I'll be very glad to have gone through, even if it does break my 4.0 in-major QPA. I need life experience like this more than I need good grades anyway.
Now, about today: Priya's birthday party. Even though I didn't get to bed until a bit after 5 in the morning today, I still didn't really feel that tired, but evidently my body disagreed. So, I woke up at 1:00. A few minutes later, I "realized" that Priya's birthday party, at Max and Erma's, was already starting! So I looked up the location on Yahoo Maps and literally ran there. Then I was totally bewildered because no one was there yet. It turned out that we were actually supposed to meet to go over there at 1:30. :-) So I walked back, jumped and surprised Ed, told everyone in a very loud voice what had happened, and then eventually we actually went over to the restaurant.
I had a great deal of fun at the restaurant, talking first about wiping out 99% of the human population and how best to go about it (okay, that wasn't the exact direction the entire conversation went; it concerned power chiefly). I think I offended Alex, though, but I guess we agreed to disagree. I'm not sure what kind of impression I made on the others present, either (of course, they all knew me to varying degrees already). I had a lot of fun with Ed though.
After lunch we went back over to the hill area. We had strawberry shortcake (pretty good; Jadda and Jared mashed the strawberries and might well have made the cake, though I'm not sure about that latter part). Then most of us went into Hamerschlag and played a party game called Apples to Apples. The rules are simple. Each person has a hand of 7 red cards, which are replenished after each turn. The cards each have a word, phrase, band name, country, famous person, etc. on them. A turn goes as follows: the person whose turn it is turns up a green card. That card contains an adjective. Each person other than the one whose turn it is selects one of their red cards which they think is related to the green card and puts it down in the center face down. The person whose turn it is then flips them all over and chooses the card which is most relevant (or irrelevant) or funny, or whatever.
Anyway, one interesting feature the game has is politicking. First of all, you get to try to advocate things, but advocating your own card can actually have a negative feedback result, especially if your answer wasn't particularly strong to start with. Second, there are "write-in" cards, where one of the players gets to choose to put anything on the card. Needless to say this compromises who played that card, but oh well. Many attempts were made to make use of Alison and Jeff's relationship in order to coerce a choice out of one or the other of them, but few were successful.
We played two rounds of the game. I won the first and Alex won the second. I really would have liked to play more, as I was having a great time, but at that point a lot of the other people appeared to have had enough, so we dispersed.
I've decided to make this a set of three updates, rather than just one, because there are three basic topics from the past few days that I want to cover, and I want to go into enough detail about each of them. And I'm not going to go quite in chronological order, because I don't feel like writing them that way.
So, the first issue which I wish to address is the OS midterm. Wednesday at 17:00, I headed over to Wean to start grading it. This process lasted until 4:00 in the morning, but there were a couple of breaks (first of all, to eat, and then when I had to go back home to get insulin). So, you might think that cycle was brutal, but it wasn't really.
The grades received, on the other hand, were. The average was a 61 and there were a lot of scores in the 30-40 range. You might think this was because the exam was very hard, but it really wasn't. There was one gotcha, which was that the first three questions had very long English descriptions from which you had to pick out the information that was actually relevent to the answer. But other than that, the exam seemed to me to be substantially easier than my own midterm. Greg thinks that it's simply that the current junior CS class (my class) isn't as bright as it should be, because CMU has been pursuing diversity at the expense of skill. You might think that with an average like that, the exam would be curved, but you'd be wrong again. Greg has never curved OS at all, because he believes that his grades should be an objective measurement of how well the student has mastered the material. He's not about to start now, although the average may possibly be low enough that he decides to give a retest, to let people have one more try to prove that they have mastered the material. I hope he doesn't, since it would probably get tiring to grade another one.
I was tough but fair in my own grading - if the students didn't get the key insight necessary to solve my problem (which a disappointingly high number of them did not) then they weren't going to get more than about half of the points out of me. Greg is really worried about this class, and I have to say that I understand what he's saying, but I don't think it's our fault (and neither does he). It's simply that the students we have have either been very lazy, or (our worry) just don't have the ability.
Then there were a couple of incidents that bear mentioning. First is the hot peppers. See, Greg called up the Indian restaurant because the last time he had ordered from them through Wheeldeliver (think that's the right spelling) they hadn't put nearly enough spice on his food. As it turned out the restaurant actually delivered. Anyway, they brought these small green peppers. Greg told us about how the first time he'd had one, he hadn't known what it was and his eyes had been watering, etc. One of the other TAs complained that his food wasn't spicy enough and Greg offered the peppers as a way to solve that, but he refused.
Greg also offered the peppers to me. At first I was going to refuse, but then I said "Okay, but let me finish my food first, so that I can actually taste it" (I had ordered with a spice level of 3 on a 1-10 scale). So, after I had finished eating (keeping about half of my drink, some rice and bread in reserve) I ate one. Unfortunately, no one was watching, and they didn't believe me. That thing was quite hot, but Greg just said "have another one" and handed it to me, so figuring that two couldn't be much worse than one, I ate that too. It hurt a bit, but it was certainly quite an experience, and everyone else there was suitably impressed. See, although I don't like my food so hot I can't taste it, I have a pretty powerful ability to ignore pain.
The second was that Doug was talking to someone on AIM, and then Ed took over the keyboard and typed a bunch of crap, so I typed "That wasn't Doug typing". Then Greg took over, told the person at the other end he was the OS professor, and proceeded to launch into a rant about wearing clean underwear to an interview and so on. The person at the other end was completely confused, and I was cracking up. I don't think they actually believed it was Greg; rather, they thought it was still Ed.
The students probably won't be too happy with their grades, but they really do reflect how well they learned the material. Oh well...
If you look down two entries you'll see that I still have one more entry to write in my series of three, but this isn't it. I am feeling rather bitter towards the world right now and, as bizarre as it might sound, I want to capture that before it goes away. I've gained the ability to recover from bad situations much more rapidly than I used to, largely out of necessity. It's not like I don't get upset any more, it's just that I get over it sooner (which is absurd, given that I always got over being upset much faster than Alison did when the two of us were going out...)
Anyway, I need to elaborate about lunch. It really went rather badly - at least, for other people, it seems. I didn't realize it, but I guess I managed to irritate Priya quite a bit with my conversation at the beginning. I apologized to her since it really was supposed to be her birthday party, and she accepted it. So I guess it's okay, but I'm still not happy about it. I'm fairly sure Ed wasn't bothered by it, so that's something at least. I don't really know about the rest of the people. Well, except for Alison, who also expressed her distaste for it in her LiveJournal. But I honestly don't care about her opinion. (Yes, Alison, I know you're reading this. If you don't like it then that's tough. I am fucking sick and tired of letting myself be pushed around by some specter of you.)
Well, that was brutally honest, but it ties into the next part, which is that I was literally in tears only a few hours ago. It started with James asking whether I'd be going to Ben's birthday celebration the next day. I answered that I was pissed that no one had done anything about my birthday. Mark said that we were really doing it because it coincided so well with mid-semester break, etc. I told him that birthdays were something really special to me and that if I talked any more about it I would get emotional. Well, needless to say, I talked more about it. Mark tried his best to console me, but his style was miserably ineffective, although I'm not sure anything he could have done would have worked better.
So, right now I'm convinced that the world doesn't appreciate my basic dignity or respect me as a human being. That's okay, I guess. Maybe I haven't done much to earn that respect. But it still really hurts to be treated this way. Maybe people don't think of it the same way I do, but I'm sorry, that doesn't excuse them in my eyes. And then again, maybe I'm just looking for an excuse to pick fights because being angry feels better than being pathetic. I guess it doesn't really matter. By now I'm over it already. And, like I said in an earlier entry, I have to be prepared to feel terrible every once in a while this semester for exactly these kinds of reasons. I wish I didn't have to go through this, but I do, so I'll try to put what resources I have to good use.
This is the long-awaited entry that could have been made much earlier, had I written it then, but it required a lot of background work. First things first: I finished The Count of Monte Cristo on Wednesday. I must say that I simply never imagined the ending would be what it was. I'll try to avoid spoiling the plot for those who have not read it and say merely that it is an absolutely magnificent book. Its scope, power and beauty cannot possibly be overstated. I look forward to some day acquiring a hard-cover copy of it with gilded pages that feels good in my hands. It may well be the greatest book I have ever read - even knowing that one always tends to overestimate that which one has just experienced. And I cannot resist quoting the Count, just a little bit: "Wait and hope."
That experience, in turn, inspired me to be slightly less lazy and post some of my own stories online. If you feel like checking them out, there aren't many there, and their scope is nothing in comparison with The Count of Monte Cristo, but I am nevertheless proud of them.
To wrap this up, I got frustrated with trying to find a theater I could actually reach that was still playing the recently released movie, The Count of Monte Cristo, so I downloaded it on Gnutella and watched it last night. Maybe my expectations of it were simply too high (too much like the book), but I really didn't like it. You have to understand that cutting The Count of Monte Cristo down into a couple of hours, many characters and scenes will be left out. But it was worse than that - they added things in which detracted from the core message. Furthermore, they totally bought into the theory of the book as fundamentally concerning itself with revenge, which I think is a fallacy. The center of The Count of Monte Cristo is the count. Revenge is simply that which his fate inevitably impels him to choose as his goal. About the best thing that I can say for the movie is that it was so different from the book as not to really detract from the latter at all.
So, read The Count of Monte Cristo - the book which had me clasping my hands together and crying when it ended. Read it for the experience - read it for the memories - read it for the knowledge. Read it because it will teach you more than a semester of calculus, show you more than a year of high school, make you feel more alive than a summer's day. And if none of that convinces you, read it because I told you to. :-)
Ah, that glorious, almost indescribable moment when in a new Final Fantasy game one first gets the airship, feels that immense sense of freedom from being able to traverse the entire world in under a minute, and hears those magnificent strains of airship music. I have another entry, long delayed and still in queue to be put up within the next few days, but this is merely to note that beautiful feeling which I experienced upon obtaining the Hilda Garde III. It also notes that after a somewhat unwanted "break" of several weeks, I'm back to playing Final Fantasy 9, though I had to steal time from my still numerous other obligations to do so. I only played for a few hours - enough to get a sense of progress, but not so much that I got so tired as to no longer enjoy it. But I will beat this game. It is a personal symbol for me of that life which I must and will build for myself.
I've been a little derelict in updating my page over the last few days. I guess that not a whole lot has happened. I've gotten badly out of the habit of doing work. I did have a Metaphysics summary due yesterday which I turned in, and today we present our Algorithms homework to the professor, which we did a fair amount of work on (although I'm still not all that confident in how we'll do). But my Vision assignment which was due on Tuesday still hasn't even been started (like I said, the class has a very lenient late policy, so that's not a disaster, but still)... and lots of other things that I should be accomplishing are just kind of sitting around.
Earlier this week, I was thinking about putting up a semi-rant about how CMU is a really bad place to meet women not already in a relationship, especially for someone like me. But I realized that this is a really terrible forum in which to do that given my readership. I may end up doing it anyway, but at least you should appreciate that I did my best to hold off. :-)
I will say this much, though. It's like it was before. I have no reason to believe I could handle being in a relationship without badly messing up my life in the process, and plenty to believe that I couldn't, but I still feel that something is missing from my life. I'm still unwilling or unable to do anything about it, and I still suffer because of it. If there has been any change at all, I suppose it's that I am more accepting of my situation.
I still feel that I have too many commitments right now to really handle a relationship, but I wonder about next year. I see myself retreating into my room a lot, where I will finally have a place of my own. This won't be like it would have been in the past, when I would have been allowing myself to wither away. I will keep myself healthy. Still, I don't anticipate a massive increase in my desire to participate in social events, nor in my propensity to do so. This means I'm likely not to meet many new people, which keeps the odds of a relationship low. Sigh. I suppose starting a relationship the year before I'm very likely to be moving, quite possibly far away from here, might be a bad thing in pragmatic terms. As if that were any consolation...
This is the disaster story that almost happened but didn't... and now that I know it's all officially okay, I can talk about it. It all started with my harebrained scheme to get a single on Mudge 3A (the same place I live now). My room draw number was 130, which would have been more than adequate, but I thought that it might not be good enough, and Marcus had 65. Mitch had 19 or something ungodly like that and was also going to take one of the rooms. Given that, I wasn't quite sure how it would all work out. The plan was for Marcus to take a room for me and then give it to me unofficially, since at that point we thought that swaps involving singles weren't allowed.
So today was room draw... and Marcus had been up all night doing 525 and was rather frazzled and totally forgot. I woke him up by knocking on his door around 21:00 and asked him what room he had gotten. He had this look of terror in his eyes. I had the immediate "don't panic" reaction - go to Housing's website, check available rooms and what time Room Draw ran until, see that it was still on and there was one room available, and grab Marcus and head over, telling Mark to call Mitch and have him email me which room he had gotten.
There was one single left, marked female only. But Marcus knows the housing people, and he asked if there were even any females on our floor at all yet, and the answer was no, so he got Adria (one of the housing people with whom he is acquainted) to convert the room to male. In the meantime I had been talking to Misha, who I know from KGB, and he had informed me that other than the aforementioned single marked female only, there were no singles whatsoever left in Mudge, primes included! (One of our fallback plans had been for Marcus to get a prime single in one of the other towers and then for Mitch and I to switch.)
Then we headed over to Mitch's because I preferred the room on the side of the hall that he had taken to the one on the end, and I wanted to know if he would be willing to switch. He didn't care, so we headed down to the Room Draw area again, although I didn't go in because we didn't want Adria to know anything was up what with the whole trading of singles deal. But in the course of their discussion it came out that it was okay if we switched, we just had to move into the appropriate rooms and fill out the paperwork later. So not only am I getting my room, it's all official. The thing is that it was so amazingly close. If I hadn't woken Marcus up - no chance. If he hadn't known the people who work for Housing - no chance. If that one room had already been taken - no chance. Sometimes things just work out right. :-)
At this point the question comes up of whether I have gotten out of the habit of updating my website, since my updates have been so infrequent over the past week. I believe, however, that the answer is no. Rather, there hasn't been a lot going on in my life, and I have been generally lazy in regards to a lot of things, one of which is this site. But I do still intend to continue updating it.
My Friday was somewhat interesting, and I feel like writing about it, so I guess I will. First I got up and went to give an Algorithms presentation with Mark and Nithin. It went rather badly. Mark took almost 40 minutes to present his question out of the hour allotted to us, so we barely had time to do any of the last problem (which I had painstakingly spent hours preparing) at all. Furthermore, I doubt our grade will be very good. There's a laundry list of reasons we did poorly, none of which I was responsible for except perhaps starting too late, but I see no reason to list them all.
Then I went to office hours. A fair number of people are finally starting to work on the kernel, and the universal cry is "context switching doesn't work!" I tried to help as many people as I could. I think most of them have a better conceptual understanding now than they did before, even if their code still doesn't work. :-)
While in office hours, I overheard Michelle Lai discussing some blatant unfairness in regards to her intended candidacy for Student Body President. Specifically, she was left off of the ballot for being 2 signatures short on her petition sheet - signatures which she thought she had, but 2 of which turned out to be invalid through no fault of her own. We talked some more about the issue and I emailed the person responsible, Neil Hunt, and eventually posted to cmu.misc.market about the issue. (You will probably always be able to find this post by going to Google Groups and searching for "Kenn Hamm Student Gov't elections unfair" or something like that - after they've archived it, that is.) No one seems to have taken me up on my offer to discuss the issue, but Michelle is still appreciative.
After that Shion, Mark and I watched Magnolia. I definitely liked the movie, but I also felt like I missed a lot. It's a very long movie with a huge cast (compared to other movies). We were watching it in Shion's room with the windows open because it was so hot, and every once in a while a car (or even worse, an ambulance or police car) would go by and I'd completely miss a line. This is a movie where that's a bad thing. I may watch it again at some point, although not right now.
I guess that's about it for Friday. On Saturday Mark and I went to Eat-'n'-Park (where I first gawked at Mark for ordering two whole meals, then ended up doing the same thing myself) and grocery shopping. Sunday I didn't do much. The Simpsons is steadily deteriorating, and Malcolm was a rerun. Futurama and King of the Hill were good though. I still haven't gotten around to watching the last 2 weeks of The X-Files, so I just taped this one too. I think I need to watch them this week or I'm going to run out of tape...
Well, I guess I really have gotten lazy updating my webpage. Then again, I've had a ton of work... first Vision, then Graphics, and always OS. The Vision was late and the Graphics will officially count as late in about half an hour, but who am I kidding, there's no chance I could finish it tonight. I'm not really sleep-deprived but I'm totally stressed out. I suppose spring vacation will be a little bit of a remedy for that... I don't see myself getting a whole lot done in that week (although I really should).
There was a story I was going to tell here, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that it had no point. I mean, using this page as a place to gripe is cute and all, but it's unsatisfying.
So, I guess I should go on with the big news... I bought nilmop.com. (The domain name.) Ed is going to co-own it, but it's registered to me. So, now you can get at this site through http://ragnar.nilmop.com/kenn/default.html. Hopefully that URL will stay around for a good long time to come... and I must admit that despite having to remember to renew it eventually (not for 3 more years!) it's a weight off my shoulders to know that no one can come along and register it before I do now. I mean, I always kind of wanted it...
My fortune cookie this evening read "You have an ability to sense and know a higher truth". I'm not going to further comment on that.
I have no time to write a real, decent update. Fortunately, nothing has really happened that requires one. But, what did happen is that two of the three people on my Livejournal friends list took a bunch of online quizzes. I hate those things. I present you the results without delay.
Note: This one really didn't apply to me (I don't
even know what most of these kinds of makeup are), so I just
answered how I think I'd want a potential girlfriend to.
What's Your
Style?
Find out @ She's Crafty
-25 or less - not only are you not fluffy, but you positively delight in scaring the fluffies. Now that's not very nice, is it ;-)
http://www.geocities.com/not_all_there_93/fluffytest.html
Who's Your 80s Movie Icon Alter-Ego?
Find out @ She's Crafty
My Mormon name is Kendon Helamans Warrior!
What's yours?
Well, since I leave for home with my mom in a few hours, now is as good a time as any to make an update, I suppose. This past week, as always, I had a bunch of work. Fortunately, most of it was pretty easy. I had Algorithms due on Tuesday, but it seemed like one of the easiest assignments yet. Then on Thursday, I had Graphics due (the assignment had only 2 problems!) and an Algorithms exam which was mostly true/false and multiple choice (I think they were trying to make it as easy as humanly possible to grade).
There's still a ton of OS work which I could potentially be doing, and I will try to do some of it at home, since grading kernels is going to take a really long time. But at the same time, as my obligations related to classes that I'm actually taking were shrugged off, I started to do some other things and to think. James bought a Playstation 2 and Devil May Cry, a game which is hard to peg in a genre but in which you play a half-demon who goes around killing other demons. The graphics are gorgeous and the gameplay (from the one level which James walked me through) is fun too. James is playing it right now about ten feet away from me, on my TV.
I've been cleaning up some of the tags on my music (I can't just call them ID3 tags any more, since I now have ogg and flac files as well as mp3s, and EasyTAG handles them all without breaking a sweat). I also discovered Mark's collection of over 1500 MODs, mostly ripped from Super Nintendo video games, which he had somehow forgotten about. I also cleaned a lot of useless junk out of my Andrew account. I've been working with Ed on getting email @nilmop.com set up, but we haven't succeeded yet.
Despite not being entirely out of the fire yet, I'm glad to get a chance to go home, see my cats, finally beat Final Fantasy 9 (no, I still haven't beaten it, but I fully intend to do so over this vacation...) and just relax a little.
Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Sat Mar 30 04:53:56 2002