Well, somehow I've survived the insanity of the past week. It has now been one day more than a year since I started keeping this journal. It's certainly seen its fluctuations, from occasional days on which I'd make more than one entry to the current state, where one update a week is more typical. I suppose it's not precisely that I'm not worried about missing things so much as that writing entries doesn't really seem like a "natural" activity at the moment. Every time I have to force myself to do it. I suppose that this could mean I don't really feel a need for it, or it could mean that I'm simply too lazy or unmotivated. In any case, I suppose there's no reason to speculate on it at great length. Happy birthday, journal!
Last week was insane in large part because I stayed up for 33 hours straight in order to turn in my Compilers project on time (which I did manage!) Only 15 students turned it in on time, out of 34 registered for the class. Peter Lee (the professor) concluded that students had underestimated the difficulty of the project and gave those who had not yet turned them in amnesty to do so whenever, and those who had already turned them in 2 additional late days, contingent on his seeing real progress on Project 3 (which he expects to be one of the toughest). I haven't started on it yet, as I've been in a very lazy mood ever since finishing it.
I've also been sleeping far more than I should, and at odd times. It started with my sleeping for almost all of Wednesday, which is almost excusable, given that the Compilers project was due at midnight on Tuesday. But then Saturday I slept for 15 hours or so when I had intended to only sleep for 3. Because o fthis, and also because of general laziness, I haven't started my Game Programming yet, which is due on Friday. I do have 3 or 4 (can't remember which) late days, but I can only use 2 per project. Still, I'm fairly confident I'll be able to finish, if I can just get cracking within the next day or two. I've also got a paper in Value, Fact and Policy due in something like a week and a half, but I figure I'll put that off until the last minute like I always do with papers. Besides, I don't think we've even covered all of the material in class yet that will be relevant to it.
Mark borrowed a keyboard from Prof. Thibodeau (who also works at Seagate and does a very large variety of other things) and leant it to me. It's laptop-style and very small (no numeric keypad), but has a few quirks, such as the incredibly odd placement of the tilde (~) key. It also has an integrated touchpad which I haven't been able to get to work. But I've now ordered a keyboard which is black, but otherwise very similar - also laptop-style, but without the quirky key placement or the touchpad. I think I'll be very happy with it. I also ordered the 120G Seagate hard drive which Mark found for me, with FDB (Fluid Dynamic Bearings), which massively decrease the sound level. I did pay quite a bit of a premium for it, but as it was the only 120G FDB hard drive that seems to actually be available, I think it's fair. I realized that I've received quite a lot of packages here - I think about 11 or 12 already - and it appears that the flow will just keep coming. I'm still glad whenever I receive a package. I don't know that the novelty of something cool magically appearing in the mail room will ever wear off.
I finally completed my collection of South Park episodes (and have watched all of them, to boot), although there were a few I could only find in Realmedia format. I burned them to CD-RW (I don't like to burn to CD-R unless I'm sure I won't find a better version in the future) and have freed up something like 4G of hard disk space. This is slightly less of an issue since I'll be getting my new hard drive at some point, but still good.
Looking back at my first few entries, I'm amazed by the number of links I used and by how enthusiastic I was about this page. I suppose I had my reasons then, as I do now... I wish that I could update this page using voice rather than text, and that Laura could respond in a nice, neutral female voice. Actually, I don't know that I'd like that. I like the tactile experience of typing too. Well, maybe I'll start updating more frequently if more starts happening in my life, or maybe my entries will just keep getting longer and longer until eventually I write one a year and it reads like a novel...
I suppose updating once a week had become too predictable, and so despite some vague intentions to start updating more often, the result was that I actually ended up taking longer. The last week or so has been kind of a problem. Specifically, I've been in this lazy state in which I can accomplish almost no work. My last day to turn in my game programming is today and my game still has some fairly serious issues, and on Monday I turned in one ofthe worst papers I can remember writing. I actually asked whether late handins would be accepted for it, got a positive response, but then ended up not actually doing anything to make the paper better. The really bad part of this is that the current Compilers project is supposed to be one of the two hardest of the semester, we've already had a week or two to work on it, and I haven't started it yet. I have a feeling that my midsemester break is going to be somewhat unpleasant due to the amount of work I'm going to have to do to have any chance of finishing that project.
I received my copy of Squaredance and am now listening to it for the second time. I actually didn't like it all that much the first time, but I realize that I often don't like a piece of music before I'm familiar with it, and now it's starting to grow on me. The package also included a business card directing me to a URL with information about a tribute to Yasunori Mitsuda, which looks interesting.
I don't think I've seen any movies or TV shows, read any books, or played any video games (except my own crappy racing game that I'm trying to make work) since my last update. Nor have I left campus except to shop, or met any new people. Yay, my life is boring. I did get my keyboard, which is really really cool, and a USB hub and PS/2->USB adaptor so now all my devices reach to my bed. Unfortunately, some of the "internet and multimedia" keys on the keyboard don't seem to generate anything through the adaptor, but I'm not using any of them yet anyway.
My room has been getting progressively messier. I do put quite a bit of effort into cleaning it up, but apparently not as much as I do into messing it up again. I'll clean it up, I suppose - right after I'm caught up with everything else. Heh.
I'm sure something else has happened recently, but I just can't think of anything. I've been too wrapped up in all of this work and the fact that I'm not getting it done. I think I'm going to try writing updates more frequently, even if they end up being really short. (Of course, I've said that before and then not done it...)
Okay, I'm going to try this micro-update thing. Today I went to Game Programming, in which we went over a bunch of project management/software engineering stuff, which I thought Mark would hate, but which he actually didn't have a problem with. I thought it was pretty interesting. In Value, Fact and Policy we watched the second half of the made-for-TV movie. In Compilers we covered iterative data-flow analysis.
This evening I went to a Thai restaurant with Shion and Varun, and Dave Silver met us there. It's on Craig Street and I had seen it before, but never gone there for some reason. I ordered a yellow curry and while it wasn't quite what I expected (you'd think I'd know what a curry dish was by now) and was a little spicier than I like even though I only asked for a 4 out of 10 on the spiciness scale, it was pretty good.
Now there seem to randomly be fireworks going on outside for some reason.
And this sentence is only here to remind me of something I did today (which it will probably fail to do at some point), but not to inform you of what it was. :P
There's an easter egg in the C-Book. Members of the CMU community, look carefully through the page with "Pieper, Joshua" at the top. All others, be confused.
Last night I went to The Olive Garden with Mark, Jeff and Dave, and Shion and Jessica met us there. I had fettucine alfredo and a raspberry lemonade. The food was quite good, and the service was amazing. Our waiter was able to remember all of our orders without writing any of them down, always knew when we needed more of something, etc. We left him a nice tip. Dave, Jeff, Shion and Jessica went bowling afterwards, but after that much food, I just wanted to get home and collapse (which I did).
I think there was a long period over which I didn't have many dreams, or at least, I almost never remembered them. But lately, I've remembered many more, although I haven't been writing them down like I used to. Of course, it may just be that I've been going back to sleep for a couple more hours more often recently, and that's when I'm most likely to remember dreams.
I just had a dream in which the main event was that my sister died. She whispered in my ear after she had died but before anyone knew about it. Everyone I told about it thought I was crazy. Then my cats mysteriously disappeared.
Next I was in a parallel universe, not only to this one, but to another relatively like it. I knew this because I saw another me, but no one else could see him, and my dad thought I was crazy. At home there were at least two Clydes and two Revcos, so it seemed like they had been moving into this dimension. There were also baby kitties who didn't look so well, and I tried to convince my dad to keep them. My sister was still dead, and at the point when I woke up, I hadn't seen the copy of me (or the me that presumably lived in this world) again.
I woke up with Another Inspiration (a remix of the Chrono Cross theme for Another World; Chrono Cross is a game that involves travel from one dimension to another, for those of you who've never heard of it) in my head.
And now I'm back, having just 1) called my mom on James' cell phone (I was actually going to go out to see if anywhere was open that would sell a phone card at this time, but I doubt it; fortunately James and a bunch of other people were awake in Marcus' room) and 2) put Another Inspiration on. This really has me a little freaked out, although I think I'm starting to calm down.
Yeah, I'm really bad at keeping up new habits. Also, I should be asleep now, given that I'm not working on compilers, and given that I'm supposedly going to be able to typecheck programs in two and a half days (which I find pretty unlikely). I think my perfect sleep schedule is degenerating badly though. It was cool while it lasted, and I'll see if I can get back into the groove again. It will be tough, though.
I ordered and received Time and Space, the tribute to Yasunori Mitsuda, and it's really, really good. I posted a review of SQUAREDANCE (that's how they want the name formatted) to the bulletin boards on majesticmix.com and oneupstudios.com and got into a bit of an unintentional flamewar with the musicians (apparently my review was too negative :P), but I think it's mostly resolved now.
At the KGB meeting on Monday, I bought the newly-formed Tautology Committee, so I am now proud to inform you that I either will or will not be attempting to go to sleep rather soon. Guess which one?
Wow, that was a whole week. I seem to have the most interesting dreams - or at least, I remember them - when I go back to sleep. I've been doing that quite a bit lately, and am always astonished when I do finally get up to discover that it's between 10 and 11 rather than some time in the afternoon. I suppose that I actually go to bed significantly earlier living alone, because no one is there to keep me awake, although I certainly didn't expect that effect. It's good, though, because it makes me get up in time for Game Programming.
There's still a ton of work to do for Compilers, but it is slowly moving along. At some point I'm going to have to start crunching. That probably won't be until the weekend.
I re-watched Orgazmo last night. Very funny movie.
Heidegger now makes a slight bit of sense to me, after Cavalier explained it. His writing itself was extraordinarily opaque to me.
I'm sure a whole lot more has happened in the last week, some of which was probably even worth writing about, but the whole thing with not making frequent entries, thus forgetting what they would be, prevents me from doing so.
Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Wed Oct 30 16:34:00 2002