When I play Mahjongg (the game that comes with Gnome with the tiles and matching, not the game for housewives that Anselor plays), I find that I give names to all the pieces. (Note that I don’t speak any sort of Chinese.) Here are some of the names I use:
Claw
M & M
The letter ‘r’
Half ‘r’
Pirate face
Spear
Pirate ship
Pi
Face
Jumpy dude
Yellow turd
Yellow chicken scratch
Window
Pawn
Lines
Bullseye
Ink
In the last couple days, I dealt a lot with crappily written code that wasn’t my own crappily written code. One program was a C program (obviously written by a mathematician) that calculates the various elements of a Voronoi diagram. I cleaned it up and adjusted things to allow it to dynamically re-calculate the diagram based on a changed set of input data. The other stuff I dealt with was version 5.5 of phpNuke for phatplaya.com. That stuff isn’t quite as bad, but just different from the usual. Reading, understanding, and repairing someone else’s code forces you to think like they do for a minute, and possibly become a better programmer in the process. I suppose this only applies to turbo-nerds. Half of my reading audience (two people) will probably not have any idea what I’m talking about.
I think it’s cruelty to animals to force dogs to live in their own filth. Is the same true for turtles? Do turtles have a sense of smell?
Our house officially smells like someone took a dump on or near the turtle tank. The only thing this reminds me of is the time I walked within a hundred feet the twenty or thirty port-a-pottys at some random sporting event or county fair, days after their initial installation and use after several dozen hours of baking in the near-desert heat. (I think the smell damaged my ability to create new long-term memories a la Memento.) I propose a change to the age-old tale of the Tortoise and the Hare. In this new version, the Tortoise will not win due to the pride are carelessness of his competitor. Instead the Tortoise will win due to the Hare’s inability to withstand the world-record stank which inexplicably seeps forth from the Tortoise into all nearby forms of matter.
Every time I inhale, I am reminded that it was a mistake to do so.
I’m not sure if I’ve posted the Alcohol lyrics before, but here’s my favorite stanza from ‘Alcohol’ by Bare Naked Ladies:
“I thought that alcohol was just for those with nothing else to do. I thought that drinking just to get drunk was a waste of precious booze. But now I know that there’s a time and there’s a place where I can choose to walk the fine line between self control and self abuse.”
School is starting to get annoying. When I’m at work all I want to do is play Morrowind. When I’m home I have to do school-related stuff before I can hit the morrowind crack pipe. I am doing much less work for my nine credits so far that I ever did in high school. Hopefully I’ll get my butt in gear before any of my grades start to reflect my effort.
[Obligatory StarWars review]
Star Wars 2 is about a thousand times better than Star Wars 1. That’s not much of a surprise if you honestly consider how bad episode 1 was. If I had to compare Starwars to Spiderman, I think I’d have to go with Starwars. Mind you, this is a ‘it hasn’t even been 24 hours yet and i haven’t mulled over every little bit’, but both movies have crappy teen ‘I ache for you, you complete me’-style conversations and Starwars has better fight scenes. I’d describe them, but you’re all under George Lucas’ control like I am, and will find out yourself. The surprise of what happens at several points in that movie is well worth the ticket price. Also seeing how the plot lines between the two trilogies connect scene by scene is fun.
[/Obligatory StarWars review]
Today in class the TA walked up to the chalkboard and wrote where the students can download “steaming video”. I laughed out loud, and proceeded to raise my hand to ask a question every couple minutes through the pre-recorded lecture. Sometimes I think that a sense of humor is rare among computer engineering grad students.
Today was a strange day.
I woke up at noon in the twin bed I grew up in. It’s big enough if I lay there like I’m dead. Unfortunately, I curl and turn and use about twice the real estate available to me here, so I wind up on the windowsill, half off the bed, curled up at one end of it, etc. It’s strange to wake up so many times during the night. The bed is also about four times fluffier/softer than what should be legal. So I keep half-smothering myself everytime I roll over. (You’re probably asking why you should care. I haven’t posted in quite a while, so gimme some slack.) Another weird thing about sleeping at home is the sunlight. My room here is above ground with two windows. This means there is an inescapable bounty of light by about 9 AM. Here, my habit of hibernating until people come back from a day at work/school at 5 PM is impossible. I’ve been waking up at 10 with the same attitude of a waking vampire on the receiving end of a Maglite attack.
After the strange bout of above-ground undead waking, the next event was to go to a church event with my mom. I thought it had something to do with Mother’s day, but I wasn’t sure. When our car pulled up, my mom gave me something to hold. It said ‘pansies and daffodils’ on the side, among pictures of flowers, lace, and cute little duckies. Finding this rather odd, I hoped this event and the bag in my hand were unrelated. I hoped wrong. It turned out to be a full-blown tea party that could make Martha Stewart jealous. If I see another teacup again, it’ll be too soon.
After that event, soon to be forced out of long-term memory, my family went to the Olive Garden. There, I ran into two people I worked with at Winn-Dixie six or more years ago. I had previously randomly bumped into both of those people at separate occasions for no apparent reason around two years ago. I find this odd.
I definitely have too much free time.