March 28, 2006

you’re such a fascist

I’m taking a class called Philosophy of Politics, and we are reading a book called COMMUNISM, FASCISM, AND DEMOCRACY, a very brave subject for a man named Cohen.

The professor for this course is damn near insane (genius?), though he looks to be an excellent source of notable quotables. Really, all I hope to get out of this class is the ability to knowledgeably call someone a fascist. That’d be sweet.

March 23, 2006

mad sweet indeed

Tuesday Morning
A friend from the scooter club called to say someone had seen a scooter similar to mine in Atascadero. I’ve gotten calls like this before, but it’s never panned out. As a precautionary measure, I send the Atascadero police department an email with a picture of my Vespa.

Wednesday Morning
Got a call from Officer Piapen in Atascadero. They found my freaking Vespa.

I am one happy camper. It’s in one piece and it runs. Whoever had it dropped it and took a drill to the ignition cylinder, but it’ll take about $60 to get it back where I had it.

Mad sweet. And I’m off to Vegas tomorrow. This could be the best spring break ever…

March 20, 2006

oh, leonard

oh, leonard bernstein

The long awaited sequel in my to VAIN has finally arrived. I’m really not sure who the target audience is, to get the whole thing you’d have to recognize the people in the picture, understand more than a bit about networking, and know what a wormhole is.

And even then, it’s not really that funny. Let’s just consider this a poorly thought out experiment and move on.

March 19, 2006

subjectless

I just got done with my algorithms final a couple days ago, and though I believe that class to be one of the more important classes in my major, I hated the man who taught it. He was bitter and angry, and nothing brought out the worst in him like students, especially his students.

Given that, there’s no doubt the man was damn funny. He told my favorite story about a week before class ended, and I suspect it originated in deep space or left field. After crushing that barely detectable light we called hope in the previous midterm, it’s possible he felt it necessary to lighten the mood:

Prof: I lectured to an empty room once.
*awkward silence*
Prof: I was teaching a grad course and only five people were enrolled.
Prof: Some days only two or three people would show up.
Prof: One day, I walked into the room and nobody was there.
Prof: So I was pretty tee’d off, and I thought, “You know what, I’m gonna go ahead and lecture”
Prof: So I did.
Prof: I lectured.
Prof: I fielded questions.
Prof: I collected homework.
Prof: People walked past the room looking at me like I was insane.
Prof: Can anyone guess the punchline?
*awkward silence*

Prof: I was in the wrong room.

March 13, 2006

vim shmim

Religion isn’t the opiate of the masses anymore, Karl. IDEs are.

“The whitespace thing is simply that Python uses indentation to determine block nesting. It forces you to indent everything a certain way, and they do this so that everyone’s code will look the same. A surprising number of programmers hate this, because it feels to them like their freedom is being taken away; it feels as if Python is trampling their constitutional right to use shotgun formatting and obfuscated one-liners.”

The thing is, the forced indenting is one of the reasons I wanted to learn Python.  I don’t want work on code that was created by some crackhead programmer who thinks fitting his entire program into a single line will somehow reduce the number of bugs due to faulty statistical analysis.  Either way, it’s an enjoyable rant on what programming languages one should learn, by Stevey, whoever that is.

March 12, 2006

couldn’t you have just shot me?

It’s the kind of thing you hear in the news, but never really believe can happen in your own home, to those closest to you. Deep down I’m aware it’s happening in the shadier corners of the planet, but in the room right next to mine? I’ve heard again and again that all the other kids are doing it, but it won’t happen to my friends. My friends know better than that.

The topic was recently brought up in a conversation between Kris and I; he guiltily and in hushed tones confided that his own sister had asked her brother (her own related-by-blood brother for pete’s sake!) for his help with this task. Simultaneously horrified and embarrassed he claimed he was unaware of how to accomplish such a thing. To the best of my knowledge, they haven’t spoken since.

This morning…

*deep breath…*

This morning… Byron added a song to his myspace page. This song plays without asking for your permission.

Byron Clamor, you’re violating commandment number six, you’re killing the Internet. I know you explained that you “just caved in,” but if your so called friends jumped off the Brooklyn bridge, would you be walking on air with them, or would you try to grab their ankles to stop them from going over like a sane man? If you had implemented a piece of javascript that allowed stabbing in the face, I would be less repulsed as I recognize there is a time and a place for face stabbing over the Internet. This would would have a plethora of ethical uses for both digg and the World of Warcraft Forums. But forcing unsolicited songs from my speakers? Man… that’s just plain wrong.

my other pro-tolerance message is also condescending – jc

If I had to pick a single word to describe the title of this entry, it would be ‘plagiarism’. If forced to choose a second word, it would most likely be ‘blatant’.

It’s been an arduous week, the kind that makes people say to themselves, “The ‘Real’ world has got to be better than this.” I’ve never fallen for this myth.

The thing is, at the base of it all, I’m a pessimist. I assume life is not going to get better. Working with this assumption, it follows that whatever you call the ‘Real’ world must be worse than school, as it appears later in the chronology of my life. Ya dig?

Just one more week ’till Vegas and spring break, at which point I hope to locate my lost shaker of salt….

March 1, 2006

rain man

“I have pi memorized out to 60 digits….

I hope that gets me laid.”

-whereami

Now that is totally sweet.

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