It’s official, I’m working for a fruit company this summer.

Ryan: get this, we’re having a quake 2 game at lunch almost every other day
Ryan: quake 2
Ryan: at work
Ryan: on CompanyX’s LAN

Me: damn, I would do very poorly at that.
Me: maybe I should take an elective in pwning newbs.

Scene: Driving in a rental car in Sacramento. It’s dark and it’s raining.

I’m lost, of course. Fortunately, I had the foresight to print out directions before I got on the plane, but reading them would require more light than was available at the time. There was only one solution: The overhead light.

“Now what could go wrong with turning on the overhead light?”, you might ask. Normally, the answer is “very little”, the light bulb might be burnt out, but at least your situation would not be any worse than before. But as it turns out, the designer of the PT Cruiser felt it appropriate to place the moon-roof controls adjacent to the overhead light switch. So instead of being able to read my map, and getting where I need to go promptly, I’m now in the dark, wet, lost, and unsure whether the next button I press will activate light or an ejection seat.

The rest of the weekend went considerably better. Except for where my plane broke down and I had to get a rental car to drive back to San Luis. That part was bad too.

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.

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…

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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….

“I have pi memorized out to 60 digits….

I hope that gets me laid.”

-whereami

Now that is totally sweet.

“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.”
– Voltaire

Ryan: ahh.. beer
Ryan: the 6th wonder of the world

Me: 8th
Me: The 6th wonder of the world is the sphynx or something.

Ryan: fuck you
Ryan: it’s beer

Me: hahaha
Me: you’re right
Me: fuck the sphynx

Ryan: god damned half cat

This just in: There is a difference between a Bran muffin and a Raisin Bran muffin.

The difference is quite noticeable. It’s the raisins, some of the most disgusting little dried up fruit imaginable. All muffin-sellers please adjust your signs accordingly.

I kick ass at public speaking. I have oratory skills that would make Hitler and FDR alike let out a low, appreciative whistle and say, “That man knows how to bring it to the mic”.

I should qualify this proclamation, the two recent speeches I’ve had to make were not of any instructive value, they were more about mocking friends whom had already consumed a few alcoholic beverages. So I suppose my expertise lies more in “roasting” among drunken friends than any real talent. Regardless, it’s the one skill I have that I am completely confident about; if approached in a dark alley and met with a thug who challenged me to throw down street style, I would propose it is highly probable that I would be declared the victor.

Last night I had a chance to thank Dr. Nico at a faculty appreciation dinner. The good doctor was the first computer science professor I had at Cal Poly and is the reason I am still in this major today. I was more than willing to thank him publicly, but when they added in a free prime rib dinner, that sealed the deal.

Honestly, my favorite part of the evening was simply getting to hang out with the professor, meet his wife, and have a beer (well, he had wine, but I had beer) with the man. I asked him how he decided to get into the biz of teaching, and he replied, “I’ve wanted to do this since I was about five.”

And that is why Phillip Nico is the man.

Last fall, my Vespa was stolen.

But when you ask a vending machine
For Reese’s Pieces
And get Corn Nuts instead…

that really hurts

The weather got warm this week; into the 80s on Monday here in san luis, but dropped down a whole lot today, down into the 40s.

Apparently Lauren is a bit chilly

Today I cut a 1/2″ piece of steel into two pieces without even touching it.

Under pressure I might concede the 6800 degree flame helped.

Two interviews today. Both for internships with the same company. This is a company that I’d very much like to work for, so I was ready, though nervous. Job interviews are strange things, you never know exactly what punches are going to be thrown and so what you’ve been training for may be nothing like what you see in the ring.

ROUND 1. FIGHT!

We went toe to toe for thirty minutes. My interviewer was ill, which put him at a disadvantage, but I feel I made a good impression and have a strong reference for this position. booyah.

ROUND 2. That guy with a chair came out of nowhere!

Upon discovering there was another interviewer for an equally enticing position at the same company, I went gDub style and busted in where I wasn’t invited. I gave him an ultimatum: interview me or forfeit a shiny new Intel Mac laptop.

Not surprisingly, they chose to interview me (them laptops are hard to get). Surprisingly, I felt my performance was much better during this interview. Maybe it was because the topic was more familiar, maybe it was a result of gained confidence from my earlier interview, or maybe the interviewer and myself were just on the same wavelength.

Ultimately, I think he was intrigued by the fact that I showed the drive to barge in where I wasn’t necessarily welcome to get something done.

I’m gonna go weld something.

UPDATE:  I just realized that the tshirt I’ve been wearing all day is on backwards.  If I hear back from either of these jobs I won’t wear it any other way.

Ok, two annoying things with my cingular service that I’ve found solutions to recently that I figure others (specifically my immediate family) might appreciate.

1. To delete a message WITHOUT LISTENING TO THE WHOLE MESSAGE, hit 77 (yes, the number 7 twice) while the message is playing.
2. To quickly make your cellphone silent, hold down the pound key. This is only relevant to more recent Samsung phones, but without this trick, you have to turn the damn thing off or navigate complex menus to shut it up.

I hereby promise this is the last time you will ever be in danger if learning something from this website.