narcissism and the greater good

Earthworms in puddles
Hapless victims of giants
But why were they there?

Almost every day this week it rained. It made for a fairly miserable time getting to class with a laptop, but it did give nice spans of time to ponder the great mysteries of life, like why the hell earthworms crawl across cement? I brought this up in conversation with a friend of mine. "You know, if you're an earthworm, and you were to find something that you couldn't dig through, why on earth (!) would you continue across it? It seems ridiculous!"

He commented, in a sarcasm-about-wisdom-hiding-actual-wisdom tone, that if no earthworms had done it, then they would only be in one spot. They are fighting for the greater good! Or perhaps they are emo earthworms. But the first sounds much more noble.

	Christopher Columbus worm
	Amelia Earhart worm

On the other hand, stories in Time and Newsweek recently began insisting that humans aren't really tending towards that sort of commitment to the species at large; we're becoming more and more enthralled with ourselves. Well, not humans in general, but the US, at least, is suffering from a "narcissism epidemic." Interesting. I wonder if all that teaching that little kids get about being a beautiful and unique snowflake is best summed up by Chuck Palahniuk: You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.

Well, maybe putting it so bluntly isn't the right thing, either, but I can certainly see where psychologists might get inklings that people, especially my age, might be getting a bit big-headed. I have borne witness to many a student spending hours grooming his or her Facebook profile page to make it attractive to, you know, anyone who might visit. Such effort! And the fact that some employers and graduate schools now use Facebook to help make decisions on candidates sort of encourages that, too. I dunno... I'm not sure that I can subscribe to that. I know that I spend too much time on Facebook after my lenten resolution ended, but I think I'm doing a better job than a lot of people. Anyway, it's time for adventure. I have to put off thinking about this atomic theory paper for as long as possible.

germany!

I can't adventure
Enough during school, but in
The summer? For sure!

Just this morning I received an email from the DAAD-RISE program that I applied to many moons ago, and they told me that I've been accepted as an intern for the summer! That means that I'll be heading to Germany in mid-May and coming back stateside in mid-August. The work will be at a university in Darmstadt, a town (or city?) just outside Frankfurt. I have lots of research to do before I get there, though; I don't know the first thing about work visas or apartment-hunting in other countries or train passes or driving internationally or... well, the list goes on.

Anyway, I'm sure that I'll be posting more about that as summer approaches. Right now I've got some PL homework to do. *sigh*

canadia parte deux

White lands of the North,
But full of warm things! And, of
Course, of injuries.

I get to see Evan this weekend! Super exciting! It was a pretty long flight to get here, though. Mostly because of a couple hours spent in O'Hare waiting for my other plane to board. I was bored, so I decided to explore. Did you know that O'Hare has a children's museum in it?? It was pretty crazy. I also spent upwards of an hour walking around, and I made it from end to end in that time, but I skipped, like, 4 terminals. They go from A to L or something, and each one is huge.

Irrespective of that, I'm here! Evan's little apartment is pretty nice, although it seems his roommate has made himself scarce for the weekend. :P When I got here, Evan took me out to try poutine, which is some crazy dish that is, both basically and exactly, French fries + gravy + cheese curds. Hmm.

This place is interesting; Ottawa is right on the border of two provinces, Quebec and Ontario. The drinking age is different in these two provinces, so students from the other side like to come over here to drink a year younger. There are a lot of signs at bars detailing that Ontario residents aren't permitted entry unless they are 19.

Let's see, what've we done so far, other than eat poutine... well, this weekend in Ottawa is Winterlude, an ice/snow/winter festival thing. The city sets up ice sculpting contests, ice slides (super fun), fire and ice shows... plus the Rideau canal is frozen over and skateable, so we did that. It's odd to see, like, vendors and stuff just parked out on a frozen canal. We got a beaver tail, too, which is more or less an elephant ear, but tastier and in more flavours! We got garlic and cheese. Mmmmmm. Oh, and I, of course, injured myself ice skating. The canal ice was weird. Its surface was really irregular, I guess due to the fact that there was an unseasonable warm spell this week. So my figure skates' little teeth thingies caught on one of the flaws, and down I went. Onto my knee. I'm reasonably certain that it fared better than Georgia's knee, haha, but it still kinda hurts and is a bit swollen. :( But, you know what? It was totally worth it. Oh, and some random guy visiting from Toronto took our picture. I gave him my email address, so maybe he'll have sent it to me by later today and I can put it up.

For dinner yesterday, we whipped up a dericious feast. I had brought some drunken goat cheese with me, so we had that, and we had also some fresh homemade bread, artichoke hearts, FECKING TASTY bean sprout salad, tuna salad, currants, and local brews. Yum! Every adventure with Evan seems to turn into a food adventure, inexplicably.

But that wasn't all, of course! Evan of all people would be the one to find a Valentine's Day rave for us to attend. The tickets for it were pretty sweet: Invader Zim-themed! Hahaha. So we got all dolled up and went out to the club. It was pretty sweet. :3

Well, maybe that's all. Probably not. There's still today, and we're still planning some adventuring for later. It's going to be sad to go back to Bloomington, especially since I have a midterm, like, 23 hours from now. Uck.

But it's a good weekend. :D

basically awesome

Cooking at last! And

I get to see Georgia!  What

A term it will be!

It's so much more awesome already.  I actually get to see the girl I'm living with!  Mary's still pretty nonpresent, but Georgia and I have been spending a lot of time together cooking, computering, homeworking, and generally hanging out.  Tonight we're off to a formal, hooray!

Not to mention the other awesomenesses: the fact that I actually get to see my own house during daylight hours is crazy.  And it isn't just because the days are getting longer!  Sean's going to have ridiculous amounts of cave trips and other adventures this term, I think, since it's his last before he jets off to grad school who-knows-where.  Last night we took a trip to a cave just west of town that didn't really have nice rock formations (people had been through and destroyed them), but in the entrance where it was below freezing there were some amazing ice formations.  I think he'll be putting up those pictures later; I'll post a link if I remember to.  And Carlo seems excited to find some adventures, too.  A trip to the Creationist museum may be in store.  I can't wait to see a mural of people riding on velociraptors.

These classes are pretty sweet, too.  I wish I had learned Scheme the right way the first time; I resented it until this semester, really.  But now that I see how just nice it is, I can't help but be in love.  Damnit, Dylan, you were right.   :s

Anyway, I'm off to prepare!  My first real dressing-up with short hair!  :D

delay

Too much to do, and

So little time for blogging.

I'll have to make due.

Well, it's been a really long time since I wrote anything on here, but that's okay, haha.  I've been adventuring!  The Canadians came, and we went quarry jumping, crazy caving (thanks to Mr. Sean Lewis for setting up a ridiculous trip :D), wandering around Bloomington... we also cooked a massive (I mean massive enough that I couldn't finish all the leftovers before they went bad) Thanksgiving dinner for Canadian Thanksgiving and watched War Games.  So now I've finally seen it!

I've taken midterms, and I realized that different departments function differently.  Up til now I've been doing all CS stuff, mainly, and not a lot of math, but I guess the Math department likes to kill souls.  I know that I got a 73 on my Modern Algebra midterm, but that was actually pretty good compared to what other people got.  This leads me to think that there is going to be some kind of grand, happiness-inducing curve at the end of the semester.  :3  It's definitely stressful to try to think about that grade, though.  But it's my favorite class!  Augh!

Also, I've been doing CC stuff way too much.  It's hard to manage my time when I spend 6 hours at the fricking data center in one night.  Ridiculous.  But it's sort of cool to learn how to install and optimize operating systems.  I'd actually never installed Linux before... *ashamed face*  But now I have!

The times that I see my roommates are becoming even fewer and farther between; it's sad.  But it looks like my course schedule next semester should permit many more shenanigans.  Woot!  I actually am allowed to register for classes starting today, so I think I'm going to get on that.

One of the projects I'm working on for this semester is called Fluency, and it can be tested out at this webpage.  It's a pretty neat idea; a GUI builder for people who don't know how to program.  The code that underlies it is a pretty massive mess.  I started out by improving the text areas (I just did that last night), and I'm terrified to death to try to mess with all the Null Pointer Exceptions that pop up in it.  But the project should be fun, for sure!

Also... umm... hmm... oh!  I changed my mind on what I want to be for Halloween.  I'm going to be the Silk Spectre from Watchmen.  I'm pretty excited about it.  I think I made this decision mainly because I got invited to a Heroes and Villains birthday party, and Daphne just doesn't really cut it as a superhero, haha.  :)  So that's going to be my project this afternoon.

This weekend is Homecoming, and I think it's going to be another football game that I don't go to.  Oh well.  I'll get to one eventually.  I'm pretty excited about going rappelling tomorrow, though, in stead of going to the game.  Wewt!

Oh!  And elections!  I'm TEH PSYCHED about the elections.  I had my mom buy me a sweet shirt recently: Bigfoot-Nessie 08--Change you can believe in!  ^____^

I'll try to be more diligent about writing this in the future, but no promises!  It's sort of fun to try to remember everything I've been up to, anyway.  Sort of.  :P

adventure

Now sore and happy,

After such adventuring,

How can I slow down?

It's been a heckuva weekend.  Friday Ben and I worked on our SuperPong game for Rawlins, which was a lot of fun.  Had some pizza and brownies (care of his wife... and they were delicious!), chunked out some Swing stuff...  It's coming along great.  And it looks like that's going to be my only hard class.  Granted, it will be hella hard, but that's okay, eh?

A couple things I learned about Java during the course of this exercise:

threads are easy.  Just make sure you don't run them til after you paint your console for the first time.

dimensions are dumb.  For whatever reason, swing makes an applet that doesn't actually conform to the dimensions you give it.  We had to put in corrections of about 5 pixels for the sides and bottom (more for the top) to ensure that the paddles and ball in our game wouldn't run off into invisible parts of the screen.

arraylists are mega-useful.  Except when you compare a sprite with itself.  We turned on clipping in our game (so that the ball could, you know, hit the paddles), and instead of flying anywhere, the ball just vibrated in the middle of the screen.  We were like, "wow, what the hell is it doing?" for a couple minutes before we realized that it was just hitting itself every clock cycle.  D'oh.

defaults are good.  We're storing all our correction and size and initial position and whatever variables in a Defaults file in the package, which makes it easy to change them.  But, of course, you already knew that.

Anyway, then I hung out with Nick and Chris, and they fixed my bike!  W00t!  Well, by "fixed my bike" what I mean is that they put my bike's good parts onto Venus's bike.  Hers was still in terrible shape from the flood, so we replaced the chain and wheels and cleaned it up a bit.  I got a bike chain bracelet out of the whole thing, which makes me feel pretty cool.  Then we played some Wii and tried to watch Casablanca, but all fell asleep (most likely because it was about 1:00am when we started it).

Saturday I made sushi for lunch.  It was delicious!  And so easy to make, too.  I screwed up a little, though, and my sushi didn't hold together as well as it could've because I kept thinking that my hands were sufficiently wet that the rice wouldn't stick to them when they... weren't.  Yeah.  Hands wet = good.  And I need to figure out the optimal way of cutting the fish so that the slices are a little prettier.

After sushi, Jeff, Georgia, and I went to a parkour event at IU.  That was pretty sweet.  I was able to do more things than I thought I'd be able to, which was a pleasant surprise.  I gotta work on my triceps, though, so's I can do pullups and stuff.  Uii.  But, um, I also learned the difference betweek parkour and free running (somehow I never learned this over the summer with Evan?): I guess that parkour is all about efficiency in getting from point A to point B and free running is more about "self-expression".  It's sort of like parkour for showoffs.  :P

Then was some marathon training with Georgia, which was tiring, to say the least.  I got in an unbelievable amount of exercise yesterday.  After running 3 miles with her, I lifted some weights, then walked home, found Evan online (yay!), finally saw his pink hair pictures, then packed up again and biked over to Kam's for his housewarming party.  It was pretty sweet.  All my AIs from CS were there.  They were funny drunks.  :P

Today should finally bring a watching of War Games, which I'm excited about.  Unfortunately, it will also bring some reading and some code cleanup.  I can hardly motivate myself to do that kind of mundane stuff after all my excitements this weekend.  :\