Kid on the Bus 1: Just spell it.
Kid on the Bus 2: I am!
KOB1: You’re going too slow.
KOB2: You spell something, you spell… “visitation.”
KOB1: “Visitation.” V-I-S-T-I… Shut up! V-I-S-I-T-I-O-N. “Visitation.”
She’s got a shining future in spam.
Category: TARC
For Lent I am giving up my headphones. In addition, I have two places where I can catch a bus home: right out in front of my work building, or a twenty-minute walk away on Bardstown. The buses on Bardstown are faster and more frequent, and I actually enjoy the walk a lot, but I am lazy. I am giving up not making the walk every day. Without my headphones!
The general approach most Catholics I know have toward these forty-day abstentions is a mix of self-denial and self-improvement–I gave up soda several years running, because I like soda, but avoiding it is good for me. This year I’m doing one thing for denial and another for the benefit. It’s object-oriented Lent.
Issues of concern to people who ride TARC a lot
I need to write about the three locally available tabloid-style free newsweeklies in Louisville (LEO, Snitch and Velocity) one of these days. I don’t have time right now. But in case you need a quick way to figure out which is by far the worst and most vapid, I pose this question:
Of LEO, Snitch and Velocity, which would bald-facedly publish the sentence
“Think precious, not pompous: The 36-page books, which sell for $12, teach values and lessons and record special moments, which is exactly the purpose of literature.”
?
(That’s right. Exactly the purpose of literature.)
If you live in Louisville, of course, you’ve already guessed the answer.
From the pokéblog
We watched out the balcony window last night as a huge storm thrashed by, and today there are a lot of downed trees along my bus route. This is remarkable mostly because it’s not a particularly arboreal area–I just got on the bus, and I live downtown.
Update 0810 hrs: Actually, our bus has had to take a detour because of one road-blocking tree, after the world’s most laborious three-point turn. The tree didn’t look all that big, really. My GTA experience suggests that we totally could have taken it.
Update 0825 hrs: Almost had to detour twice more, for trees blocking like a lane and a half. Both of them had pulled down power lines; we just managed to squeeze around. The way it looks up here in the Highlands makes me grateful that our building didn’t blow down last night. There really is a lot of damage.
Post Road Trip Day Something
I cleaned a lot of plates in Berkeley, pumped a lot of pain in the EFF offices. But I never saw the good side of the city… until I played Illuminati with Leonard, Seth and Zack while Sumana danced to songs about shell accounts.
Actually I saw several very neat sides of the city, including BART (which beats the tar out of TARC, I’m afraid, leaving it with one measly C) and Salon Central. I missed out on the party at City Hall, but I sure heard a lot about it. The weather was gorgeous, and I made new friends (Jacob from Alaska is three, and he and I played hide-and-seek from O’Hare to Louisville).
Recent excursions into Powellian hyperbole notwithstanding, I had a freaking great time in California, thanks entirely to my kind and generous hosts. Even though I’ve been up for about 30 hours trying to grab the tail end of all the work I missed, I don’t regret a thing, and I can’t wait to go back. Maria and I spent a good chunk of yesterday (when I should have been, um, grabbing the aforementioned work-tail) making the first real arrangements for this summer’s Calicomicon journey. The Five Lords of the Texas Eagle will sow terror and reap, um, comic books!
Last week, I got out of class and went to the glass-walled bus stop, where somebody had put a shopping cart through one side and left it where it stopped. I wish I’d had my camera, I could have won something. It was a whole story in itself: shelter, cart inside it, pile of safety shards.
Actually that probably wasn’t the whole story, but still.
I smile habitually at people I don’t know, when making eye contact. When I’m tired or it’s raining, it’s like saying “Hey, yeah, you know, all in it together, hang tough.” Otherwise, it’s my version of “Hello! Don’t shoot.”
This morning at the bus stop:
| Harrassed-Looking Woman: |
“Excuse me. You got a cigarette?” |
| Me: | “No, I’m sorry.” |
| (HLW pauses, looks around, looks back) | |
| HLW: | “Makes you happy, doesn’t it? Makes you happy to refuse people.” |
| Me: | “No, I… don’t smoke.” |
| HLW: | “Then why you smiling like that? I’ll tell you why. It’s ’cause you’re an asshole.“ |
Pokéblog
I haven’t written nearly enough lately, but today I was overtaken by the urge: blog! Blog away! Unfortunately, the university computer lab system is tenaciously stupid, so I had no outlet but my pocket Moleskine. Let’s see what we gots in there!
1528 hrs: These two guys are sitting in front of me, one seat apart, using the room’s wireless network and AIM to talk to each other with their laptops. Welcome to technology! Also, no fair, I want one!
It occurs to me that this is an auditorium, and there is no earthly good reason to have a wireless network in it. Except so that all the geeks who live and work in this building could talk to each other with their laptops. Oh.
1557 hrs and every day before my Object-Oriented class, at least five guys and a girl sitting directly behind me spend their between-class break talking about Magic, the card game. They’re all in this same room for the class right before this one, so it’s a solid fifteen minutes of rapid conversation. It approaches argument, as only geeks can argue: insistently, with weak attempts at sarcasm and hyperbole, over incredibly trivial things.
I mean, I played the game. Still do, maybe twice a year, with my very old decks. But LORD, we’re in grad school now! Shut up about your stupid Magic cards!
1620 hrs: The funny thing about watching your professor work in a Windows folder he’s got up on the projector is that you know exactly when he or she created the file he or she is demonstrating. Like, say, 0030 hrs last night.
1742 hrs: There’s a man on the bus a few seats away, wearing large suspenders with a tape measure print. Little does he suspect one of the crucial factors of suspenders: they’re elastic, and of practically no use as a measuring tool! Now, a tape measure belt, that I could understand.
Fun With Iteration
Jon once proposed that Will Smith produce a franchise of songs in the same vein as “Miami,” ranking each city in order of preference:
“Miami, my second home!”
“Los Angeles, my third home!”
“Dublin, my… 467th home.”
More Fun With Iteration
This morning, TARCing in ten minutes late to my advisor appointment, I managed to correctly get his office extension by picking a known number down the hall and trying each subsequent number.
The day went very well, actually. Object-Oriented Software Development is going to be hard and a lot of fun; AI and Algorithms are going to be hard and… well, basically just hard. I managed to buy my books and a lunch and backpack. Oh! That’s a great excuse for a gimmick, because I was actually buying said backpack for Maria, and I had biked to class and had only one way to carry it. That’s right: for a few hours, mine was a metabackpack.
That biking was the first time I’ve ever actually done a real bike workout, and it was pretty cool. (It’s also longer than I thought; now that I’ve scouted the route, I think I’ll mostly TARC it.) At times I felt like an escapee of TRON, whizzing through lightfields with limitless dexterity. At others, such as when I ran into a chain link fence within five minutes of leaving my apartment, I did not. And at still others, I tried to stop, ha ha, whilst riding with a misaligned brake pad and fifty pounds of new textbooks. The other thing I learned today is “inertia.”
Also! I returned Sumana’s call and ended up talking to Leonard, who was gentle and solar-powered, the way I imagine dimetrodons. I babbled a lot, at one point, I think, engaging in extended discourse on the subject of avocados.
Yeah. I lived through one day, and tomorrow it’s already my weekly Hump Day Vacation, wherein I do nothing but hang out with Ian and get excited about secret projects. Also, try to find a longer CAT5 cable so I can get Yellow Puppy out on the interweb. Ph34r! My… vastly underpowered new computer!