mayday
Originally written 05.01.2002.
wasted untold amounts of time writing an e-mail to some silly college journalist who wrote an editorial that tim pointed me to complaining about people who were pretentious name droppers. i think tim gains a great deal of enjoyment from my disdain for such editorials. at least he hooked me up with some cap’n jazz and pedro the lion mp3s (how’s that for name dropping?). later on i read a d.h. lawrence short story that tim told me to read. i’ts called rocking horse winner and apparently there’s an emo band or something that named themselves after the story’s title. i think they’re playing this years krazyfest. and that’s the thing: i like the idea of semi-obscure bands making semi-obscure literary references. it’s like a treasure hunt. it makes life more interesting. can’t remember the last time i got that “wow, that’s interesting” feeling from an mtv band.
been listening to the new weezer release maladroit. don’t see the drastic improvement of the final versions of the songs over the demos that peter was talking about. still, as i said before, i like them in an entertaining, let’s go party and cruise around the township with our windows rolled down sort of way.
it’s mayday and all across europe people are taking to the streets. in edinburgh there was a pro-palestine rally, and on the news wire i saw photos of thousands upon thousands of french left-wingers protesting le pen’s write wing politics. in berlin people got crazy and fucked shit up, and i saw footage of londoners bicycling through the streets to bring rush hour traffic to a grinding halt.
met with one of my lecturers who is overseeing my uml honeynet project. we discussed the project a little bit and he said he wants a 20 page report on the thing. bloody hell. but i need to figure out how to write like that if i ever plan to do anything in academia. it’s pretty impressive over here. the third years are doing a system design project which sounds a bit like the robot project i did as a freshman. couldn’t quite make out what the project is exactly, but i heard the phrases “monolith that emits morris code using ir”, “legos”, and “apache”. sounds rad. most of the fourth years seem to be doing dissertations. at osu, hardly anyone does.
my family must be naturally anal. at least the males. tim’s busy putting lyrics and liner notes into his mp3 files. i didn’t even know you can cram that stuff into id3v2 tags. i’m busy writing ridiculously over-engineered oo perl code to setup my uml honeynets. it sucks, and is probably a waste of time, but once i get started doing something i feel compelled to finish. at least i learned some stuff, like how to pass arguments to the “wanted” subroutine used with file::find. the solution which i found on the perlmonks site is to write a subroutine to generate anonymous subroutines:
$wanted = make_wanted(\&wanted_1, $arg1, $arg2);
find($wanted, '../');
sub wanted_1 {
my $arg1 = shift;
my $arg2 = shift;
...
}
sub make_wanted {
my $wanted= shift; # get the "real" wanted function
my @args= @_; # "freeze" the arguments
my $sub= sub { $wanted->( @args); }; # generate the anon sub
return $sub; # return it
}
i guess you really can do pretty much anything in perl. it’s just not always pretty. i love writing code, because after doing it for a couple of hours i find that i get into a zone where i don’t care about getting food, i don’t care about going home, and i can’t even be bothered to talk with people on im. i just want to get my code to work. and to be honest, i like that feeling. computers can consistently maintain my attention like few other things can, even to the point that it puts people off. it’s just really good to get that feeling when you’re just completely and totally focused on something. i reckon i should go to more of the hackathons that the opensource club at osu does every once in a while.
my own personal hackathon lasted until 8 before i figured i’d better walk back to the flat. again my timing is shit. as i started walking down the road it started pouring. i couldn’t see from the water drops on my glasses, and they kept slipping off my nose anyway. the drops stung my eyes, and i was starting to get a headache either from the constance pounding of the rain or the continuous grimace that was developing on my brow. between fuming over code not working and getting drenched it was less than a fun walk home.
no amount of rain could ruin the night completely though. the mark thomas product is on television. “how i became an arms dealer in eight days.” awesome.
i think that tonight was paddy’s birthday or something because he and all his stupid friends were being quite loud and chucking stuff out of the windows. well, at least it wasn’t our flat this time. paddy is this agricultural student who lives in the building and is basically the type of kid who still hasn’t outgrown the notion of bullying. i remember him getting drunk and trying to pick a fight with an also drunk marco. he kept calling marco a poof and i think marco responded byy saying “oh you’re a great wanker”. for some reason that just incensed him. it would have been hilarious if i hadn’t been worried that someone was about to get trashed. so we all do these paddy impressions where we grunt and talk like cavemen and it’s totally juvenile but completely hilarious. we’ve been throwing around the idea of writing a sit-com pilot around paddy’s life.