Archive for February, 2005

Tired. ~_~

I hereby declare VBScript as evil. It took me forever to debug a beyond simple few lines of code in an ASP file because of a typo. With any reasonable language, the compiler/interpreter would have complained about me using an undeclared variable, and I would have corrected the typo, right away. Anyways, I discovered you can actually force it to do this, but it should do this by default! It was hard enough finding an editor that would give me highlighting for ASP files… I guess that’s not such a common thing on Linux. In fact, the only editor I found that would do it is Scite – it’s actually quite a nice multi-platform editor.

I saw The Grudge. If you like horror movies, this one was excellent. I even watched all the extras. :D

Saw Shirley had a progress report of sorts up, so…. Here’s my progress report, for the upcoming week of hell:

  • Physics Midterm – Wednesday – 20% done – (Worth 10%)
  • Math Midterm – Wednesday – 30% done – (Worth 25%)
  • Algorithms Assignment – Thursday – -40% (yes, that’s negative) – (Worth ~3%)
  • eCommerce Assignment – Friday – 100% – (Worth 10%)
  • Hours of sleep I got last night: Zero – (Worth a lot!)

Yep. As usual, my priorities are backwards. :-|

Timing is everything

Ever since I discovered LugRadio, I’ve been religiously downloading low-quality mp3s on my Zaurus and listening to them on the bus. Oddly enough, www.lugradio.org seems to be down, of late. I’ve had to find what I can on difficult-to-find-and-incomplete mirrors. Anyways, I was on the bus, listening to another great episode of LugRadio finish up, and the bus stops. It’s my stop, so I get up and walk to the doors. The lugradio guys finish the episode by saying their usual “bye” and “thanks for listening.” I step down on the stair to open the doors. They open and at just the most perfect moment, Too Flute by St Germain starts up. Jesus, it was like a fucking movie. And I must say it’s a wicked feeling, moving to your own soundtrack. It gave me a little rush and got me pumped to come home and eat my dinner. Sadly, it was Friday night, and I was getting home from school at around 12am… it’s not like I was out having a life, or anything.

In the library…

As fate would have it, the first math quiz/test that I’ve actually been prepared for in maybe 2 or 3 years was cancelled due to a fire alarm, and no time left in the class. I suppose it doesn’t really matter that much, as the studying I did will pay off eventually, anyways. The (e-)commerce is going alright; a little more work than I expected, but no problems. Now I just have to pull my pants up in my other two courses: physics and algorithms. And I’d better do it fast, as I’ve got 3 midterms in 2 days, next week. Yay.

John pointed out something that all the Gifu interns already knew: Sanyo employees have to buy Sanyo products. Yeah, they have a sign about this in the company cafeteria. Of course, I couldn’t read this sign (we all know my Japanese is only good enough to impress 4 year olds and 74+ year olds), but when somebody asked one of our coworkers about it, they explained it. Every Sanyo employee has a quota of Sanyo products that they must purchase, annually. Of course, coming from an open minded Canadian perspective, I was blown away! They even have to bring in a receipt! I believe that the somebody who explained this whole thing was Ujisan, who is probably the only actual Japanese employee that has no problem (and seems to enjoy) dishing out the dirt on her employer. Actually, she’s probably the only Sanyo employee that the interns could actually get a straight answer from. It’ll be cool when she comes out and visits!

Listened to some LUGRadio, for the first time. My impressions? Oh man! I love this stuff! ::mrgreen:: It’s a group of 4 British Linux geeks that sit around and shoot the shit about the latest developments in OSS and stuff. And it’s not nearly as lame as that sounds, or what I’d expect. I wanna go have a drink with these guys! (Yeah, I’d even drink beer…). The only problem is, because it’s listening to a conversation, it’s pretty hard to do much else while listening to them. So I came up with a great idea: I can listen to them on the bus! Yes, it’s my idea; I invented it. Mine. What a good way to pass the time. In fact, right now, I’m sitting in a library at school, waiting for a couple MP3s to finish being transferred to my Zaurus over terribly slow USB 1.1. Should make for a more interesting ride home. :D Apparently, there’s another radio show of similar nature, The Linux Show. Haven’t checked that one out yet. If you try LUGRadio, the later shows are much better quality than the earlier ones. Ironically, they’re made on Windows PCs… :o

Oh, and I heard this song on one of the shows. Pretty funny. ESR writes and sings! (Other versions available.)

UPDATE: I’ve listened to a bit of The Linux Show, and they’re much more what you’d expect, i.e. geeky. “I’m what you’d call a hard-core gamer, and that’s really what’s holding me back from trying Linux.” At the same time, it seems way more noobish. I’d definitely go with the Brits, on this one.

Texas Holdem got smarter

Well, all had been relatively peaceful since I put up that manditory code entry field; no more poker comment spam. But just yesterday, I noticed a couple trickle in. I guess Mr Texas Holdem got a bot that keeps trying all possibilities. At least the condition isn’t as bad as it was before… I don’t think I’m gonna do anything more in the immediate future to prevent this comment spam. I received 20 comment spam over the span of about 8 hours. This is much better than the 60-80 I’d receive in about 5 minutes. They’re easy to delete, I just don’t like having my blog defaced by them… it’s like walking up to someone’s cabin in the countryside and spray-painting things like, for a good time, call…. all over it. Despite the fact that I actually want to get together and play some poker with my friends, Mr Texas Holdem can roll over and die. Please?

So, if it’s not clear:

Do not click on any links to some stupid fucking online poker!.. unless I tell you to, of course.