I just got back from a week of taking care of my cousin’s dog, Boscoe. It felt so good to have a creature to take care of and interact with. I often get very lonely (and bored) when I am by myself and have nothing to play with. One of the best things about Boscoe is how much he likes cheese, its a common interest which runs deeper than some interests I have with some of my friends sometimes. It would be really cool to have a puppy around. I have been around dogs all my life, but have been directly responsible for none of them. Boscoe was a first in that area. As I think back on the past week I remember all of the fun, annoyances and just silly shit about it, but im a bit sad because its all over so soon. Watching Boscoe hop in the back of my cousin’s SUV when he returned was a quick reminder that I functioned only as a temporary substitute.
Why use one shelf when you can have three?
In the ceramic studio glaze room I have somehow managed to go from being assigned one shelf, to now using three shelves. I have always had the shelf I was assigned, but a few days ago I claimed another shelf that wasn’t used (a top shelf) for my tall stuff and then today I find that someone who unloaded a bisque kiln has managed to expand me on to the unoccupied area of shelf space beside mine. In the studio itself I’m almost as bad, I have my two original shelves, and then I have claimed another one off to the side for holding all of my tall things. I am starting to feel really bad because of the amount of space I take up in the two rooms. Everyone is supposed to be on 3 shelves total (1 glaze + 2 green), and I have 6 (3 of each). I can’t find a good way to reduce the amount of space that I am using, so I really don’t know what to do about being a shelf hog.
Realizing I’m The Hotest Person On Campus
This morning it was about 60 degrees, and lightly raining when I left home. I opted to wear a tshirt and jeans, no jacket, heavy coat or scarf. Apparently I am the only person who feels that dressing the way I did was warm enough for the day’s weather. Everyone I saw entering campus today had on a coat, or at the very least, a sweater. Am I just totally hot or is everyone cold paranoid? I don’t like feeling like an outcast because I don’t freeze my balls off at 60 degrees.
Barnard Trades Nazi for Super Bitch
Before in Barnard I had to watch for the lab rule Nazi, coming in and verifiying compliance with all posted rules.
This semester, meet the Barnard Lab Super Bitch. She stands about 4ft, 6 inches and is of Asian origin. Her mission in life? To make sure all systems are functioning and showing their login window, and doing it as fast as possible. The she-devil (or is it taz devil?) of the lab swoops in silently, runs down each row of systems, jiggles the mouse and presses the spacebar on every non-occupied system and then leaves just as quickly as she appeared, all without smiling, saying a word to anyone, or appearing to care at all. I would have to give her a 9.5 out of 10 on the borg scale.
Differences Between Public Restrooms and the UNCC Ceramic Studio
The ceramic studio at UNCC is a shared environment of clay creativity, where everyone shares common tools, clay buckets, slurry return and kilns.
as i think of more, ill add to this entry of analogy
Maybe if we ignore it, it will shut up
.. BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP… it is like a constant echolocation becon for the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The new crosswalk technology at UNCC has been running for several weeks now. At first it seemed like the idea might actually catch on, you want to cross a road, so you press a little buttom to get a safe crossing signal, and traffic gets a red light, sounds like a good plan, right? It might work for crossing a busy state highway, or even a city street in uptown Charlotte, but how useful is it for a lightly traveled university road? During the first few weeks of school, people actually pushed the button, waited the amount of time (since the commanding voice behind the button demands “WAIT!”), and then crossed when told it was safe. Now, several weeks later, things have changed, it is very rare that anyone actually use the electronicly assisted crosswalks. It would appear that the students are rejecting this new technology and that we have gone back to the old way of doing things on campus, if a pedestrian is waiting to cross a road, vehicles stop and let them cross, if someone is already in a crosswalk, vehicles wait for them to finish crossing. Similarly, if vehicles are moving on a road, pedestrians tend to wait for the vehicle to pass before entering the crosswalk. It is all very simple and easy to work with, especially since there is a university-wide understanding of what is expected when it comes to pedestrian/vehicle and goose/vehicle interaction. Why use a beeping box of horror when humans already do it better?
Illogical Barcodes
Have you ever stopped to look at a barcode and try to figure out what it is trying to tell you? I never did until recently when I started using a barcode reader at home and realizing how confusing barcodes can be. The worst example would be on books. While most of my books in my personal collection have EAN encoded barcodes, which contain their ISBN number, a large number of books that my mother reads (romance novels, etc) use a UPC encoded barcode, which contains only an arbitrarily assigned number that has no relevance to anything, the same can be said for almost all barcodes on DVDs that are issued ISBNs. I have been trying to add a barcode usage functionality to GITI’s Library area, but I’m finding it hard to just use the most logical identifiers, the ISBNs. I am presently testing a pair of fields, ISBN and “UPC” to try to sort out this issue, but I find myself asking why this task has to be such a pain in the ass. When I wanted more answers I turned to the ISBN coordinating body (www.ISBN.org), and discovered that part of the reason for using UPCs for the barcodes is that they are cheaper. A person can register as a publisher and obtain 10 ISBN numbers for $30 total, but it would cost an additional $25 PER ISBN for rights to the accompanying barcode in EAN format. UPCs aren’t as expensive in bulk, and are not permenant, they can be reassigned at any time with no additional fee, so with UPC, once a book goes out of print, its number can be reassigned to a new book with no additional fee, however, it leaves the original book without a unique identifier. Many stores that sell only books reencode the ISBN into a barcode sticker for their usage, making it possible for them to opperate on a single numbering system. Should I do the same? (If you find how book stores can do this to be confusing, it is, anyone can ENCODE an ISBN into an EAN barcode, but you can only legally attach it to a product if you don’t own the rights to the EAN. To add it into the product itself [print it on the cover] it must be legally registered).
Mastering the Insanity of C++ Compilation
Writing code in C++ is great fun, but that fun can come to a dead halt if you realize you have no good way to compile it. So, what does one do? Well, my first attempt was to connect to a Sun Solaris system to ask it to compile for me, but for some reason CC was being a bitch and wouldn’t read my file and additionally I kept trying to call “cc” instead (cc is for C, not C++). Once getting frustrated in Solaris, I moved to trying to manually call the Visual Studio .NET VC7 compiler… apparently it doesn’t work on the systems in the labs. Next, I tried “calling home” to my Suse Linux machine via SSH, that kinda worked, it compiled and stuff, but I still couldn’t edit the file on a machine that also had access to the file to compile it, so that was a bust. Finally I gave up on the whole “remote compile” thing and went to a Solaris lab, sat down, compiled and was happy.
Since I compiled my little program I have been playing with the compilers a little more and I can now compile in the labs on Solaris, remotely on Linux and I even managed to get a command line compiler set up on my Windows Server 2003 system.
cc – Unix/Linux C compiler
CC – Unix/Linux C++ Compiler
gcc – not sure, but it doesn’t work for me.
g++ – GNU C++ compiler, works on several OSes
Quote for August 23, 2006
If mankind minus one were of one opinion, then mankind is no more justified in silencing the one than the one – if he had the power – would be justified in silencing mankind.
– John Stuart Mill
Frustration with Previous Self
In past few days I have looked at more of my own old code for GITI (Scheduler, PIM, the Interface, whatever) than I ever have before. The things I am finding in my old code are not pleasant. I left myself almost no code comments, there is no spacing, no indention and everything is basicly one giant lump of code. To make things worse, I am discovering that a lot of the identifiers I used for queries previously are not things that will always be unique, therefore there is room to confuse GITI as to what records I am requesting. I did a lot of stupid things in my past before I had any formal CS instruction.
It is difficult being in my old code again, but I am gradually working towards making things sane again, one function and one module at a time. I should have no difficulty getting the education module and its dependancies fully audited, corrected, converted (to v2 standards) and functional before the semester starts.