Hmmmm, it’s been almost 2 months now. Guess I’m due.
I wrote this a month ago.
Clare left, and it was sad. Then I went up to Dad’s house for Sarah’s baby shower, and realized that $Distance_To_Dad == ($Distance_To_Clare)/3 so I called and switched with someone (who ended up calling in sick…) to get another day off, and Clare and I met in beautiful (I guess…) Paso Robles and spent the night. We went out to dinner, watched a The Shawshank Redemption, and just enjoyed holding each other for a while. In the morning we got up, went to brunch at Denny’s, talked for a while longer, and drove back home. At this point I should say that Clare is one of the most incredible people I’ve ever met, and I haven’t been this happy in a long, long, long time, if ever. I dunno, life is just really up right now, and I think that she has more to do with it than she realizes. And she’s pretty. The baby shower itself was good fun, too… it was nice seeing dad again.
Speaking of Dad, he’s working on this new p2p program, written in Visual Basic. It’s pretty nifty for sharing files directly with another person (more than one in the future) and he’s constantly working on it. If you wanna mess with it, I’ve been given permission to pass it around, so long as it doesn’t get passed further than that. It’s been pretty cool, he calls me a few times a week and he bounces ideas off me, and I give him some. We work out how to get certain functions and ideas to work together. It’s fun working on a program with someone, even if it’s not necesarily my project.
speaking of programming, school (since, you know, it seems all I ever do for school this semester is code) is going good… omfgwtfbbq. There’s apparently vibrating condoms. Sorry, listening to loveline. Where was I? Oh yeah. Programming.
End previously written entry
Programming is pretty cool… At least, C++ is. I really like the way my C++ class is taught. It falls perfectly between just teaching theory and praticalality. Tony teaches us everything, even semi-obscure concepts because we’ll probably see them in the industry, but tells us why they aren’t usually good ideas. Our assignments are usually extremely practical (Use a linked list to write a program that reads and formats input from a file, and then present this data as an inventory management program, where the use can add, search or delete from the list. Next assignment, do the same thing, but use Classes. Beautiful.) Anyway, it’s a great way to teach. I’ve run into a couple snags – The class is taught on WindowsXP using MSVisual Studio. This was new to me, the only thing I’d ever done with Visual Studio is VisualBasic development, and C++ is nothing like VB. The only C++ development I’ve ever done was on the Linux commandline, using a good old text editor and GCC. Well, one of the snags I ran into is this… In the lab, they have Visual Studio 6.0 (circa 1998) and VS “.Net” (circa 2002?). I have VS6 at home, so I decided I’d just do my labs in that. At that point, it looked like the class was going to be taught specifically around VS (which bummed me out, but thankfully turned out to not be the case). Well, like any piece of MS software, it decided to go against the standards and include a few good solid bugs. One of which my program was suffering from. I struggled with this code for about a week before I asked Tony and he pointed that out. We tried the code in VS.Net and it worked. Well, I don’t have .Net at home, and I can’t keep using VS6 for my projects if its buggy, so…. I switched back to using make, vi/kate, and g++ on Linux. Works just fine for me *shrug*.
My other (online, blackboard) programming class is not quite so cool… Not quite so cool at all. Windows API Programming with C. Hardcover textbook that’s almost 1500 pages. Ugh. “Hello World” is almost 100 lines of code, some of it downright unintelligible. “Oh well”, I figured, “I guess I’ll learn something.” Ha. Haha. Chris, remember taking Visual Studio with Bajic? It’s that retarded. Except this guy barely speaks English. These assignments are dumb… not at all practical like my C++ class. These are more like, “Here’s a 200 line project copied directly from the book, figure out how to change the icon, the mouse cursor, and the background”. Except like I said, poor english. So maybe more like: “I have provide assignment3 for you, you needs must change n. icon file n. mouse n. bground color to black.” (…who uses “n” as a bullet point?) It’s terrible, but I’ve gotten A’s on everything so far with the exception of an assignment that was due on the same day as another assignment – his blackboard announcements are difficult to understand, at best. For a while I was even more greatly angered because, obviously, I’d have to be *in* Windows to write and test code for Windows, right? Ahhh… but then I found sweet, sweet VMWare. It’s a nifty piece of software that emulates PC architecture, runs on Windows and Linux and you can install other PC operating systems on it… I installed Win2k on it, and the VisualStudio and I can do all my development in Windows without having to reboot, its great. It’s saved my sanity, I’m sure.
I’ve got lots more to tell (I mean, it *has* been 2 months…) but it’s almost 2:30 in the morning, so stories of my adventures in Berkeley, and all the other fun stuff I’ve found online lately will simply have to wait til tomorrow.
“Sometimes lies are more dependable than the truth.” – Ender, Ender’s Game
Your HARE DAEMON represents your passive,
kindhearted, and honorable nature. Though you
are occasionally shy with new people, friends
admire your unshakable tranquility, even in the
face of chaos.
What Animal Would Your Daemon Settle As?
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