Sunday, December 24, 2006

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Watch out for that nog!


Watch out for that nog!
Originally uploaded by pepperedjane.
Well it's just about that time; time for me to pack up and get my body outside of Pittsburgh and back to New Orleans for the holiday time. My decrease in posting activity has been in direct proportion to my increase in end-of-semester actual work activity! Awesome. The highlights of this have been finishing the workshop paper (I submitted it on Friday) and almost finishing my assignments for HOT Compilation. I actually may be finished with the semester as we speak. I am waiting on word as to whether or not my final assignment passed the test script. There was only one test that it failed, and I think I found the bug, so hopefully things will bode well.

Other activity has been similarly. Saturday night there were some holiday parties. You can check some more pictures of one by following the link on the right. Uh, what else? I saw a documentary on East Liberty on Friday night called, "East of Liberty: A Story of Good Intentions." It is a film made by Chris Ivey, a fellow I've met at least two or three times. The film (1 in a 3 part series) was all about the Redevelopment of East Liberty that occured in the 1960s. Apparently, while the city planners had good things in mind for the people of ELib, their plans didn't work out quite that well. The new revitalization that is going on right now (see the East Side development project) is also a big part of the film, but the film takes less of a solid position on whether or not this is a good thing. Naturally, the G-word comes up a lot ("gentrification," which at this point I feel is almost hopelessly loaded) and I find myself just as conflicted as ever as to whether or not it is a good thing.

Anyway, it was worth seeing, but I somehow expected it to feature more music. I wonder how I came to this conclusion?

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Winding it down...

In general, my mood is inversely preportional to the amount of C code that I have to write in a given day. This means that right now, I am in a bad mood, since I am working on my final projects for HOT Compilation (yes, that's the name of the class) and one of them is writing a garbage collector in C. Actually, it's not really all that bad. The algorithm is conceptually pretty simple, it's just the levels of indirection in C that always confuse me. I am always having to stare at expressions like
int** theadp
and think really hard about whether what I need is a pointer or a pointer to a pointer. Anyway, I have gone back to working on my paper, the deadline for which is tomorrow. Make sure to watch The Office tonight. It's an hour long one, and it's about the Christmas party so it should be a good one!

Monday, December 11, 2006

After yesterday's post...

After my long entry yesterday, I think it may have been wishful thinking. I was able to use this reverse-lookup thing to see whose number it was, and while it wasn't in her name, it was registered to someone with the same last name. This, naturally, makes me lean towards the "She just didn't want to call me back" side of things, which is fair enough. I guess in the future I will have more confidence in my number-typing abilities and less confidence in my woman-chatting abilities...  Hey come on, I kid! I kid!

Enough with the self-pity! Back to talking about "My Name is Earl" and Pittsburgh's night life.

Sunday, December 10, 2006

In Which I Lament (first private entry evar!!1!)

(Sorry, I know I don't usually do these "friends-only" entries, but then again I usually don't say anything that I care if people I don't know hear about either.)

Anyway, I am feeling pretty lame right now because I haven't been able to get in touch with this girl. Here's the story morning glory:
On Wednesday night, during an excellent time at the Squirrel Cage, I sat down and talked with this super awesome girl. We talked for a while and had a good time. Finally when some more of her friends came over, I left and later on bought the drinks for their entire table (not sure where that one came from, but I was in a good mood). Anyway, after much prodding from my friends at the table, I went over and got her number, and she was really enthusiastic, it seemed, that we might hang out the next day. Well the next day came, and I called got no answer, left a message. Today the same thing. Now (and this may be the part in the story where you see that I am deluding myself) I am getting the sneaking suspicion that I took down her number incorrectly! Here is the quasi-evidence:
  1. When I call the number, there is nothing in the message indicating that it is her or even a girl's phone. Just the standard robotic voice, "You have reached 412..."
  2. We didn't do the standard, "Let me call you right now so that you have mine too," nor did we do any kind of confirmation that I was taking down the right number. I even had a premonition at the time that it would suck if I didn't get her number correcly.
  3. She seemed a little too enthusiastic to have given me a bogus number, but of course that is hard to read. (And come on, who even does that? Just say 'no' when someone asks for your number!)
Anyway, the other obvious choice is just that she's getting the messages and she doesn't want to hang out. This is an possibility that I can handle. In fact, this would even be better for me that just taking down the wrong number, because at least then I wouldn't have to go through the bullshit of wondering, "what if she thinks I am being an asshole and not calling." The other thing that sucks is that if I ever see her again (a definite possibility in Pittsburgh) I don't know whether to act like, "Hey! I tried to call you I think I got the wrong number!" or if I should not talk to her at all because she blew me off. And of course she certainly won't want to talk to me if she thinks I blew her off!

Anyway, none of this would even be important if she hadn't been really nice/funny/cute etc, and we seemed to get along pretty well. I have briefly considered outlandish options like craigslist "missed connections" or scouring the Internets in hope of finding some record of her existence, but probably I will chalk this up as a lesson to Always make sure you got the correct number!

Okay, end lament session.

Saturday, December 9, 2006

This is we say goodbye in Austria...

Today as I hang around the house and work, I left a DVD on; "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." It's one of my favorite movies from my childhood, and it still holds up pretty well, but man, it sure is corny... There is a lot of really over the top slapstick humor and other stuff.

Anyway,two lines you should remember:
  • "Nazis. I hate these guys." and the irrepressable,
  • "No ticket!"

Somebody's in this Torso

For some reason I was in kind of a sour mood last night. I can never predict these things, but when I am it's usually probably better that I not hang around other people.

But anyway, last night I was hanging around people, and while I didn't really get into any arguments with anyone or anything like that, I was pretty quiet the whole night. We went to get Thai food with KDog and his friend from Germany, along with some other kids from my department. Later on I ended up at the Brillobox, and thanks again to my sour mood, I basically just watched "The Shinning," which was showing on their big HDTV. There was no sound, but being as I have never actually seen it before and you can kinda figure out exactly what's going on by the images, I actually really enjoyed it.

After that, they started showing, "The Best of Andre the Giant," and it became pretty clear that I was just going to keep watching and not talk to anyone...

Today, I've got a long day of ML hacking. Hopefully that will make me feel special and alive.

Thursday, December 7, 2006

Bleh...

Just so that I am in agreement with everyone else; yes it is cold outside.

I just walked home from Squirrel Hill (actually I ran a fair amount of the way just to keep warm) at approx. 12:45am. It is 19 degrees outside, feeling like 5 according to weather.com, and I am officially bitter at life. I really hope I can sleep in late tomorrow...

Tuesday, December 5, 2006

I am a Weeeener!

I just won tickets to a concert off the radio!

WRCT has a show on Tuesdays called the "Brass Band Power-Hour," which plays, of all things, Brass Band music.

This Saturday night, Rebirth Brass Band (New Orleans' finest dance brass music) Ellis Marsellis and some blues singer whose name I forget are playing at the Manchester Craftmen's Guild in a celebration of New Orleans music. This rules, because the tickets are like $40 normally, and I got two. If you want to go see some booty-shakin' New Orleans music, just let me know...

Monday, December 4, 2006

West Philadelphia, Born and Raised

Well I guess it's about time to talk about my crazy weekend in Philadelphia...

So my mom was going on a recruiting trip at the military academies (West Point and Anapolis). As part of that she got some tickets to the Army/Navy football game for me, her and my dad. I agreed that I would go along way back at the beginning of the semester. So it was a little surprising to realize that it was only the week after Thanksgiving.

Anyway, I went out and joined them, and it was a ton of fun. The game was fun. It was neat seeing all of the Army Cadets and Navy Midshipmen, who get to come in from their schools to watch. It was especially wild seeing them all line up and march into the game. It was almost like a movie or something...

It was also impressive to see that there were a bunch of cute girls who are going to be future officers, both in the Army and the Navy. I've never heard man say that they had a thing for women in uniform, but maybe it's time it became a thing...

WordAlso I found out that women make up about 25% percent of the student body at both schools. Which got me thinking... sounds a little bit like CMU, huh? Hey oh! Ba dum dum...

Another neat thing was going out in Philly. We went to a few Belgian bars that were really happening, had great Belgian beers and good food, like mussels and french fries dipped in seasoned mayonaise (even better than it sounds).

The only thing was, it was way crowded. It reminded me of Chicago in that respect, being a very fun place but just a little too much for me. It's definitely one of the things I like about Pittsburgh. Just because a bar is cool here, it doesn't mean that there wil be 1000 people inside.

It's great to be back!

Oh and no, I won't be talking about USC's loss this weekend! It's still too close.