Almost there...

I am almost finished. I've taken both CS finals (312 and 340), my guitar final, and my Old Testament final. Thanks to a merciful professor I have a summer to complete the projects that I got _very_ far behind on when I got sick.

But this darn Physical Science final won't go away by itself. It's funny. A class that under normal circumstances I would ace easily (I got 98 on the first midterm, before I got sick), consequently turned into the class that I quit going to in order to not get any farther behind in my (more important) CS classes (since you can use your final exam score as your grade in the class).

I've read half a semester worth of lecture slides tonight. I'll probably get through most of the second half before I go to bed. Tomorrow I'll be reading the book. And when I say, "reading the book", I mean the whole book. 36 chapters. And then taking the final. What should have been one of the easiest A's of my life has turned into, "This will take a miracle, and I'll take whatever I can get."

Ah the wonderful life of a student. bleh.

Not-so-random thought Thursday:

I have 5 projects.

I have 5 days.
I have to work in Windows.
That is not my amused face.

The Lunch of Champions

Sometimes when Nicole has stuff to do I get to stay on campus all day. This isn't necessarily a bad thing because at my office or in the CS laptop lab I have an extra monitor to plug in to and I can get lots done with few interruptions. The only problem is that it sometimes gets a little hungry, because the only food I keep at my office these days is some oatmeal that I have for breakfast when I work in the mornings on Tues. and Thurs.

Enter the economics of choosing a cheap, filling lunch that can provide enough calories to last several hours and taste good enough that I want to eat it. If you believe everything you see on TV, a Snickers bar is the perfect answer, except for two problems. First, I can't stand nuts, or any food that contains them. Second, at $0.65 or so the cost/calorie ratio, while not too bad, is literally blown out of the water by the "real" lunch of coding champions: The Granny B's pink sugar cookie.

Your average candy bar has a calorie content of between 150 and 200, so we'll say the average is around 175. at $0.65, that's about 2.7 calories per cent. Now some of you will look at that wonderful pink sugar cookie's package and say, "That's only 113 calories." And that would be because you forgot to look at the serving size: 1/4 cookie. That's right, baby: 452 delicious calories in that marvel of baking ingenuity. At $0.75 in the bookstore, or $0.80 in the vending machines here on campus you have either 6 cents per calorie or 5.65 cents per calorie, respectively.

Add to that a bottle of delicious whole milk (a delicacy I don't get to enjoy much these days), and you have a 602 calorie lunch (enough fuel for about 6-7 hours of programming before I start to get hungry again) for a grand total of $1.50.

I know some of you (Nicole?) are rolling your eyes right about now, but if you can find me a better tasting, healthy lunch that I can get anywhere on campus for $1.50, I'll eat that instead.

Where have all the "real" hackers gone?

A real hacker is a special kind of person. I'm not talking about the idiot crackers and script-kiddies that break in to networks and who turn your neighboor's great-aunt's computer into a spyware-infested, slower-than-cold-tar bot-net slave. While I'm not in the same hacking universe as a "real" hacker (people like Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Steve Wozniak, etc...), I like to think of myself as a budding hacker. If I want to learn about something, I start digging through the documentation, source code, whatever I can find. When I see something cool in a website, I'll take a look at the source and see if I can figure out how it works. When I discovered an un-implemented feature in the port of my favorite text editor to Apple's Cocoa Framework, I started going through the source to find where I need to add the code that will make it work. (this got side-shelved by the demands of school, but I'll finish it off this summer)

Part of this is a natural curiosity for how things work. Part of it is the fact that I now have the knowledge to make some semblance of sanity of quite a lot of the 1's and 0's that make the world run these days (given time to look through it).

Given this curiosity, when I got to work today to see everyone gathered around my buddy's computer, I naturally came over to see what was going on. Much to my surprise, it turns out that some lazy-assed idiot has cloned Justin's extremely slick, one-of-a-kind website. (trust me, it actually _is_ one-of-a-kind). Not cloned as in copied the source code, modified it so it's the same but different. Not cloned as in copied the whole thing to his own server and replaced images, blurbs, etc. with his own material. Cloned as in sucking the content off of Justin's server, changing the font, and translating the blurbs to Spanish. Cloned as in using the exact same javascript file from its location on Justin's server. Justin is in the middle of some "minor retaliation", so don't be surprised if there is a little "addition" to the slacker's page if you go look at it. And don't be surprised, Mr. Sebastian Lazy-pants if your web presence takes a turn for the worse... There's an amusing little anecdote to this here.

What the heck? What ever happened to, "gee, I wonder how that works...", or, "hmm, I wonder what I could do with that..." ???? If you're going to go through the trouble of copy/cloning somebody's work, it's not that much trouble to learn how it works and make it your own, with a little note saying, "Thanks to Justin for the ideas".

I just can't understand that way of thinking...