Anthony's Pitas Page

There must be some level of blood alcohol that gets me past "nervous-stupid" but doesn't quite get me into "genuinely stupid." I need to find that point and remain there at all times.

Well, crap. Apparently everyone can read stuff you put on the Internet. Who knew?

A round of quickies (from the last 2-3 weeks, I started writing then forgot to finish):

• First, an apology for the shoddy math in the last post. While I stand behind my choice of functions (at least in terms of shape), the area between the curves is utterly meaningless. Really, leftovers = guests-(guests^0.5)).
• Valentine's Day has been and gone. I used to buy flowers and dinner. This year, I bought a hard drive. I hope it shows up this week. (EDIT: It did.) I was much, much less depressed than I expected to be. Thanks, Jaimee. Also, my sister sent me the best card I have ever received. Maybe a scan will be forthcoming.
• For the finest in contrast between beauty and squalor, check out the winter sunset on a clear day over Mullins Center yellow lot. It's the only thing about the world outside that's given me much of a lift recently because it's been so damned cold.
• I'm feeling tired again, which is discouraging when I'm barely 3 weeks into the semester. I really just have to keep holding out for summer break, even though I have no plans. I had better get some work done tomorrow; I've been lounging all weekend.
• Mike and Randi are going to England over spring break. I've never done anything over break, and my undergrad career is nearing its close. I feel like I should come up with something. Mike tossed around the idea of potential travel this summer, but for some reason the idea of traveling around without a girlfriend makes me very depressed. We'll see how it works out.
• I have an interview with Microsoft Thursday afternoon. If it goes well, I'll get to interview out in Redmond sometime next month. If THAT goes well, I'm going to be on the other side of the country this summer. Here's hoping.
• The INSIDE of my windshield was covered with frost this morning. I didn't know they did that. It turns out that ice scrapers really aren't designed to work on concave surfaces.

• Installing Gentoo Linux has been an interesting experience. I've got a running system now, but I'd be hard-pressed to recommend it to anyone without a pretty fast processor. The gimmick behind Gentoo is that it compiles everything from downloaded source right on your machine, so it's theoretically better tuned to your hardware (and particular device/codec/etc. support wishes) than a stock binary package. It turns out that compiling KDE took longer than everything in the entire base system, including the amount of time it took me to figure out that GRUB is a really, really shitty bootloader.

  Gentoo is interesting in that it has no install script whatsoever. Everything has to be done manually, from mounting your own partitions in the exact right place to chrooting your environment to continue with the install (because the REAL root for the install is the tmpfs filesystem loaded from the CD...), to... I think I got a lot out of it. It may replace Slackware as my recommended "learn about Linux" distro, but I wouldn't want to install it on another machine of my own anytime soon.

• Mr. Rogers is dead. Mr. Rogers, staple of children's television, cardigan model, prince of sharing, fish caretaker, the man who showed me the magic of a prism for the first time and still managed to remain cool enough to have a traffic light in his kitchen and a fantasy land behind his living room wall. Rest in peace.

Ladies and gentlemen, I submit the following for your approval:

Note that

leftovers =(3*guests²-4*guests^1.5+1)/6

is not defined for guests < 1 (obviously!).

It seems like there ought to be a potentially humorous way to tie this into permutations due to people talking to each other, but I can't come up with anything at the moment.

A bunch of tidbits.

• I was at Wal-Mart today. The kid in front of me got carded for buying Asheron's Call 2. Not only that, but he couldn't produce ID with his birth date on it, and when the cashier finally just let him have it and he went to pay, his debit card didn't authenticate properly (maxed out) so he had to pay with another card. Something tells me his financial and personal future aren't looking too good.
• A flock of wild turkeys crossed the road in front of my car on the way home from campus. I don't know if there's a superstition about that. I should invent one.
• I will never install Windows 98 on anyone's machine ever again, particularly one with a recent motherboard with integrated components (video, audio, Ethernet). Nothing works properly with it anymore, and people don't bother to support their hardware with drivers written for it. I fixed two severely broken computers in the last WEEK by moving them to Windows 2000 instead.
• Either I need to get more work done when I'm awake, or I need to invent some way of doing work in my sleep. I'm not getting so much sleep and I'm STILL not getting much of anything done. I think the Internet is really, really bad for you.
• I got into the grad-level seminar I was trying to get into, involving writing programs for the Sharp Zaurus. It's kinda neat because it's based on Linux, but I almost wish they had a proprietary SDK for the damn thing instead. Open-source projects are notorious for being rife with weird dependencies from multiple sources, and one downed site in the chain of ass-slow foreign webservers is all it takes for me not to be able to install the one lonely application I spent half an hour downloading 20 individual support packages for. Furthermore, screw them for not including SSL support in their shipping email client. Would it have been so hard?
• Speaking of the Zaurus, its package manager sucks. The only error message the thing has is "ipkg says something went wrong. Sorry." Are they kidding? If you're going to make something that utterly useless for fixing problems, you ought to at least make it funny so the user has something to think about other than how much he wants to break your skull.
• Since I seem to have gone into rant mode, why don't I mention the guy who's in a couple of my compsci classes? He appears to be in his mid-to-late thirties, and makes a big fuss about how he's a "nontraditional student" at every opportunity. He makes unfunny jokes as often as possible. Apparently he wedged himself in front of my housemate in line to talk to the TA about how he was a nontraditional student. He's in two of my classes, one I'm taking and one I'm a TA for. I caught him regurgitating (completely incorrectly, I might add) something I said in the former class in the latter class. I could almost see him twitching with joy at how clever he was to know that. It almost disappoints me that I don't know his name, because I'm going to end up giving him a fair shake in the audition for the class I'm TAing. There haven't been many times in my life where I've really wanted to cause the downfall of another person. It's a weird feeling.
• I'm going to grad school. This places at least another year between me and the real world, with its crappy job market and inevitable daily grind. It's strange; I want to write software for a living, but I'm really not looking forward to going into an environment where work is for its own sake and not to really gain any real understanding from it or advance knowledge or whatever. Oh, well. Hopefully by the time I'm through with my Master's, companies will actually want to hire computer programmers again.
• My house has a pimpin' new room. We moved our TV, books, movies, and video games into it. We're picking up another housemate, too. He's a good guy. I'm looking forward to it.

I was unable to resolve either of these into a full idea, so here are two fragments that have been kicking around in my head.

Night Streets

Not every entry in this blog is going to be about driving; it's just that I've been doing a lot of it lately. Yesterday I drove from home to Sunderland to visit Jaimee, Dave, and Jess. I didn't leave until around 5:30 from here, so I ended up at the apartment around 7:45. The events of the night aren't so interesting: movie, TV, diner.

The plan for yesterday was to go, visit, and come home without staying over. I was supposed to go to Braintree today to pick up my new glasses, so I needed to be back. Of course, they weren't done on schedule, so I wasted my effort. I expected to be making the trip somewhat earlier in the day. By the time we were done at the diner, it was nearly 2:30. I returned Jaimee and Dave to their apartment.

"Are you sure you'll be ok to drive? You can crash here if you want."

No, I'm not.

"Yep, I'll be fine."

And so I headed for home.

Driving at night is a strange thing. After a certain hour of the morning, encounters with other cars are rare. You find yourself wondering where they're going, and why they're doing it at such an ungodly time of day. Also, the look of everything distorts slightly in the limited reach of your headlights. Roads bend differently than you remember them, and sometimes you fail to interpolate properly given the small piece of the road you can see and a couple lights in the distance.

The effect is magnified when you've been awake for a long time. Hovering at the edge of consciousness in a speeding vehicle is definitely not a good thing, but it's kind of interesting. There's something really low-level that kicks in to keep you on the road, whether by hugging the lane marker or following the cars in front of you. Perception skews; the motion of a lane marker disappearing from vision becomes the skittering of a living thing. The entire affair becomes a frightening ride where you're more a passenger than in control.

Dangerous stuff. It's not too surprising how many accidents are blamed on driver fatigue every year. The Australian Transport Accident Commission blames between 20% and 30% of traffic accidents on driver fatigue, and cites a more solid 30% of severe single-car crashes. (Source) I've driven a few times when I was definitely too tired to do so safely, and only one of them was out of necessity. Never again. I like being in one piece entirely too much.

On Burnout

burn·out (būrn' out)
n.

1. A failure in a device attributable to burning, excessive heat, or friction.
2. Aerospace.
1. The termination of rocket or jet-engine operation because of fuel exhaustion or shutoff.
2. The point at which this termination occurs.
1. Physical or emotional exhaustion, especially as a result of long-term stress or dissipation.
2. One who is worn out physically or emotionally, as from long-term stress.

Yep, that about sums it up.

Everybody reading this knows that I did way too much last semester. It wasn't helped by messy circumstances; Amy and I broke up then, too, and it gnawed at me (particularly at my sleep) until I had a chance to analyze and resolve it over winter break. It all added up: I'm going back to school Sunday, and yet I hardly have the ambition to bother getting out of bed in the morning.

You'd think that a month's worth of doing nothing of consequence and getting plenty of sleep would recharge somebody physically, mentally, and creatively. There must be more to it than that. I'm scraping bottom, still, on all three counts. I've slept for eight hours or more every day this break, and I'm constantly physically exhausted. I want to program, but I don't have the drive to crack open a project to work on. I'd start something new, but I haven't had any ideas (though one did come to me today, and I may pursue it). I couldn't even bring myself to read anything of any worth over break (Richard Feynman's excellent Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! being the one happy exception).

There must be a good reason, something I'm missing. People just aren't supposed to get tired of doing things. I don't really feel like doing anything except lying in bed.

Addendum (01/27/2003): I get to go to grad school. I'm happier about this turn of events than I've been about anything in a long while, so maybe I'll be less lame soon.

I never thought I'd start a weblog.

For a long time, I maintained that weblogs are the new SquareSoft fansites, the things that everybody did when they first got Internet access but don't like to talk about later. Weblogs, I said, are the stronghold of angst-ridden, Linkin Park-listening teeny-boppers. They're the product of attention whores who believe that random internet strangers actually care what they ate for breakfast or what kind of day they had.

I may have missed the point. Occasionally, I have something happen to me worth sharing, and I end up retyping the same story to five different people on AIM. This is inefficient. First, it assumes that the lucky recipient is really interested in what happened to me today, and second, it's needless to retype the whole story again and again. It's also tough to tell a story with any sort of quality like that, because you get so sick of typing the same thing that by the last iteration it's a mere shadow of the humorous, well fleshed-out anecdote that you had in the first place.

I thoroughly expect this journal to be shortlived. If the Web had dust, every webpage I've ever done would be positively caked with it by this point. I can pretty much give you the thing's lifecycle:

• For the first week, I will post every day or nearly every day.
• Following that, updates will become gradually more spread out as I begin to become occupied with other things, like school.
• Still later, I will only update when earth-shattering things happen to me, or stuff that's simply WAY too good not to share.
• Finally, I will simply abandon the project and stop posting altogether. I guarantee there will be no "Oh, by the way, I won't be posting here anymore" message. It'll simply die of neglect, and the e-tumbleweeds will begin to roll in.

There's still some shame in doing a blog. The five or so people who are actually going to read this already know that my techno-Illuminati housemates would probably garrote me if this were to be made public. Have a care not to blurt out comments like, "Hey, are you going to update your blog?" at inopportune times. I really do try hard to be taken seriously, and unfortunately in the place I live one loses his e-penis entirely upon doing things like creating a blog, maintaining an Amazon wishlist, or playing Counterstrike. I'm already scraping the bottom as far as they're concerned by posting on multiple forums and keeping a webcam (which I really ought to link into this page, eh?). This just might push me over the line.

So, why did I decide to start a blog at 1:17AM on a Saturday night (now Sunday morning)? Why else? I had a crappy evening, and wanted to bitch about it. Tonight sucked like a sorority chick at Mardi Gras. Tonight blew like the Challenger. Tonight... well, you get the idea. Base, I know, but what should you expect? This is a blog, after all.

I've always hated driving in Boston. I don't even like being in someone else's car in Boston; I'd much rather be walking or taking the T. Unfortunately, sometimes it's necessary to actually suck it up and drive in. Tonight was one of those times. A bunch of people from the SA forums were heading to Jillian's for general merrymaking: drinking and arcade games, including DDR. I'd gone with them before, and it was too fun to pass up a second run at it. Bad move.

I left my house about 7:45, expecting to meet people by the DDR machines around 9:00, as per the plan. I figured this would give me tons of time. I was doing decently at first; I was in Boston by 8:45.

I ultimately walked into Jillian's at 10:20.

At this point, it's worth noting that this isn't the first time I've had a crappy time navigating in Boston. This far exceeded the scope of the legendary Beacon Street Redux before the first meetup I ever went to, and even the combo "Mapquest has the MFA's street address 200 numbers too low"/"Forsyth St. and Forsyth Ave. both connect to Huntington Ave., and only one of them will get you to the Science Museum effectively" diaster. This was a lot worse. Amy almost came, but decided to go to Somerville for DDR Extreme instead. She probably made the right choice.

I wandered for more than an hour. Apparently I missed the connection from Route 9 to Brookline Ave., and just kept going. It took a lot of doing to get myself pointed in the right direction again. That only happened after:

• I discovered that Boston has some gas stations so small that cars filling their tanks will totally clog every inch of ground the place has to its lease.
• I finally staggered onto the Expressway, remembering a promise (LIES) of a Fenway exit. Finding none before Quincy going southbound, I got off 93 at one of the most annoying highway constructions I've ever seen.

The highway cloverleaf is a model of design efficiency. It's simple, it's elegant, it allows convenient turnarounds for all roads involved. The half-cloverleaf is the devil's own. The half-cloverleaf beckons weary travelers with the siren song of a convenient U-turn, then provides ABSOLUTELY NO WAY to get back onto the opposite side of the highway. Again, by stumbling around and through sheer power of luck, I was able to eventually run into a road running parallel to the Expressway for a while, then rejoining it northbound. I was back in business.

Continuing north, it became apparent that the promised Fenway exit was a cruel joke. I did the best thing I could: Line myself up even with the Prudential Center, then point my car at it and drive. I figured I could pick up Huntington again there, and go back for the street I missed the first time.

I ended up totally lost again, instead. I eventually pulled into the parking lot of a good-sized liquor store to get my bearings. The map's cover read

EASTERN MASSACHUSETTS
with Central Boston

In fact, an impressive amount of Boston was on the map, but everything I was interested in, and where I was, was about a square or two off the lower-left side. I eventually ended up getting directions to Boylston Street from a friendly cop in the liquor store (guarding, not buying, evidently) and was on my way.

The rest of the trip wasn't so exciting. I got reamed for parking, and didn't successfully locate anyone I had gone to meet. I'd never gone to Jillian's this time of the year; it's impossibly busy. It was hard enough to move in there, never mind find people that I only have a very vague notion of what they look like. I eventually gave up, played a couple games of DDR, felt sick, and left.

I was sick this week, to the point of losing 5 pounds. When you're as skinny as I am, that's not a good thing, and it tends to make you weak. I discovered this tonight. It's really pretty frustrating to know what your muscles are supposed to be doing, tell them to do so, and have them come back with "No thanks, we're tired. Go do something more our speed, like go to sleep." No amount of "but you guys used to do this" helps. I tried.

By this point, I was almost out of gas, as I hadn't stopped for fuel before I left. Had I not been lost for so long, it probably would have been enough to get me there and back. Also, when I got back to my car, I found out my tire was flat.

I can't decide what the moral is buried in here. Either it's "don't drive to Boston," or "take someone with you so you don't have to find anyone." In any case, here's the final tally:

• Drive time (total): 3 hours, 35 minutes
• Red lights run: 1
• Red lights almost run: 1
• U turns made: 2
• Gas acquired: 11 gallons
• Money spent: $ 33 and change
• Fun had: 0.

Also, somewhere in the middle there I ended up in a US Postal Service dispatch area cleverly disguised as a through street.

Thus ends both my evening and my first entry. This was actually done in two parts, because it was late and I fell asleep writing the first part of it. Hopefully I didn't restate anything from the beginning at the end.