Last Thursday my group at work had lunch with a couple of new engineers from the Kirkland office, who come down to Mountain View for orientation their first week. We were sitting outside, and it was really a gorgeous day, maybe 65 degrees, sunny, a little bit of breeze. After a while, the two guys from Kirkland, who both had lived around Seattle for a while, noticed that the rest of the group was visibly shivering and otherwise acting cold, and made light of that fact: Do you really think this is cold? I’d asked my colleagues the same thing fairly soon after I started last year, and hearing these people say it now made me think about how long I had been here, and then of course what I had really accomplished in that time, and what value there was in any of it.

But I wasn’t really cold. This place hasn’t quite broken me yet.

So I just got around to upgrading my Debian machine after, like 7 months. And it seems freaking apt-get now has “tags”. At least slackware should be safe…I hope…

It must have taken me 5 seconds today to remember that ‘make mrproper’ was the command to completely clean a linux kernel source tree…used to be practically reflex…

In what universe is this:

void do_stuff(bool do_stuff) {
  if (do_stuff) {
    // do stuff ...
  }
}

less “readable” than this:

void do_stuff(bool do_stuff) {
  if (!do_stuff) {
    return;
  }
  // do stuff ...
}

You can tell that the new Thai junta is going to be a thoroughly modern military dictatorship:

“It [overthrowing the elected government] is against the law. If I say it’s not against the law I shouldn’t be here,” he said.

“But sometimes, to break the deadlock, someone has to do something. Just like when your computer is hung and you cannot do anything about it, what you’re going to do is push the reset button or unplug it and that’s the only way to solve it.”

Damn its been a while hasn’t it…amazing this thing is still up…

I was at school, of course. I couldn’t tell if it was high school or college. It was some kind of grading conference with the teacher for a paper I had written.

It wasn’t going well. The teacher (his voice, and his face, which admittely I never looked directly at, seemed to be this old psychology professor who taught a seminar I had been in, but the personality was one of my high school english teachers) was finding all these little flaws in my argument, they were really quite ridiculous, I should have been able to defend myself. The problem was, I really had no recollection of ever having written the paper, or even what it was supposed to be about. I looked at his copy of the paper, the one with all the unfounded criticism on it, and the words I had written looked wrong.

I had another copy of the paper with me for some reason, I looked at it to orient myself. And it was completely different. Was it an earlier draft I had discarded? A later revision I had made pointlessly after the due date? It looked better for some reason, I thought it would help me explain some things in the other version, but it clearly wasn’t finished, it was filled with notes to myself to fill this or that detail in, and whatever was supposed to be there I had since forgotten, so it really didn’t help at all. Still more problems. At some point I needed to look something up in the text to explain something I had written, this text looked like complete gibberish actually, but the worst thing of all was that the first three chapters, or was it four, were completely missing from my copy, so for all I knew this passage I had written about, then forgotten writing about, did not even exist.

Finally I made some lame excuse to him about how having the conference so long after I had written the paper made it more difficult for me, since it was no longer fresh in my mind. I actually had no idea how long it had been since I turned the paper in. He responded by scolding me for wasting so much class time I could have spent working on the paper. How this related to what I had said, I don’t recall. I just wanted to get a lousy grade and leave. But no. Here is another reference, which I really should have used to begin with, that will help me get the paper “up to standards”, and until that is done I will have to keep working on it.

After I woke up, it took a few long minutes for me to realize that there was nothing more to be done, that the whole game really was all over. The burden had become so familiar I did not hesitate to accept it, even if it was no longer real.

I knew there was a good reason I hadn’t deleted any email for the last year.

Right now the inbox of one of my email accounts has exactly 1337 messages in it.

This means, unfortunately, I have to delete something every time I get a new message now.

Today was my last day of regular classes as an undergraduate, and who knows, maybe ever. Four exams next week, and it is over. I was stuck in the lab late tonight, one last time, finishing up one final project report, limiting the opportunities for reflection. When I was finally done I felt like I needed to do something, to sort of pay my last respects to this place. But I only had a few minutes before the bus came. I ended up wandering up to Sieg Hall and spending a moment in the somewhat wrecked former undergraduate computer science lounge there. It seemed kind of appropriate — I had first come to that place on a Spring day, it must have been cold, it certainly is cold now, within a month or so of 5 years ago, invited by the department to visit and hopefully be persuaded to accept their direct freshman admission program the next year. What did I expect to get out of college then? I can’t say exactly, but I don’t think I have it now. It is time to move on, to seek and not find something else.

It feels like a thick fog is finally beginning to clear. Something, in the distance, is there, I can sort of see it now, but I can’t quite make out what it is.

If you have been browsing various technology news sites lately (or even slashdot), and you don’t have any anti-american ad blocking software installed, you have surely seen these wierd Intel banner ads. They have the usual vague images of happy people working productively that accompany most computer advertising, and the text on the banner is usually something along the lines of “With Intel built in, Bumrungrad has expansion built in”. The first time I saw it my immediate reaction was “what the hell kind of name for a CPU is Bumrungrad?” — I assumed it was some kind of new product. Actually I am sufficiently up on the codenames for future Intel processors that I was pretty sure it wasn’t a CPU, but thought it might be a new core logic chipset or something of that nature.

Finally today I saw a longer version of the same ad (and was forced to stare at it for an especially long time as the rest of the page I was trying to read loaded), and learned the truth: Bumrungrad is a hospital in Thailand, and the ads I saw were actually promoting a white paper from Intel touting the various advantages said hospital had accrued from the use of Intel processors. So this ad campaign would seem to be a complete failure: Anyone dumb enough to click on the banner probably assumed, like I did, that it was promoting some new product, and upon finding out what it really was, would be unlikely to continue reading. And anyone who might actually be interested in reading the white paper would see the ad and have no idea what it was about, and most probably not click on it.

So unless their intent was to produce an ad so incoherent that people would be compelled to click on it just to figure out what they were trying to express (and do you really think a huge corporation’s marketing department would be that postmodern?), they have just dumped tons of advertising money down the drain to no effect, other than perhaps an army of zombified consumers, aimlessly wandering the aisles of Fry’s wondering why the hot new Bumrungrad chip is nowhere to be found.

There is a Python library function that, given a string, produces the string resulting from replacing each character with a block of hex digits representing its character code in the current character encoding. I was looking for this, and knew it had to exist somewhere, because it is utterly essential to do certain things, but got stuck finding it, mainly because of the name. It isn’t called toHex or getHexString or getHexDigits or anything remotely logical like that. It is called hexlify. And of course there has to be an inverse function called unhexlify also, in case you have accidentally hexlified something and need to get it back in unhexlified form.