"V for Vendetta" is awesome. Go see it.

Yes, do go see it. I must admit to being impressed by the quality of faked British accents. There were a few slips, but I definitely couldn't have done better. Also, there was one guy whose accent I thought was badly faked but it turns out he's from Northern Ireland, an accent which I don't know how to identify. There were many explosions and long-winded speeches that managed to avoid being corny. And there was one speech which I will quote here (courtesy of IMDb) because it was just so amazing and full of fancy language that it made me laugh:

Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is it vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished, as the once vital voice of the verisimilitude now venerates what they once vilified. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose vis-à-vis an introduction, and so it is my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.

If you are not dead from the alliteration, do keep reading.

This makes me think of something, though: how is it that in a country that has more space than it knows what to do with, why is it that there are no Kinépolis-sized cinemas ANYWHERE? I saw the movie in a room with (no joke) 4 rows of seating, plus 2 on the floor right in front of the screen. Seriously, I've been to movie theaters in four American cities now (Albany, Miami, Pittsburgh, Pasadena) and I have yet to see one that has more than 100 seats. Loew's (the one in Pittsburgh that I went to) isn't even part of a mall, really; it's free-standing and there's tons of space around it, so why can't it be bigger? I read reviews of Loew's online that said the screens were really big. Right. My definition of a big screen is one, when I sit halfway back, whose edges line up with the edges of my glasses. Kinépolis is the only place where I've seen a screen that big.

Random things

• "Scenes from a Memory" by Dream Theater is absolutely amazing. Try listening to Scene Six. Just the idea of "scenes from a memory" with hints of mutated versions of previous Dream Theater songs everywhere is awesome.


• I've been experimenting with Java and have concluded that it is more useful than a bucket with no bottom, but only marginally. I was trying to do something insanely cool with it (seek out .java files, batch compile them and dynamically load them into the runtime environment), but it turns out this isn't possible. Sadness emanates from me.


• I'm making important changes in my rankings of favorite musicians. The top three of the drummer list now looks like this:
  
  1. Danny Carey (Tool)
  2. Neil Peart (Rush)
  3. Mike Portnoy (Dream Theater)
  
  So Neil Peart has been demoted, in favor of Danny Carey. Also, the distance between second and third place here is very, very small.


• The peer review for my WCAC paper essentially said, "Dude you rock." And I have to write a revision strategy based on that.


• We're going to have a giant steel pole, with people-shaped figures walking up it, on campus, next to Forbes Avenue, a main thoroughfare that goes through campus. Apparently the campus was in dire need of art, so we decided on a 100-foot steel pole. The hole for the foundation was dug today. This has already been heavily discussed by students and equally heavily ignored by the administration, but I see it as a major problem when the administration, which is propped up by twenty shitloads of money that students pay in tuition every year, gets to do whatever they want to the campus with no input from students. Oh well.

Pretty simple

In a conversation yesterday, Jacob (Meh) and I (Think Different™) independently discovered and expressed the entirety of what guys think about girls.

Meh says:
    meh girls eh?
Think Different™ says:
    i know
Think Different™ says:
    what the hell

lolz

I'm grading a 15-200 program now. It generates a random sentence using lists of possible types of words (adjective, noun, etc.) and a sample sentence like "noun;verb;article;adj;obj". The program chooses a random word of each type to generate the final sentence. This is one output I got:

[Mary, eats, the, big, hot-dog]

:D

Finally, a sensible person

There's a fat guy walking across the country on a personal journey of losing weight, regaining health, and finding out who he really is. This is the best fat guy ever. He's been walking across the country, from San Diego to New York, since April 2005. Apparently this is a fat person, who, one day, thought to himself, "Good God, I am so fat. I need to fix this." This is in contrast to, apparently, most fat people, whose trains of thought seem to go something like this: "Good God, I am so fat. I need to eat a cheeseburger." Alternatively, it might be, "Good God, I have the right to be fat! People who get stuck sitting next to me on airplanes be damned!" So anyway...I definitely approve of fat people who actually take steps to stop being fat, so I definitely approve of this guy.

Today in Graph Theory the prof proved the non-planarity of K_5 and K_{3,3} in the coolest way - using Euler's Theorem. Now we're talking about planarity, which is cool but also unfortunate because talking about planarity means we have to talk about stuff like analytic geometry, which I can't say is my favorite thing in the world.

I have the rough draft of a Write Crap About Crap paper due Monday, and I'm not sure if what I'm planning to write will pan out. I've already had to write a general plan of what to write and submit it, but I think what my teacher does with such things that people hand in is scribble an "A" at the top and hand it back without reading it.

I have a somewhat rough week next week. A 15-251 test (which worries me because I fux0red the last one), a physics test (which also worries me a bit just because it's a physics test), a 15-211 programming assignment (not that bad, actually...and even kinda fun), the rough draft of the WCAC paper, and probably something else. There's always something else.

I'm in the mood to code, so I think I'll do that now.

The graphs are everywhere

So, I am being inundated with graph theoretic goodness lately. My 15-251 homework, about pretty much exclusively graphs, is almost complete. I still have to do my Graph Theory homework. In 211 we're studying two forms of trees (B-trees and tries, which I insist on pronouncing as "trees" because of its roots in the word "retrieval") which are forms of graphs. My life is in danger of getting too graphic.

I am now using Firefox 2.0 alpha 1, code-named Bon Echo. I really can't decide which is a better name, Firefox or Bon Echo. It seems like an OK browser, or as OK as can expected from an alpha release. I still am having trouble deciding between Firefox and Safari for normal web browsing.

Room Draw, the process by which people pick rooms for next year, is going to suck. I had been hoping to get a single room, but before the freshmen even started picking (freshmen are last to pick), all the singles on campus were gone. Before the freshman selection started today, I looked at the numbers of rooms of each type left. There are a total of 577 open slots, both on- and off-campus. There are about 1400 freshmen, total. This means that about 830 freshmen must have either made arrangements already, or are going to be quite screwed. Here's my very rough calculation. I'm being extremely optimistic here. I'd say at most 150 freshmen did Group Housing. 830 - 150 = 680. Now I'm gonna guess that at most 400 freshmen are retaining their rooms. 680 - 400 = 280. Now I'm gonna guess that at most 100 are moving off-campus. 280 - 100 = 180. Now what about these remaining 180? Some will move into frats at the beginning of next year. Not all 180, though. Unless there's something I've missed, there is definitely a rather significant number of people who, as far as I can tell, will not be able to secure housing through CMU. I'm just on the wrong side of the middle of the freshman draw pool, so I think I'm probably safe from being left apparently homeless, but I think it's very likely I'll be in an off-campus apartment, which is a non-optimal situation.

In other words, construct a bipartite graph with vertices in X representing freshmen, and vertices in Y representing room spaces. Two vertices are adjacent if and only if the freshman could live in the room. |X| >> |Y|, hence there exists no perfect matching in this graph.

Back

So I'm back in Pittsburgh now. Getting Serum out of my room proved to be rather tricky. He was sitting on the counter. I didn't want to touch him, so I figured the next best thing would be to sort of herd him onto a sheet of paper which I could then take outside. It was fairly easy getting him onto the paper, but as soon as I started to move it, he leaped off of it. At one point he was on my hand for a fraction of a second. His feet felt very strange: cold and slimy and sticky, but when he jumped off my hand, there was no trace. I suppose if you're going to have feet that can stick to vertical surfaces and ceilings, they're going to feel weird.

Anyway, after a lot of aggravation I finally managed to get him outside. By that time he was very worked up and his little sides were puffing in and out. I felt quite bad. He must have been very scared.

Some asshat baggage handler somewhere broke one of the feet off my suitcase so now it sometimes falls over when I try to stand it upright. Grrr.

I should go be productive now.

Last day in Miami

So this is my last day in Miami. Not a whole lot is going on today that's different from what's gone down on the other days.

Serum is falling down on the job. I expected that his presence would somewhat cut down on the presence of insects in my room, because he's an insectivore. However, last night I discovered the presence of a profusion of very tiny little insects. They're easy to kill but they're ubiquitous. I've discovered them crawling around on my laptop numerous times. This makes me worry that they are actually inside it. I hope Serum isn't too scared to eat or something. I'd feel bad. I'll be putting him outside tomorrow when I leave. I'll miss him a little bit.

Not making a lot of progress on 251 or Graph Theory, unfortunately, even though this week they're on almost the same subject. This worries me slightly, as well as the fact that my Write Crap About Crap teacher has not emailed me regarding grades yet, like he said he would.

I'm going to do work now; I just needed to rant about how Serum sucks at his job.

It's raining graphs

So I have 15-251 and Graph Theory homework that I'm doing concurrently now, since they're both about graphs. Graphs are interesting and happy. It amuses me that the ∞-point extra credit problem on this week's 251 homework is to prove the four-color theorem.

Odd sort of day today - it's cool, but humid and overcast. I realized that maybe the reason I've been sleeping so soundly here is the heat...even though I usually prefer my bedroom to be cold. I can't say I'm too fond of the air mattress I sleep on here.

OK, I have nothing good to say and I'm rambling. I will shut up now and prove the six-color theorem.

Of things and stuff

So last night, I wasn't feeling too great when I posted. Just after that, I received calm from a rather unlikely source: Serum. I went into the bathroom to take a shower, and Serum was there, sleeping on the bathroom counter. He was lying there motionless, with his tail neatly curled up. I thought for a minute he might have gone into torpor and I'd better put him outside, but when I took a closer look, he opened his eyes. I just watched him for a while, and he just stared at me through one eye. I think he gradually changed color too, from light to dark green. Then I just felt calmer. I guess it was just looking at the little guy, all curled up and peaceful, that slowed the chaotic stream of thought in my head. Looking at a sleeping lizard, six inches from head to tail, is surprisingly relaxing. I suppose it might have also been just the presence of another living animal — even if it was just a little green lizard.

I wonder if the members of Rush ever took drugs? It just occurred to me. They don't seem like the type of rock musicians who would take excessive amounts of drugs. Maybe Geddy and Alex, but not Neil. I just can't imagine it.

(end extremely random digression)

Well, I have nothing else to say. Oh, I have a functional B+tree based sorted map. That's all.

Images and words

Wow...in the last few hours, I've been having the most mentally chaotic time in recent memory. By this, I mean I have more thoughts than you'd think possible going through my head. For no reason at all. Mostly they center around people and how inescapably weird they are. Yes, this includes myself. This includes everyone. They're not all grand, sweeping thoughts about human nature and the human race, they're partly about my immediate situation and how I have no idea about anything.

Normally when this happens what I like to do is blast music so loud that I can't hear myself think and all I can do is get caught up in the music. Unfortunately, I don't have my awesome speakers now so I can't do that. I am, however, listening to Liquid Tension Experiment, which is perfect music for blotting out everything else.

So yes, it is indeed rather disconcerting to feel like I don't know anything for certain about anything in my life. I suppose this is why some people turn to religion. Not me, though...although if you consider atheism to be religion...atheism is one thing in my life that I'm sure about...not sure where I'm going with this and having three ellipses in a sentence is bad style, so I'll stop. This is a sign of how scattered my thoughts are right now, folks — my normally rock-solid linguistic instinct is inactive. I've had this same thing happen a while ago, when I first got this blog, right before I went off to college. I found myself with a profusion of thoughts, and unable to express any of them in writing. It was quite distressing then, too.

It used to be that when this happened I could relieve it partially by writing fiction, but I don't want to do that now. It would come out as clichéd emo crap. It would be like "The Swordmaster" except probably with a central plot opposite to that in "The Swordmaster" (since my current situation as it relates to that plot is opposite to what it was when I wrote that story), and less cool and creatively meritorious. I am intentionally being vague enough that people who I don't want to know what I'm saying won't know what I'm saying, and people who I do want to know what I'm saying will know what I'm saying. Yes, I do now think that "The Swordmaster" is clichéd emo crap even though I was very proud of it at the time; the only reason I don't think it's totally worthless is that it begat a world in which I can actually write good stories. And that doesn't happen every day.

Blah. I don't want to do anything apart from sleep, and I know I won't be able to sleep for a while because of all the thoughts. I'll probably just lie in bed with my head aswirl in confusion and worry. I am rapidly losing motivation to write, so I'm going to go get a start on that now.

Stuff

Since I got to Miami, I've had a really awesome roommate - a little green lizard. He is a very good roommate - doesn't make any noise, doesn't annoy me in any significant way. He just sits on my toiletries case when I want to open it, which just ends up causing him startlement, and he is also shedding skin in the bathroom. I've named him Serum - I have no idea why that popped into my head when I started thinking of things I could name him, but there it is. I will keep you updated on the Serum's status - I suspect soon he'll escape.

I ate at Tony Roma's tonight, and consequently I am happy. Very happy. My fingers still smell like barbecue sauce. I have a blissful smile on my face right now, even though I ate several hours ago.

I've determined, through careful research, that there is not nearly enough spontaneous breaking into song and dance in ordinary life. I believe this is something that needs to be rectified. If I could sing, I would definitely do my part. Instead, I will lament the fact that I can't sing, in song.

børk børk børk

Every time, seriously

Man, every time I travel by air, I get inspiration to write stuff. Between when I left Pittsburgh and got here to Miami, so many things to write about passed through my head. Right now I can only remember two, so I'll content myself with those.

First of all, first class RULES. It blows my mind. On the Dallas-Miami leg of this trip I had a first class seat in a Boeing 777. It was one of those first class seats that reclines all the way down to form a bed. There is infinite leg room. There is a little desk-type-thing that faces the window, and the seat can rotate to face it. You get your own video screen that pops out of the armrest. You get food that is not only better than the food in coach, it's actually pretty damn decent food. Better than everything on CMU's campus. The seat itself can move and adjust in so many ways. And best of all, I did not pay a cent for the privilege. I laugh at all you people who for whatever reason do not travel in first class. I know that I don't regularly travel in first class and financially couldn't, but I laugh at you anyway.

Second, airline announcements make my linguistic nitpicking spirit cry on the inside. "If you are returning to Miami, welcome home; if not, we hope you have a pleasant journey, wherever your final destination may take you." Destinations don't take people anywhere. Destinations just are. They're places. Places just stay where they are. I'd like to see someone get taken somewhere by their destination. I think it would be a very amusing sight.

This being Miami, I am trying to be very still in an effort to minimize the amount of body heat I generate. There is no desk in my room, which is rather an inconvenience. My shoulders and arms hurt because I am lying on my bed typing. However, the house is now covered by wireless network, so that's a good thing. The signal out here is rather weak, but that's cool.

My watch just sprang off my wrist like it was trying to escape. That's a bit odd.

OK, I'm rambling, time to stop and perhaps go to bed.

Scrubs season 5 worries me

So, Scrubs season 5 is already halfway over by number of episodes. I have to say, in general, it's an improvement on season 4. Whatever was wrong with season 4 (it seemed like just a general lack of funniness; I can't pinpoint it) is mostly cured, although not totally. That's OK, however. Season 5 has produced some of the better moments of all of Scrubs. However, there is definitely something wrong with season 5, and I can pick out specifically what it is: excessive recycling of jokes.

This recycling I'm talking about is only obvious to a Scrubs aficionado like me, but it's a worrying development. Here are some of the most egregious examples:

• Johnny the Tackling Alzheimer's Patient. He first appeared as a one-time joke in episode 2-15 (I know this off the top of my head; I have an encyclopedic knowledge of Scrubs episodes). It was totally random, unrelated to anything, and so off-the-wall that it was hilarious. But the problem with one-time jokes is that a good part of their humor is derived from their isolatedness, and once you take away the isolatedness, it's just not funny anymore. In episode 5-1 it is reused not once but twice, and it just isn't funny because (a) it's only funny once and (b) it was very poorly executed.


• Dynamite areolas appeared in episode 4-9, once again as a one-liner joke. It was funny there because it was so weird and like nothing anyone would ever say (plus Elliot's reaction made it twice as good). When it was recycled in episode 5-11, it was slight overkill in a situation that was funny in itself, and the value of originality (which made it so good the first time) was of course not there.


• Mexican apple-thief: now come on, why ruin what is probably the funniest thing in all of season 5 by taking it much farther than necessary? When it was introduced in 5-3, it was so unexpected and strange and it was executed so well that there was no doubt about its awesomeness. But then actually showing the whole scenario was just stupid, and it was horribly executed. Leaving it in the realm of fantasy would have clearly been the best option.

I'm too lazy to think of and type out other ones now.

Why is this a worrying trend? Well, obviously, Scrubs' unique brand of humor does not lend itself to repeating jokes. Much of Scrubs humor is based on weirdness and originality - and jokes that are weird and original the first time aren't weird or original the second time. This suggests to me two serious problems that the writers are having: first, they are having trouble coming up with fresh jokes, and second, they don't realize that the nature of Scrubs' humor (which they defined in the first place) is fundamentally intolerant of recycled jokes. This just seems like a recipe for disaster for me. It's always sad when a pioneer of something good (I've had thoughts in a very similar vein about Metallica) loses track of what made them great.

Speaking of Metallica, they may have turned it around for their next album. They ditched producer Bob Rock and their next album is going to be produced by Rick Rubin. The pictures on the Wikipedia pages are enough to convince me that Rick Rubin will get something good out of Metallica.

Late night coding

So, it's 2 in the morning on the first day of spring break, and guess what I just did? Solved what is apparently the greatest linked list/tree recursion/pointer manipulation problem ever. This is according to the person at Stanford whose website it's on. The problem is as follows:

Write a recursive function

Node *treeToList(Node *root)

that takes the root of an ordered binary tree as a parameter, and outputs the head node of a circular doubly linked list containing the nodes of the tree in order; i.e. traversing the linked list in order gives the same output as doing an inorder traversal of the tree.

You are not allowed to make any new nodes to make the linked list: all you're allowed to do is mess with the pointers in the tree. Solving this thing requires you to have a good grasp of how pointers work, and also of how to write recursive functions properly.

I am very tired. My roommate woke me up (accidentally) this morning at 5 because he was leaving for spring break, and therefore it was necessary for him to turn on all the lights in the room, for some reason. Yet somehow I am able to write ridiculous recursive functions. As is the case with most insane recursive functions, the actual code, in the end, is very short, simple, elegant and understandable.

I will now stop ranting about recursive functions. I'm on vacation dammit.

So... now I have nothing else to say. I have stuff to do tomorrow. And yeah. Time for bed now.

I am a little weirded out by myself

OK, I am too weird even for myself sometimes. This is because of something I thought of that will make me never see girls in the same way again. Recently I heard a girl say, "I'm putting all my eggs in one basket," which is a perfectly normal idiom. However, that made me realize that girls are all carrying around a bunch of EGGS. Never mind that "eggs" is an intrinsically funny word, the idea is also very funny. Maybe it's just me who thinks that, but I think it's hysterical. So now, if I have nothing on my mind and I see a girl, I think "Ha...EGGS!" And I imagine a rattling sound that sounds like a bunch of eggs in a basket rattling around.

Anyway...

We have been granted reprieve from the 15-211 assignment of doom. It's now due after the break. At some point I said to someone, somehow, that no teacher would assign work to be done over the break. What an idiot I am. I'll have work to do for four of my five classes over break: Graph Theory (normal homework assignment), 251 (normal homework assignment), 211 (evil program), and Write Crap About Crap (stupid paper).

Speaking of which, I should be doing work for Write Crap About Crap right now. But the hell with that. I've given up on my dream of becoming a literary critic, because I'd rather not have the whole world hate me.

If reading the thing about eggs (heh...EGGS!) makes you not want to get within a 50-foot radius of me, I totally understand. I try to be normal, but I think that just isn't how things were meant to be.

hee hee...eggs

*SMOOSH*

DUDE I TOTALLY JUST COMPRESSED A STRING

I finally got data compression working. Actually, it turns out that it wasn't that I had implemented it wrong - it was that I had implemented the thing that checked to make sure it was working wrong. That annoys me.

Now I have to implement decompressing...rather important if the compressing part is to be of any use.

More importantly, I have to implement a sorted map based on a B-tree by Thursday. B-trees are awesome data structures, but extremely finicky to implement.

So anyway - once I implement decompressing, implement an encryption algorithm, specify capabilities, lay out an interface, write a controller class, test extensively, debug, test some more, debug some more, add in shareware/serial number crap, write documentation, package everything up, make a web page, and then release it all, I'll have a finished product. It'll be a piece of cake.

So, "DUDE I TOTALLY JUST COMPRESSED A STRING" compresses to "øflf—b{‘«¯òãQüÄÎ…Ñv¨†" - originally 312 bits, compressed to 155 bits, by my homemade implementation of Huffman coding.

*SMOOSH*

MAKE IT STOP

So, at the beginning of this semester, due to timing conflicts I couldn't take the 76-101 section I wanted. The ones that were available to me all looked pretty bad, but I just chose one, using the following thinking:

It can't be THAT bad, and it's just one semester, right?

I now respond to my past self:

HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHH AHAHHAHAHAHAHAH AHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAH AHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHH you tool.

Right now, I should be reading an essay by a pretentious literary critic about a profoundly crap poem by a profoundly crap poet, so that I can "hold the ideas in my head" while I write a paper that "synthesizes" the arguments of various and sundry pretentious literary critics. This is after I had to write a paper that "summarizes the argument" of a pretentious literary critic; i.e. write out what the pretentious literary critic was saying. The paper I should be reading now is just so very very bad (and I'm tired) that I can't possibly concentrate on it.

Earlier today I was working on my file archiver program (I started this a few days ago, but I've had the idea for years) and I just got a very small part of the compression part working. That made me happy, even though I realized programming so much in Java lately has made me almost forget how to write Objective-C.

*attempts to read pretentious literary criticism; gives up so as to protect brain from terribleness*

Hey I got a joke. What do you get when you cross Walt Whitman with pretentious literary critics?

|Walt Whitman||pretentious literary critics|sin(theta)â, where theta is the angle between the vectors and â is a unit vector perpendicular to the two vectors. hahahah