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This weekend was relaxing. Work is still very hectic but I
needed the break. Friday Castor came up for his birthday weekend. We
played some video games and watched movies.
Saturday I cleaned the house in the morning. My family, including
Grandfather, Grandmother, Father, Mother, April, Ron, and Robin. came up to buy
me a birthday dinner. (Yes my
birthday was recently. No I will not tell you when. I try very hard to
avoid embarrassing birthday things.) It was quite nice. Sara was very
popular with the family as usual.
Sunday Sara and I finished cleaning the house and doing laundry. The
place is cleaner now than it has been in months. It is supposed to
drop bellow freezing this evening as well as tomorrow evening. I covered my
raspberries again. This is getting ridiculous. To quote the NWS : "The
low temperature at 6 am today was 31 degrees. This ties the record
low for this date set in 1877"
The hits just keep on coming:
|
The temperature at Indianapolis fell to 29 degrees at 05:47
breaking the record for the date set in 1971. This is the
second lowest temperature ever recorded for may. The monthly record
low is 28 degrees set on may 10 1966. To put this in perspective: 29 degrees is the average minimum temperature for early March at Indianapolis. |
00:18:33 Thursday May 05 2005
I spent the first half of today at the dentist's. A 10:00 appointment
did not finish until 13:30. I chipped a tooth eating pistachios on
Saturday. At least it now has a temporary crown.
Despite the fact that I got to work 5 hours late I still managed to
work an 11 hour day. It is definitely crunch time.
After an exhausting week I took this weekend off. Friday I left work
in good spirits if a bit exhausted. Sara and I went to the always
delicious Sofra for dinner. And then
joined Terry and his friend Sean at the cactus for drinks. Needless to
say after a week of 12+ hour days this was not the kind of stress my
body needed. However how often do Terry's friends (and my fellow server communists)
fly in from California to visit. After two Efes Dark
and two G&T's
I was feeling no pain.
Saturday got off to a slow start. I awoke about noon and got ready to
head to Chicago. There was some small issue with the camera and
calypso had to be rebooted due to a hung filesystem. So much for my
uptime. Sara
and I introduced Terry and Sean to the joys of the Blue Nile
restaurant. The rice helped calm everyone's stomach and soon everyone
was feeling human again and we were on our way to Chi-Town. When we
arrived at the united center we just gave our name at the gate and we
were admitted to the rock star parking directly in front of the
Michael Jordan statue free of charge. We went to the will call box and
there were four tickets waiting for us. From there we headed up to the
skybox from which we got to view the U2 concert. Sara thought Terry and I
were weird because we took pictures of the fully stocked box. Having
been grad students we are accustomed to abuse, not being treated so
well. I also got to meet Sara's grandparents once again. They are kind
and generous people.
The show was excellent. I felt somewhat bad attending because I am not
really a U2 fan. Terry and Sean on the other hand experienced the
concert as some type of religious experience. The trip home was
colored by everyone's most offensive jokes which helped to pass the
time as we waited in traffic. When we hit Lafayette everyone was
exhausted and so sleep came swiftly.
Today has been largely uneventful. I spent some time with Castor,
Ohler,
Lehmann, and Wanke. I am
going to get some sleep now. This next week look for me to take up
some projects that had been set by the wayside again.
Photos from the U2 concert: Mine, Terry's
STAMPS! They put Feynman on a stamp! As Rick said when I mentioned it to him: "They should put him on the money." Everyone should own Feynman stamps.
Time for an actual update. Last Tuesday Sara and I joined Josette et al for the Spring 2005
Failure Party. We couldn't stay long because I had to return to work
to finish up a project.
Wednesday the project finished and shipped. That
was also a rather educational night for Sara. You see, she had never
witnessed a post semester crash. My body tends to delay illness until
stress levels are lower. It is a super duper survival power brought to
you by, your friend and mine, natural selection. It just so happens
that it is also useful to me at school and work. With the
project out the door my stress levels turned south very quickly and I
was soon lying in bed shivering, spouting gibberish, and having fever
dreams about the proper occult uses of peanut butter.
Needless to say Sara was a bit concerned. Fortunately my fever broke
sometime after midnight and all was well.
Thursday the team members were allowed to pursue personal projects and
to escape work a little early. This was a good thing because when I
returned to the house Sara needed some help with a minor
crisis. It was quickly resolved. I did some more work for Dr
Weber-Fox's Lab. Shortly thereafter the Showalters
arrived from Florida. They will be dwelling at Casa de Noland for a
month or two until their lease begins.
Friday I returned to work and began my research into Genetic
Algorithms. In the evening I cleaned up and had dinner with Sara's
family at Spageddies. That evening the weather was particularly bad
and rain began to leak in during our meal. Wanke appeared again.
Saturday I slept nearly all morning while Sara went to her graduation
ceremony. I awoke and once again joined her family for
lunch. Afterwards there was cake and gifts at Sara's apartment. By
this time my illness was sapping my strength once again so I stayed
home instead of going out with Wanke et al.
Sunday was largely taken up by sleeping and cleaning of the house.
This week: Work is ramping back up. Nothing near as stressful as my
previous project, but the new project promises to be technically
challenging. I have spent more time working on my project for Dr
Weber-Fox. Recovery from my stress induced illness has taken longer
than I expected. Tonight: Star Wars Episode III.
00:40:25 Monday May 23 2005
The line to see Star Wars
Episode III : Revenge of the Sith Thursday at 18:30 or so. I saw
the movie with Sara, the Showalters, and Terry. My expectations were very
low, but they were met. This movie, like the earlier installments,
has terrible acting and dialogue but excellent special
effects and violence. Fortunately the ratio of SFX + violence to
acting + dialogue is greatly increased in this episode.
On Friday Sara left for Pennsylvania to visit her grandparents. After
work I grilled shish-kebabs with Paul before heading over to Ohler's
place for the First installment of Melderon III. The session went
well, it would almost have to considering the amount of time that has
passed since people last played D&D in any form.
Saturday and Sunday were both spent sleeping a great deal. My illness
seems to be interminable. My throat continues to become more sore by
the day and I begin to worry that my lymph node, which has been swollen
for more than two weeks now, may
not be playing around. On a lighter note I played Eternal Darkness for the
amusement of Carrie this evening. Tomorrow : Sara returns, and I get
more dental work done!
18:31:59 Tuesday May 24 2005
Look! I fixed the "bug" where qblog thought that I was on PDT.
Now dates should show up in EST again. Unfortunately I may have to
change it to
accomidate EDT soon. Er... or
maybe
CDT.
Note to self:
export TZ=/usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Indianapolis
00:28:59 Thursday May 26 2005
Work continues on Doctor Weber-Fox's project. The first major part
known as "The AudRhyme Experiment" is finished. I have started coding
"The KidTones Experiment". The upper respiratory whatever that I have
had for more than two weeks finally appears to be letting up.
03:29:18 Sunday May 29 2005
Friday was decreed to be a half day by virtue of it being the last
Friday of Arxan's most successful
month ever. After work Sara and I ran some errands and had some
dinner. We then parted ways. She headed to Chicago to visit friends
and family for the weekend and I returned to the ancestral Noland
home.
Today I visited my grandparents (all three). Afterwards I grilled
chicken with my father. Then there was dinner with the whole family
present, a very strange happening these days. After dinner my sisters
started a campfire in the back yard. I chilled with them for a while,
but soon returned to my safe haven here in Lafayette.
Why can't people obey the standards? It isn't hard. No one has any
respect for standards. As I shall demonstrate, unwashed open source
hippies who talk a lot about respecting standards are as guilty as
everyone else.
case 1:
Visual C++ does not understand scoping at all. Paste this into your
compiler. Go on this will still be here when you return.
int x = 77;
for(int x=0; x<10; x++)
{}
printf("the value of x is %d\n", x);
What should the value of x be? It should be 77 because the x declared
in the for loop only exists inside the for loop. Moreover there should
be a warning about overriding a previous x. Does VC++ do either of
these things? No.
case 2:
Both VC++ and gcc treat the result of the trinary conditional operator
as an lvalue. If you check your copy of ISO 9899 section 6.5.15 you
will find that it says EXPLICITLY that the conditional operator DOES
NOT yield an lvalue. However feel free to try something like this. It is
almost guaranteed to work on any given compiler:
int a=0, b=0;
(rand()%2) ? a : b = 42;
case 3:
gcc absolutely abuses the standard by allowing the second operand to
the conditional operator to be omitted. Yep, try it out.
int alpha = 0;
int beta = 13;
alpha = (rand()%2) ? : beta;
This is exactly equivalent to:
alpha = (tmp=(rand()%2)) ? tmp : beta;
which, as it happens, is actually legal C.
case 4:
Today I discovered that Visual C++ disables certain language features
by default. While attempting to use the dynamic_cast operator I
discovered that RTTI
was missing. This piece of information came to me by way of the
mysterious compiler warning:
main.cpp(51): warning C4541: 'dynamic_cast' used on polymorphic type
'Foo' with /GR-; unpredictable behavior may result
What VC++ means to say is : "I am a crippled non-standard
compiler. You need to explicitly enable RTTI by doing Project ->
Properties -> C/C++ -> Language -> Enable Run-Time Type Info
and then fiddling around with the drop box that will allow me to fully
implement the C++ language."
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