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post 174

By anders pearson 01 Nov 2000

last night, i was busy studying for my probability midterm and it became clear to me that i really am not nearly as conscious in my morning classes as i think i am. there were huge sections of my notes that i just have absolutely zero recollection of writing. there is seriously just page upon page of notes on material that i’ve never even heard of before. apparently the part of my brain that is trained to take notes doesn’t actually require any of the rest of the brain to be working; it’s developed into pure reflex, so i can sleep through my classes and still have complete notes to read later. a pretty handy skill i think. of course, it does seem to have a few glitches that produce, at random intervals, weird little stanzas of incoherence. eg, i found this in the middle of one page:

“this little interval
that little interval

casts/splints
PANTSMONSTER

suppose dysfunction afly
a flat is a good idea
so just chose deformed hula
fly by twice the negative tea
he is not wonder one maybe it
wiggles”

i have no idea how that came out of my brain or what any of it means, but i did decide that ‘PANTSMONSTER’ is quite possibly the funniest word ever invented. i think i could be a successful stand-up comedian just by getting on stage and saying ‘pantsmonster’ over and over.

post 170

By anders pearson 31 Oct 2000

new yorkers can be so rude. today, when i was in the grocery store stocking up on apples, razor blades, and syringes, i kept getting the nastiest looks from people.

post 167

By anders pearson 29 Oct 2000

my bookmarks were starting to get out of hand, so i figured i’d put them into a little database to try to keep them under control. then i figured that since i have to be online to use them, i might as well put a web interface on the bookmarks. i realized that that also solved the problem of having different sets of bookmarks on my computer at work and my home computer. it also means i can access them when i’m on a lab machine or a friend’s computer. anyway, there’s no reason to keep them to myself. so here’s the rough version of my bookmarks database. it’s even got a simple search feature. not too sophisticated yet and a bit rough around the edges (the search isn’t yet case-insensitive for example) but it seems to work pretty well. the listing on the default page is the 20 most recent bookmarks. once i polish it up a little, i may let other people add bookmarks and i may even integrate it with /dev/random.

post 165

By anders pearson 28 Oct 2000

if i actually watched TV or listened to the radio or otherwise had any sort of contact with humanity on a regular basis, daylight savings time probably would have come as much less of a surprise to me tonight. it didn’t help that i was trying to debug a program that depended somewhat on time to order things. “Why the fsck is it not putting the newest one at the top anymore?!? it was working fine 2 minutes ago and i didn’t change anything!”

i seem to remember there being some big debate over whether daylight savings was relevant to modern society and whether we should just do away with the whole thing. i don’t really remember how the arguments on either side went, but right now i’m siding with those midwestern states who don’t bother with it because it confuses the cows. make that cows and exhausted programmers.

post 164

By anders pearson 28 Oct 2000

a quick lesson in recursion: try this link to see what happens when your Page Not Found script is set up to include a file that doesn’t exist, resulting in another call to the page not found script and so on and so on.