Interesting Stuff

The good news – bridge club is the shit. I’ve just finished playing for over 6 hours straight, and we had a new member join us tonight. Sadly, I don’t remember her name, but if she comes back, I’ll try to learn it. On a slightly sadder note, Monday is the last scheduled time that Unit551 will be playing with us. Luckily, I believe I’ll be free to go. It’s $2.50 to compete, free to just play the hands. However, it looks like I’ll get rides to the Knights of Columbus games sometimes, and Unit551 might have charity tournaments here once in a while, so it’s not really the end of us playing together.

The better news – I’m not going to die on Monday!! This was in doubt for a while. However, when Dodds says that ACM is due at the end of the semester, he actually means at the end of finals, rather than the beginning of them, and Prof Olson got enough complaints that he moved the final to the day that the 5C rules require it to be (before, he just decided to make it due on Monday because it was convenient for him… jackass). This means that I only have my final paper in Philosophy and my final exam in Systems on Monday (and this is why I could stay so long at bridge, rather than work my ass off).

The bad news – Natalie is leaving on Monday morning, and won’t be back until the fall. I think it’s a good move for her, but it’s sad to see her go. Frosh year, it looked like she would excel here much more than the rest of us, but it doesn’t appear that way any more. How sad.

Now, for the news news – troops sent to Iraq are not equipped with adequate armor, and many of them scrounge bits of bulletproof glass from junkyards as protection. This story is all over. I think it’s absolutely despicable what they’re doing with these “wars on terror,” needlessly putting the troops in harms way. This reminds me of the depleted uranium they use as bullets in Afghanistan. This has been going on since the Persian Gulf, and has some absolutely horrible effects (WARNING: THIS LINK HAS SOME VERY DISTURBING PICTURES). So now, to keep our troops from complaining that they have cancer and their children are deformed, we’re just going to make sure that none of them come back alive, so that no one can complain at all. It makes me sick.

On a lighter note – our CS105 code works! Pomona Mike and I had to write a dynamic memory allocator in C, and it was due this afternoon. As of yesterday, we had never had a working version, and couldn’t find our bug anywhere (it worked perfectly for over 1.8 million calls, then spontaneously gets corrupted). Well, last night, the answer came to Mike in a dream. Literally. He woke up the next morning knowing what he must do, and within half an hour, had a working version. It was amazing, though still slow and inefficient. This afternoon, we worked on it more, and it is now 80% as efficient as the real version that is built into computers, and actually runs faster than the real version! \/\/00T!

Before I go, I’d like to leave you with a very interesting thought. I’m not usually one for minimalist existentialism, but I think this is pretty great: