Diary

I seriously don't know what is wrong with my life but it has become seriously boring. Like... utterly. The lectures in the university are the most boring I have yet endured. The weather is boring. Driving school is (mostly) boring. I don't even suffer any mental disorders to spice up my life anymore.

This. Sucks. A lot.

So there it is. I don't know what to write. My life doesn't change at all, I don't experiment with new kinds of food, I don't wear skirts and high heels just for thrills, I don't go shopping, I don't visit my friends in other cities, I don't participate in any sports, I don't get laid, I code in Java every day and every night, I utterly and totally suck in my life at the moment.

I need to come up with something real fast I guess.

RIGHT NOW: Doing absolutely nothing, would you believe it.

With the examination session over and two weeks since my last post, it's a high time to post something again.

First and foremost, I am very happy that I managed not to fuck up majorly during this session, even though it was one of the most difficult to date. 79% average is really really good, compared to what I was expecting. Numeric Methods and Concurrent Programming made this term look grim, but hey, I'm still alive and going!

Other than that... The little discussion in the previous post's comments has led me into developing a game with Zvitruolis. Nothing too grand to look at right now, but everything is going in quite a comfortable pace. The basic premise of the project may look ridiculous (a Java game???), but right now it's working quite alright and there isn't much of the notorious Java lagging. Maybe JVM 6.0 is actually fast enough to keep up with the requirements for a normal 3D game?

More about things in the next couple of days. Right now my brain is drained by the exams, thank you very much.

RIGHT NOW: Writing rotation implementation in the physics engine of the game. Some serious shit, I can tell you that.

Hello, hello, hello! Apparently, people realised after all how cute and lovable I am, since I at last got my Christmas presents... way into New Year. Well, better later than never, huh? I got a lovely donkey from my friend. She got a bunch of angry looking owls for that. Yay! I got 15 euros from my grandma. Well, she always pays me money instead of an actual present. Well, again, better money than socks. Yay! Also I got an awesome Porsche 911 so I can kill myself fast. No, not really. And last but not least, I got a cheque to buy some books in a bookstore. Double yay! I don't remember how printed text looks anymore anyway. Except my stupid university homeworks.

Other than that, I have a couple of new addictions. First and foremost, I got in love with Korean national sports. So much intensity, so much skill... like, wow. Yeah, I'm talking about Starcraft and Warcraft 3. My obsessions are way behind the schedule, it seems. Doesn't matter, they will release Starcraft 2 sooner or later... and my hardware will not be able to cope with it, which is quite another story. Add to that my religious hatred to Vista (that piece of shit ain't touching my computer EVER). Ah well... Maybe when I'm old someone will start releasing games for Linux platform as well, sniff...

The other new obsession is... well, geeky. I have become a functional programmer. No no no, I am still as dysfunctional as ever, it's the programming that is functional. I mean, pass function as an argument of another function? Sounds like yay! Also, it confuses the shit out of people reading the source. To make matters worse for them readers, I have begun learning J. Now that thing is a blast. What's not to love? Any programming language that doesn't have cycles, because its operations are by default meant for whole arrays at once, is good language in my book. Seriously, what can be better than finding the biggest member of an array in three keystrokes?

>./

Can't get better than that, no way.

Of course, it does have some disadvantages. For example, the final code looks something like this in the end:

],(+/@:(_2&{.@:]))

Bonus points for those, who know, what this program does. But hey, at least its programs are ten to twenty times shorter than similar C programs because of lack of cycles, and you can piss off people who claim that's just random gibberish.

RIGHT NOW: Just looked through a list of driving schools that are accepting new students. I want to get my licence this year, even though I don't have a car yet. Face it, being 21 and not having a licence sucks. And now to watch some Starcraft MSL matches

I wrote a blog entry a couple of days ago but I deemed it to be too stupid to be postable. See, I have some quality control here after all. And it wasn't a very interesting rant anyway. No rants are interesting when written more because of boredom than anger.

Anyway, my great programming spree is over. A little test from Management is all that remains this week, and as far as I know, it's going to be a piece of cake. A program for my friend was very simple and a joy to write (seriously!), even though the numeric method it implements sucks a lot. Well, that's how it's meant to be after all - easy things don't work well usually. My own program... Well, let's not talk about it. After I wrote a page of its documentation (yes, we are required to provide documentation for our programs), I decided I can't bare it much longer and decided to rather get a zero for it than waste my time and brain cells. Linear algebra was never my forte and writing programs that implement the theorems of linear algebra - even more so. The third program - about concurrent programming using monitors - went fairly well though, which was kind of nice, given that I had only ten minutes to spend on it. Yes, I am fast.

Anyway, fuck the programming. It's not about it. I can't get my mind to programming anyway now.

My cat is quickly fading away. Just this morning she was able to jump up about a meter on a washing machine. Right now she's lying on the ground with her rear legs almost completely paralized. It seems that cancer finally reached the vital organs and nerves, so she has maybe a week to live... if we don't euthanize her, that is. I think we will do it, because it's a really pitiful sight to see her like that. The poor creature... It's a bit early to write all the good memories about the cat. It will quite probably be my next post. Right now I just wish that she will suffer as little as possible.

RIGHT NOW: Trying to make my cat feel comfortable during the last days (hours?) of her life. Death is a terrible terrible thing...

Fuck fuck fuck and fuckity fuck, it seems I spent last night thinking so much about the stuff I was going to blog about that I totally forgot to write anything in the blog! Very clever of me, especially when I don't remember most of the planned stuff right now anyway. OK, so let's try to remember everything...

First and foremost of all, I got an invitation to join a band. It is about a year since the last time I played in a band, so it came both as a pleasant surprise and a huge headache since most of my hardware wasn't used for that period of time and my skills aren't as mad as they used to be, and they weren't too mad even then. Anyway, I believe I will be able to cope with it... barely. I have three programs to write in the upcoming week - one in Java, one in C++ and one in Python - and they must be finished until Friday. There are no other variants - either they are finished by them or I am dead. Of course, the wonderful part about it is that I have started doing none of them yet.

This brings me to another great thing - the meeting of Lithuanian Formula One fans. OK, I can clearly see some of the people who know me a tad better than average confused. Yes, you remember it right - I absolutely hate Formule One as it is now. Doesn't matter really - I'm there to party and to promote some other racing series as well. However, this also means that I will most probably be absolutely unable to work on the three programs. This leaves me precisely four days and four nights for everything...

And I'll be damned if I don't make it.

RIGHT NOW: I have just spent three (four?) hours playing snooker online with my friend. That was quite fun actually, however, we're both terrible players and have lots and lots of things to improve. Well, if we play it as much as we played today, it might take quite a short time... and I will have even less time for the programs. Argh...

Oh, and yay for my new haircut. People say I look like a human being at last... What a nice way to put it, isn't it? Anyway, I kind of like it.

A day when you have to carefully read through 500 lines of code to find, what causes segmentation fault is not what I call a good day.

A day when you have to find an eternal cycle in the same lines of code after you catch the cause of segmentation fault isn't fun either.

Knowing that tomorrow you have a midterm test of Data Bases from SQL, when you have never in your life studied SQL and you have never ever been to Data Bases lectures - simply priceless.

Well, at least it snowed a bit today. I love snow.

I have a couple of thousands of Python lines still to come. Small part of them - tomorrow. A bigger chunk - next week.

Why why oh why do I understand programming? I could be some stupid moron instead and study... I don't know, marketing, management, anything else? Or, on another hand, why am I not a chick and can't use their *blink blink*, *look at me, I'm so cute, ain't I, so you wouldn't hurt me with a bad mark, would you?* and other special weapons that would help me immeasurably in this situation?

RIGHT NOW: Reading Phillip K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly". I actually saw the movie first and was impressed (because Keanu Reeves is soooo cute, and I'm not even gay (no matter what Tiffy says)). I have also read Dick's "Ubik", which is also a very weird book. But they are well written weird books, I can give him that.

P.S. Sorry for a bit harder on the eyes blog background, but the previous got bugged for no apparent reason, and it's too late to spend additional five minutes carefully choosing from the pregenerated blog layouts (like I would ever bother with creating my own layouts anyway).

Oh... my... god... how scared I was today. Well, theoretically there was absolutely no reason for me to get that frightened, but theory and practice sometimes go differently. Anyway, there I was with one of my coursemates (the most favouritest of my coursemates, I must say, enter any droolings and overexagerated superlatives here you deem to be necessary). I was helping her with homework a bit (anyone who says "sure you were" in a sarcastic tone after reading this sentence will be shot on sight). I was perfectly informed that she has a boyfriend long time ago, but... let's be honest, I hoped to never ever meet him. However, the damn bastard came to her today right when we were doing homework.

I don't know, what got into me. We weren't doing anything that might have upset him even slightly, but I still went "Oh shit". I was ready to be killed instantly, smeared onto the wall or something else equally terrible happen to me. Anyway, I managed to gather my thoughts soon enough, so we just shaked hands, introduced ourselves... and I got the fuck out of there.

If you don't understand, why should I feel scared of him... Well, I don't either. But I would seriously rather not meet him ever again. That dude scares me just as much as that coursemate attracts, which is quite a lot.

RIGHT NOW: Converting Las Vegas oval from daylight to night. Saying that it doesn't go too good would an understatement. However, given (the lack of) tools I use for it, maybe the result isn't that bad after all. Anyway, I still think that the biggest problem with anything I and my online racing friends do is the lack of competitors, not quality of tracks, cars and other modifications we do. So if you know anyone interested in racing modded F1 Challenge 99-02... Champcar mod, to be more precise... feel free to inform them.

Hurray for me, as I finished my concurrent programming homework, yay! Actually, it would have been a very easy one, but professor decided to make everything quadruply difficult by imposing limit on the lengths of arrays. Not just any limit, but eight elements. Eight elements for a bloody application which works with 40 chunks of data! OK, I know, most of you don't understand a shit and saying that I had to setup nine semaphores instead of one will not impress you. Let's just say that it's like making absolutely random things work in an orderly fashion - bloody hopeless and brain hurting.

Today during a lecture of complex analysis (I'm the only one mad enough to have picked that subject) professor made me a cup of coffee while I was busy solving a problem. To say that I was pleasantly amazed would be a serious understatement. Even knowing that I don't like coffee all that much. Now that is what higher education in Lithuania is lacking a lot - interaction between students and professors on more levels than just lectures and studies. I am really impressed.

And I'm starting to think that it's getting a bit too obvious that I really enjoy spending my time with one of my coursemates and try to go somewhere with her a bit too often... Ah well, like I care. Like my chances to score anything bigger aren't infinitesimal anyway, so I think I'll let the people think what they want to think.

RIGHT NOW: Thinking, whether I should put links to the stuff I am talking about. Maybe I can rely on my readers' abilities to Google themselves? Hmmm... Anyway, right now I am listening to Pink Floyd - The Wall album, easily one of my favourite musical creations of the previous century.

Last time I tried to be brief, I wrote one of the longest posts in this blog (out of four).

This time I ain't doing that mistake. It's 2:45 am and I want to sleep badly..

By the way, today something went 'click' in my brain and all of a sudden I started enjoying concurrent programming and started thinking its problems are actually cool. Either I am going insane or the world is going to end in 24 to 48 hours from now.

By the way squared, Tiffy raised my girl-o-meter up to 15% just because this blog is called diary. Oh come on, don't try to tell me only girls write diaries.

RIGHT NOW: I have just watched Scott Nicholson's video review of Blue Moon City boardgame. The dude is really awesome at presenting boardgames and his reviews are really worth watching... if you're interested in boardgames, that is.

This... day... was... bloody... boring. I spent most of it procrastinating, and when I managed to convince myself to do something, it was Java app I have to do for Wednesday, because there was nothing better to do! I feel like I am degrading more and more day by day. This shit is terrible. Seriously. Think about it.

I did my Concurrent Programming homework because it was the funniest thing I could do at the moment.

If that doesn't strike fear or sense of pity into your hearts, you're a heartless motherfucker.

Anyway, late in the evening my sanity came back for a while. In the spring I got hooked with paper modelling. I grew tired of it after a while, mainly because the model I picked was crappy, but this autumn I got interested again and now I'm building an "Albatros" airplane. It's not too fancy and it's not a very difficult model, and it will definitely look weird because my skills are crap, but hey, this is ten million times funnier than coding concurrent shit.



RIGHT NOW: Watching Eddie Murphy's "Delirious" stand-up. Admitedly, he's not my favourite comedian of all times (I like Stephen Lynch, Pablo Francisco, Russell Peters, Monty Python (all six of them), Rowan Atkinson etc. a lot more), but heck, he still got some good jokes. And what's a better way to waste your night anyway?