Diary

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.

OK, after three days in a row when absolutely no one has even taken a look at my blog, I have to do something, even though I didn’t intend to. I am overcrowded with various homeworks, labworks and all the other shit I have to do or else I will get my head cheerfully chopped off my shoulders and I was thinking of taking a little break from blogging, but I can’t bear to look at the stats of my blog tumbling down.

First and foremost, yay for me and for my new band. I can already tell that the band is the most awesomestest band I have ever been a part of even if I have yet to play with them in a rehersal. The dudes are very fun to be with, very friendly, very approachable and outright great. I don’t know how all the music playing, rehersing and creating stuff will go, but I am sure it will be great as well. At least they seem to be quite good musicians from what I’ve heard.

This kind of brings up problem that arises every time when I join a band - what should I do with the material of my old, already dissolved band? I have weighed various options for a long time, but haven’t found a solution. On one hand, the material is great, the music is awesome, the lyrics are meaningful and it would be a pity if all of it simply disappeared. On the other hand, it is very, VERY difficult to get my previous band mates together for a reunion and recording the damn thing for real and for good. I want to do it badly, but they are simply unenthusiastic about it. This gives me another choice though - claiming the rights for all the songs and give them all to my new band, leaving the old bandmates credited for their input in small letters in the CD sleeve. Of course, I can be nice and only claim the songs where I had the most input (that would leave six songs out of twelve)… I simply don’t know.

Of course, sooner or later we will have new material with the new band and maybe it won’t be a problem at all, because I will forget the old band, but I think it’s more likely I will still want to publish the songs… And I’m actually hoping for surprise reunion next year or the year after that.

And now I go fuck with labworks again.

RIGHT NOW: Fucking with labworks, d’uh.

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.

First and foremost, yay for the first snow this autumn! Since all autumns in this country are defined by absolute greyness of everything around, except the ground, which more resembles shit colour wise, and this kind of colours make me depressed all the time, I always enjoy the first snow. And the second. And the third. Snow is great. Right now it’s still mixed with a lot of water, so it feels yucky, and if there is wind, the overall feeling is terrible, but outside the window it still looks a lot better than the usual grey and shit brown landscape.

Other than that… Well, not much to write about. I promised my coursemate to get a haircut this weekend and blew it, because I had insanely lot of work (I stayed up until 5am on Saturday without spending a single minute on the internet, except for Wikipedia, where I had to look up the info I needed). Hence as of now I have twelve hours fourty five minutes to get the damn haircut, because that’s when I will go to the lectures and she will see me having broken my promise… which I, of course, do not want.

RIGHT NOW: It seems it was quite a while since I visited ICanHasCheezburger.Com, hence that’s where I’m spending my time right now. Also I’m browsing BoardGameGeek.Com for all the info I can find about Warcraft: the Boardgame and Starcraft: the Boardgame. I have plans to make a boardgaming group of some sort, and I want some cool games for that, and I figured these might bring me some ardent PC gamers. Come on, you have to leave that box of silicon once in a while, don’t you?

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).

This time my pretending to study didn’t work. OK, let’s rename that “I totally failed”. I could understand all of the questions fully and even knew how they should be answered… except the fact that I couldn’t remember the middle parts of the theorems. I knew the conditions and the results, but I had absolutely no idea, how one goes from the conditions to the results. This was the first time in my life I felt so dumb. I think I’d have been scared a lot less if I didn’t understand a thing in the test.

On a brighter note, I had an opportunity to use a tiny bit of Esperanto today. OK, so it was like three or four sentences, but it was still fun. I mean, seriously, Esperanto is such an awesome language. It’s easier than English, it sounds better than English, it’s more logical than English - it’s so much more fit to be an international language. Well, too bad I can’t change anything here - if I started writing in Esperanto, almost no one would understand a thing and this blog would be left without it’s measly audience of three people. Weird logic it is, I must say. People don’t learn Esperanto, because very few people know it, and very few people know it because they don’t learn it. It reminds me of Dvorak keyboard layout - most people think it’s more convenient than QWERTY, no one uses it. The same is true for Esperanto - most people think it’s easier and more suitable to be an international language, everyone speaks English anyway.

RIGHT NOW: Just listened through Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” for… I don’t know, 75th time? I just can’t grow tired of that album. OK, mi deziras endormiĝi, bonan nokton, ĉio homoj.

If you’re really really interested, I am pretending to study for statistics midterm right now, which will be in an hour or so.

Whatever happened to my weekends? Right now it seems I’m doing a lot more work at weekends than I am on weekdays!

On a side note, my new pants are noisy. I didn’t notice it until last night, when I went to the happy place. God, this was the first time when I seriously tried to walk as silently as possible, because my pants were making noise while walking!

OK, this will be it. I don’t have any idea what else to write, because nothing fucking happens right now, and I work whole day, and it’s boring.

RIGHT NOW: Eating breakfast, d’uh.

So you thought you were forgotten for a while, huh. Well, sorry, but I was too busy pretending like I was studying for mid-term test from Management Basics. If you think that subject is stupid - you’re dead on. As you can easily guess, I didn’t study at all and I’m proud of it, because I got 83% anyway. And by “didn’t study” I mean skipped about a half of the lectures and didn’t even bother to get a textbook. When I don’t study, I mean it.

Except that, there isn’t much to write about. I got myself a new addiction which is called Wikimapia. Now that thing is a million times more fun to edit than Wikipedia. Since I am a huge racing fan, first of all I started adding and editing various race courses in Lithuania and elsewhere. Three hours later, I have three kart tracks and three proper race tracks in Lithuania, historic Pescara circuit (huh, no one ever bothered to map out that one???) and St.Petersburg street circuit, where IRL races are held (again, huh?). In short, that thing is awesome.

What else… Oh, yes, of course, I bought myself a pair of gloves that go right up to your elbow and a scarf. Yes, I know they both look kind of girlish, but I don’t give a damn. I’m kind of used to the fact that Tiffy increases my girl-or-gay-o-meter something like once every week, so it means I will be a girl or a gay in a couple of years, so why bother evading that. After all, those gloves are so cute and warm… And black!

RIGHT NOW: Just back from the bath and to the bed! I need my sleep badly, because this week I had seriously too little of it. 12 hour sleep, here I come.

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.