It seems that everything I have to tell from my childhood happened when I was 8. Perhaps it was the dawn of my long-term memory coupled with my absorption of all the lore my family had given to me, but my 8th year holds an unfair proportion of all my memories. A lot of the stories I can actively view in my memory, but always from the 3rd person perspective. It wasn’t until last year when I was walking and pointing a camera downward that I realized what feet look like when walking. You’d think an observation like that would come sometime before 19 years of life, but so it went.
I’m always hit by this weird wave of thought that makes my head go
“FUCK, MAKE SOMETHING!”
and it’s really starting to make me angry. Continue reading ‘Sleep and Markers’
So, here’s the poem.
I took all my daydreams from the past week or so and stitched them together when I was high on stress at 2:00 in the morning. I rather like how it turned out, besides the painful part about hymens. There’s some additional formatting on it, but it’ll do fine as is. ENJOY.
Life without Internet is like life without water. Yeah, you can live for a couple days but it SUCKS. And then you die.
So, of course, when I moved in to my apartment in St Louis this past weekend, the first thing I thought about was getting access to the series of Tubes. Sadly, all of my neighbors are smart enough to use protected wireless networks, so I was forced to go to a Panera (called St Louis Bread Co here) to use order service. I checked out Charter, which had a great deal for the lowest end service, but the cost tripled for an upgrade, which I thought to be too ridiculous. AT&T was a better deal for faster Interwebs, and they had a deal online where if I bought phone and DSL service I would get a free modem plus $60 credit for my first three months of service. I figured I just wouldn’t bother getting the phone, and then would cancel that part after 3 months. Turns out things wouldn’t be so simple.
September 30th, 2005: a Danish newspaper published a page of cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad. Muslims around the world rioted and destroyed property, leading in hundreds of deaths. Four years later, Blasphemy Day was born.
This past Wednesday (September 30th), UNIFI (the UNI Freethinkers and Inquirers) celebrated Blasphemy Day by sending out a horde of non-believers to cover UNI’s campus with sidewalk chalk depicting blasphemous images, jokes, and phrases. Here are some examples:
“You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do.”
“Imagine no religion.” (With a picture of the World Trade Center towers beneath it)
“Why does Jesus get all the ladies? Because he’s hung like this!” (picture of Jesus hanging on a cross)
I got officially moved into my apartment yesterday. I harnessed the kitten to the passenger door so he could roam a bit, then headed south from Grinnell. I picked up Sam and forced him to help me unload things, then dropped him back off at some raucous WashU event.
All of my stuff was in a pile on the floor, but I still needed some necessities like hand soap, so I ran to Target to get that stuff done. I took Ninja with me because he wouldn’t shut the hell up when I walked out the door, and I didn’t want to de-friend the neighbors before I met them. I am simply amazed at the cat’s behavior. He just sat patiently in the car as I ran in and out and drove around. He probably spent 7 hours in there yesterday.
And now I need to figure out how to get the Internet. I’m going through withdrawal. Plus, it’s my primary means of communication since I’m too cheap to get a non-VoIP way to call people.
The videos speak for themselves. The funny thing is that Lewis Prothero’s character in the movie was channeled as an emulation of Glenn Beck. But now, Glenn Beck has a speech to match it!
I updated the Weasel program a fair bit, and it is now available on sourceforge. The program still does the same stuff, but the interface is cleaner and friendlier. Most of the changes were just to make the code easier to navigate.
BUT, I am currently working on a more interesting program that will model a population instead of a single line of descent. The idea would be that there are creatures defined by the user that are competing with one another for food. They will have multiple user-defined traits that effect how much they eat, how many offspring they have, etc. You would choose how many generations you want it to run (since now there is no pre-defined endpoint), how much food is available in the environment, and then you could check some statistical info to see how the population changes over time. Or maybe it would would just print data so that you could pop it into Excel and I won’t have to try to write statistics code.
A lot of cool stuff could be done with this, and complicated things could be interestingly (not accurately) modeled by adding things like diseases, disease resistance, environmental effects/catastrophes, predators, and so on. I’m going to keep it simple until I figure out how to program a Windows graphic user interface (so you could have menus, mouse interaction, pretty graphs, etc), but if any of the few people who read this have ideas or are interested in contributing, please let me know.
So my life has taken and interesting (and welcome) turn lately. I’m applying to grad schools for PhD programs in bioinformatics/genomics/etc, and have found a few schools that have programs that seem perfect. One of those schools is WashU in St. Louis (where Sam is an undergrad).
My mother, grandparents, and I went to visit Sam last weekend, before which I had contacted a researcher at WashU whose work I am interested in, and asked if he had any work available. Turns out that he did. I interviewed with him last Monday, got the job, and found an apartment the next day.
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