possum couch

Raindrops stripping leaves,
Beautiful melancholy,
World of cold puddles.

Rain settled on Bloomington today, after a gorgeous weekend.  I wound up going back to the railroad trestle on Sunday with Chet when he got home, and we brought a proper camera this time.  Some of the photos we got are sweet.


Then fall turned wet today, and with a vengeance.  It's sort of gorgeous to look at, though; all the leaves are a sort of uniform yellow now, and people are wandering around with a vague look of helplessness as the drop date looms and midterms conclude.

There was a sweet adventure at our house this weekend, which I unfortunately missed most of.  Patrick discovered that there was a possum living in the couch on our porch, and was evidently impassioned enough take up our snow shovel, brandish it at the creature, and shout, "I DRINK ON THAT COUCH!"

The possum's name is Kevin.

(p.s. there are a lot more photos here)

amusing

Mosaics drift, soft,
Silent over now-bare limbs,
Winter sun above.

Oh, I do love fall.  Probably I won't stop harping about that until winter.

I was amused by a few things this week, most notably the fliers and chalk ads that just went up all around Lindley Hall (the computer science building) for the IU Gaming Club's LAN WAR.  Hahaha.  It's like they think they're going to target their marketing or something.  :)

Equally amusing (though less local): Obama has declared Swine Flu to be a national emergency.

Victoria's Secret sponsored a huge concert at IU this week, too, for some concert that we won (that I never heard about).  The moral of the story is that Girl Talk and Cobra Starship performed on a huge, pink, steel stage that was nearly as tall as our damn Union building, which is pretty freakin' tall.  It was a cool show (part of which I missed due to play practice.  sad.).

Patrick and I went on an adventure this morning to an old railroad trestle west of town.  I'd been there before, but with all the leaves turning and such, it was positively gorgeous to walk out on.  It stretches about a mile over a valley, and said valley is ringed with trees that were like rippling poetry in the wind with their browns and oranges.  I couldn't convince him to go all the way across, though; I guess reasonable people don't want to walk a mile across a span hundreds of feet above the ground.  Go figure.

In unrelated news, I can't believe I haven't used "adventure" as a label on this blog until now.  Egad!  What am I doing with my life!?

gwar

Fall is sliding in,
Trees aflame, and I asleep.
Shiver back the cold.

Continuing to do this much work isn't making it easier.  This OS project may kick my butt.  Not to mention IT'S MIDTERM SEASON.

First, something cheerful: weekly cooking!  This week's feature was Navajo Tacos:

Chili ingredients:

1 pound cubed-like eggplant

2 cans 14 oz. pinto beans

1 large onion chopped

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon oregano

2 tablespoons chili powder

1/2 teaspoon red pepper

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

2 can 12oz. tomatoes

1 teaspoon sugar

2 teaspoons cocoa

Cook the eggplant until it's kinda soft.  Add onions and saute until tender.  Add everything else and simmer until you're happy with it (I did about 1.5 hours).

Fry Bread Ingredients:

3 + cups of flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

1.5 cups warm milk or warm water.

Mix 3 cups flour with other dry ingredients then add warm milk/water to make a sticky dough.  Add additional flour to make a firm dough then cover and rest for approximately 30 minutes.  Form pieces of dough into thin (less than 1/4 inch thick) disks and fry at approximately 375 degrees F.  I didn't have a candy thermometer for the oil, so I just jacked it up almost to high on my stove.  That worked okay.

Toppings:

Onions, Shredded cheese (co-jack), shredded lettuce, tomatoes, avocado

Top hot fry bread with a layer of cheese followed by a layer of chili followed by a layer of cheese followed by a layer of lettuce, onions, tomato, and avocado followed by a light sprinkling of cheese on top.

It's yummy.

Play practice was pretty fun, too.  I learned that my character is basically a crazy old woman who gets to play with anything and everything on stage when she's bored.  Sweet.  If anyone has old lady clothes that they don't mind parting with for a few weeks, I'd be much obliged.

The new networks project is to implement a longest prefix matcher for IP addresses.  This basically means that we take IP addresses (those things that look like 129.79.245.103, which is where I happen to be at the moment) and decompose them into bits.  A router's job is to figure out which router a packet heading towards a given IP is supposed to go to next, so it goes through and sees how much of the address it can match with its tables.  IP addresses are assigned in a semi-geographic way, but the important thing is that "close" addresses will be "close" physically.  Chunks of addresses are designated for certain entities, so IU owns a chunk of addresses (65,534) in the 129.79 family.  So that will be fun.

The OS assignment is to implement fork() and exec() for threads, which essentially means taking a process (loosely defined as "a program in execution") and making a copy of it which can then be turned into another process.  Operating systems don't pull processes out of nowhere!  The other part of the assignment involves setting up the filesystem, i.e. making it possible to read and write files.  WOO.

Piano is going well, too!  We learned the chromatic scale this week, and the most recent songs we've played are "Great Balls of Fire" and "It's My Party."  Hahaha.  :)

Anyway, it's like 23:30, and I'm definitely still in Lindley.  I think that means it's time to head home and get some sleep.  -____-  Blargh.  Any volunteers for doing my work will be welcomed?

a long wrap-up

A large enough curve
Can appear flat; go find
Once again its end.

I'm sure some of you collected Beanie Babys, too.  I was all into that stuff.  I started after they had been around for a year or so, and this left me at a distinct disadvantage.  Many of the damn things had already retired, which led to their being unavailable in the price range of and 8-year-old.  At some point during my collecting, I decided that I wanted to get all the cats in the set, but there was one that had been a part of the original release and had gone away before I could get it: Flip.

Well, good news!  No one cares about Beanie Babys any longer, and this has led to a drastically improved availability.  I was out with Roy and Jill and Chet on Friday night, and we happened upon FLIP THE WHITE CAT AT A MARSH.  I got the IU nomination for the Churchill scholarship (officially!  woot!), so Jill offered to get it for me as a celebratory present.  This thing ain't leavin' my sight.

In other news, Atomic Age Cinema is still going strong in Bloomington (god, I can't believe I just linked to MySpace for that), and I went last night for a delightful showing in FULL 3-D of the original The Mask from 1968.  It was on a VHS tape, for crying out loud.

Other random occurrences from this weekend: I won a couple dollars in poker, I rewatched Kung Fu Panda (it's still awesome), I closed my window for the first time to keep my room warm enough to sleep in, I watched a train go by, wrote more synchronization code for OS, worked on the packet sniffer for networks (which I will probably write a real post about sometime... I really think it's cool), got some dericious sake from big Big Red, went to big Big Red for the first time, practised piano (my playing test Wednesday will include "This Land is Your Land," and "When the Saints go Marching in."  tough, I know) and ineptly played some Lego Star Wars.

graduation and grad students

Leaves outlined yellow,
Nights cold, snuggle into bed,
And watch the sun rise.

I'm now a few steps closer to graduation: all of my degrees are officially going to be complete, my minors are recorded as they should be, my general honors notation is filed-for, and I'm going to get (ugh) senior portraits.

Huzzah!

I've been hanging around grad students a lot this term (unsurprising, considering that I'm in three graduate courses and fully half of my fourth course is graduate students), and life seems good for them.  I know that I don't have nearly so much work as I was anticipating, which leaves good swaths of time to do things like go to the Lotus Festival next weekend, which I definitely recommend to anyone who'll be in the area.  It's a show that takes up all of downtown with performances from artists around the globe: last year I watched some throat singers, which was basically crazy.

Good news!  My LaTeX equation editor, which launched in knol a month or so ago, is now available in Google Docs!  YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

I'm a bit shocked at how fall-y it's getting.  It's easy to tell what time people got dressed when you see them--those with sweatshirts were probably up before 10, and those without, after.  I am excited about cold weather, though, and wearing sweaters and all that.  Oh, and the Pikachu hat, of course.  :D