it's a mad world

Mimic the motions.
Attend real life like it counts,
Evermore watchful.

People who seem to be really dedicated to their field impress me a lot.  I probably have babbled about this before, but I don't care what people do as long as they care.  And that's shockingly hard to find.

This weekend is the Lotus Fesitival that I've been blathering about, and yesterday I had the privilege to attend/host a lunch for some of the performers--members of a band called Los de Abajo ("Those from Below").  Only 3 of the 8 members came, but it was delightful to talk to them.  Their band was founded in La Ciudad de México, and their focus is on giving a voice to the people who aren't politically powerful enough to have one of their own.  Yes, this sounds trite, I realize, but they are really living like unos de abajo in that they travel from show to show, staying in hostels, avoiding the rockstar life, and having a ball with us normal folk.  They definitely knew their stuff, and they gave us a couple of fairly lengthy discourses on lots of problems in Mexico (including drug-related violence, underfunded arts programmes, illegal immigration to the States, etc.).  One spoke very respectable English when addressing the group-at-large of honors students, but it was fun to converse with them individually and flex my Spanish muscles.

The GRE was this morning, and that was pretty interesting, I guess.  I struggled into Franklin Hall (one of our administrative buildings), bleary-eyed at 08:30, and wrote argumentative and analytical essays, solved some math problems (NOTE: I definitely didn't realise that there was a calculator button on the screen... yes, I am a moron who didn't read the directions.  I still did okay with my pencil and paper, but eff that.), and attempted some inane analogies.  I was actually really embarassed by my score on the verbal section... until I realised that it was not bad at all relatively.  It would appear that most people just suck at English.

Last night my dear roomies took me out to another bar in Btown to check it out, and it was hilariously full of hipsters.  Welcome to the Root Cellar.  I'll probably go back.

Oh!  I guess I can ride fixed-gear bikes now.  The major difference between these and other cycles is that in order to move, one must pedal.  The gears are affixed to the rear tyre in such a way that there can be no coasting.  This also means that one brakes with one's legs as opposed to traditional brakes (although many fixed-gear bikes come with those, too), which is way hard to get used to.  Generally they are reserved for the creme de la creme of cyclists who know about ratios and that sort of thing, but I guess I can't help but become one of those sorts of people, tooling around as I do with these guys.  Maybe someday I'll be brave enough to try skidding around like a madman (hi, Chas and Patrick).  For now, though, I'm still pretty excited every time I don't die going someplace on one of their bikes.

a little ninja

Cats, mice, noms, threads, locks,
Arrange, coordinate, debug,
Op'ratin' Systems!

I'm having a fair amount of fun with the OS class now that Nate and I are almost done with the first assignment.  Synchronizing data is a kind of interesting problem.  The assignments that we had for this week were to implement locks, CVs, and semaphores (which are three ways to protect shared data in multithreaded environments), and to code a problem related to Harry Potter (the new book's come out!  there are 2 copies of each book and 2 librarians and 30 readers who each want to read some subset of the books) and one related to cats and mice (the cats and mice are pseudo-friends: they share 2 food dishes, but only one species can eat at the set of dishes at a time; the cats will eat the mice if a cat and mouse try to eat at the same time).  There's just one issue related to even and odd cats for the second problem that we'll probably iron out this afterlunch.

I was excited yesterday when Chas asked me to set up the wireless on his little Linux box.  It's running Arch, which is a Linux distro that I've never dealt with before.  Just in case you ever find yourself setting up wireless on one of those things, I found their wiki about it very useful.

Coming soon: the GRE!  I registered this morning.  Eep.