October 18th, 2003: Now They're Coming for Me
Ok it's been a while. Been doing a lot of work lately. Three and a half problem sets a week. Staying up way too late, though the blame for that mostly lies on the playoffs.
It's over and done with, so there's not too much to talk about. I'll just quote Jacob Berkman, a Clevelander: "... what were they thinking? ... i don't even understand letting the starter pitch into the 8th. ... these cocky managerial non-moves are exactly what cost the indians the '97 series. GRR."
He was writing about the Cubs the night before Game Seven.
Also, I need a <blockquote> tag.
Jordan rapping
I dropped by Tufts to hang out with some of the guys back home for Columbus Day. DJ Shadow, Family Guy, and procrastination ... good times.
Mighty Mike
Mike's hair is apparently too long for military regs and he got shouted at for it. Looks plenty short to me.
Awww
Blah. I kind of like this new XML mode for emacs but it can be a bit hard to get used to. A lot more control sequences than I would like. But the validation is well done, and I set up the syntax highlighting to be pretty nice. Oh... it's nXML mode, by Norman Walsh as I recall. That man does cool stuff.
Sometimes I think it would be fun to be a professional programmer, if I got to work on stuff that didn't suck. I'd take a semester off to work on mBuild or something, if someone were to pay me. For the rest of my life might be a bit much, but it would be fun to righteously deploy software that actually worked. A rarity these days, I'm afraid.
On the other hand, physics is awesome. As soon as I shopped 151 I knew I had to take it. I just wish I had enough time to really devote to getting it all. Although now that I'm not burning three hours a night more or less every night on baseball, I hope that I'll get a chance to get back on top of things. I kicked ass on the last problem sets, which was reassuring. But seeing as I started them around eleven, I still got to see the sun rise the next morning. Oh well.
October 18th, 2003: Another Thing
Is it just me, or does the Linux kernel provided with Red Hat 9 have possibly the worst scheduler / VM ever? Busy processes regularly chew all spare CPU cycles, and ever since I converted my Windows partition into more swap space, my computer's been slower as switching to a swapped-out task invariably makes my hard drive grind for a good several seconds. I hope 2.6 addresses this, unless the root of the problem is some bizarre Red Hat kernel patch.
