Zhanga: February 2006

Entries have their own pages now. Click the date to see the entry by itself with its comments.

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Friday, February 17, 2006 (6 comments)

About the last post: When I wrote about my atrocious mushroom/bowl haircut, I was thinking of writing "I know that some sags will want to ask for a picture, so the answer is no" (sags = Tiffany). My next thought was to revise this sentence and append "and by sags I mean sags and Yujing." Well, that was too much typing, and I was lazy, so I posted without writing that. Besides, I had this tiny glimmer of hope that maybe Yujing would hold back his sag instincts. Turns out I was delusional. Yujing is so disappointing. Have you checked my stupid AIM stats page? Do you see how, in the last column, Yujing is at the top and immediately followed by nine sags if we choose to count Yufei as a sag? But then again, I guess I'm too much of one myself to be talking.

I have a feeling that Friday is going to become my weekly Zhanga Posting Day. Why? I have office hours Monday 3:30 - 5:30 and Friday 4:00 - 6:00. (I hate stupid parallel structure. "4 - 6" is so much easier to type, but it looks weird next to "3:30 - 5:30.") Assignments don't ever seem to be due Monday night, so clearly nobody is going to come for help that afternoon. Whether they are ever due Friday night or not (I think they are, sometimes) is irrelevant because people are not going to ask for help on Friday afternoon.

So basically, I have these two great periods of time when I get to do nothing. No, I still don't know how much I get paid, and I probably won't find out until I get my first paycheck in... April. By then I'll have forgotten how many hours I did for that pay period, anyways, so perhaps I will never actually know how much I get paid. Anyways, Monday afternoon is a pretty good time for me to get some work done, but I don't really like the idea of being diligent on a Friday afternoon. So I'll just use this time to talk about useless things.

Mayans are pretty useless. I had to read the Mayan creation myth (the Popul Vuh) for my writing class. Check out this excerpt:

Just for fun, I decided to remove a word from the first paragraph. The missing word (the asterisks) is "crab." Yes, the pincher animal with a hard shell. Go figure. Mayans don't make much sense.

The crappiness of my Mayan class is partially made up for by my other crappy class, Super APES (" for Life"). How does one crappy class partially make up for another, you ask? Well, I gave a 5-minute presentation on the river of my choice, which happened to be the Savannah River. I got to talk about how I almost drowned near its mouth, though I realized later that we weren't really near there. Same general region... Atlantic Ocean... whatever. It's all the same. Drowning is drowning.

The other cool thing (well, the only cool thing, since drowning isn't all that cool) is that my next presentation is a group presentation. The topic is invasive species. I've been assigned to talk about examples of invasive species... and you know what that means. If you don't, then obviously you didn't pay attention to the ever-so-exciting Dr. Camp. CANE TOADS!!!!!! Yes, those ugly, hopping lumps of meat that produce toxic sludge out of their necks. The same toxic sludge that people smoke as a hallucinogen. Apparently, in parts of Australia, there is more or less a term "thong slap" (TS) which means to take a flip-flop and slap a cane toad over the head to stun it. So, fun things to do include TS + golf club, TS + run over with car, TS + put into leaf blower and fire, etc.

I read on a website that if you put a cane toad in a jar with some pool chlorine, then add vinegar, the toad will turn white as chlorine gas is formed. Does this sound like a cool fourth grade science fair trick or what? You know who's going to be in fourth grade next year? That's right! My sister! Where I'm going to find a cane toad, I have no idea. But I bet my neighbor's dog will work just as well.

4:53PM

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Friday, February 10, 2006 (9 comments)

Flashback. A snippet from the last post:

3. Have you ever gotten a haircut so bad that you wore a hat?
   It was actually so bad that people thought my haircut was a hat.

When I wrote this, it was purely as a joke. It hadn't actually happened to me before. So it's quite interesting that when I got a haircut three days later, on Tuesday, they gave me the mushroom cut. I asked for the same cut that I got last time, and they did right last time, but this time I got owned. You know, like they put a bowl upside-down on my head and cut around it. Helmet hair. Basically, I look like a more fobby form of Yujing, except my ears are smaller and my cheeks aren't as pink. And my hair is a lot worse.

I've had at least twelve different people tell me about my haircut. I even got a comment about it today, the fourth day after this catastrophe happened. So far one person lied and said he liked it, and one other lied by being neutral about it. Everyone else asked where I got my haircut and said that they'll never go there.

You know what the worst part is? I don't even have a hat! I have a beanie, but I look pretty stupid in one, so I never wear it. So I can't cover up this terrible haircut.

In other news, my box of Altoids expired yesterday:

Yes, that's a glass pig. I think somebody gave those to my sister but I stole them. Or maybe my sister got those in China. In any case, I stole them. This little piggy is there so you can see the nice padding on the inside of the tin, where the camera goes. I would have taken a picture of it with the camera inside, but I found out that it's hard to use a camera to take a picture of itself. It's even harder to use a camera to take a picture of the outside edge of an Altoids tin when the camera is inside of it. (I guess I could tape a mirror to the underside of the lid, and then use another mirror, and then somehow push the button...)

These boxes are so durable. After a year of carrying around a box that came with $1.99 Altoids, it's still together and the hinges aren't even starting to give. I wish I could say the same about the Dell laptop that I paid 500 times more for and that I'm 50 times more careful with.

So let's see, what has happened in my life...

What a crappy week it's been. Crappy haircut, Altoids tin expiring... oh yeah, today during CS, the professor threw in a "bythewayifyoudidntknowtheresamidtermnextwednesday." By the way, I didn't know. Another exam next week to study for... great. But I guess since it's still one of the lower-level CS courses, it shouldn't be too bad.

I hate my Zhanga now. It was so much better when I indiscriminately made fun of people. But now, if I write "haha, X has the IQ of a garden hose," then invariably I will hear two days later that X read my Zhanga. Which really sucks, because it's a lot easier to think of funny ways to make fun of people than to come up with more-or-less-original interesting material.

How people find out that I wrote bad things about them on this site is beyond me. Last I checked, my site gets an average of five hits a day, and four of those are from bots (Google, Yahoo, spambots, etc). That last hit is basically split between Gene when he's in English class and Pat when he decides it's time to make fun of Asians again. So... I guess that means one of you two must be leaking. Geez, remember when Daniel Gilbert went ballistic? Watch, just because I wrote that, he's going to show up again and own me.

I feel so incredibly unproductive writing here when I should be TAing. But nobody shows up! I'm still waiting for my first visitor, after 11 hours of this...

4:40PM

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Saturday, February 4, 2006 (6 comments)

In compsci two weeks ago, we were supposed to make a program that would read in a bunch of words and group anagrams together. For example, consider this input:

teacher
rapes
cheater
with
spear

Given that input, the program is supposed to return all the anagrams grouped together:

cheater teacher
rapes spear

Isn't it awesome that "teacher" and "cheater" are anagrams of each other? I didn't realize it until this course. See what good computer science can do for you?

Anyways, a good way to test this program would be to feed it a file that contains a lot of words. A dictionary, of course. The one the professor gave us had about 40,000 unique words. That only took about a second to process, which was no fun.

I have a different dictionary with 1,680,000 unique "words." They're not really words in the strictest sense because a lot of them are things like "12345" or "qwerty" or words in other languages (it's used as a password-cracking dictionary), but that doesn't matter for the purposes of the program. A huge file like that seems like a good choice for finding weaknesses in the anagram algorithm, since it'd take a pretty long time to process.

Anyways, since it's a big dictionary, it's named bigdict.txt. Ray was so high that during CS lecture, when he tried to open the file, he typed in bigdick.txt. Actually, he wasn't high, but you can tell what was on his mind.

That's actually all I wanted to say.

Just to bore my readers, I'm going to do a few selected questions from one of those dumb questionnaires, but just the interesting ones...

1. Have you ever gone camping?
   I played laser tag about two weeks ago. Camping is a lot harder than it seems. My legs were really tired from squatting so much.
   
   
2. Have you ever felt betrayed by your "best friend"?
   He'd never do such a thing =)
   
   
3. Have you ever gotten a haircut so bad that you wore a hat?
   It was actually so bad that people thought my haircut was a hat.
   
   
4. Have you ever spied on someone you had a crush on?
   Does it count if I want to spy on the person but haven't actually done it? I always want to know what the fob next door is doing with his other fobs, but I can't actually spy on him/them because I can't understand Korean. The one time I actually saw something interesting was when one of his fob girls was ironing his shirts.
   
   
5. Have you ever seen your best friend naked?
   I think I've seen more of Ronjon than I would like to have seen.
   
   
6. Would you date someone with kids?
   I'd date her kids.

2:40AM

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