Zhanga: February 2007
Entries have their own pages now. Click the date to see the entry by itself with its comments.
Saturday, February 24, 2007 (2 comments)
Google interviewed me for a software engineer in test position. That means I would do testing of code produced by the developers at Google to (for example) determine problems such as cases for which the program will fail. When the interviewer asked me why I want to be a tester, I didn't really have a good answer for her besides the fact that I like coding and software development.
Well, I've figured it out. Why I didn't think of this earlier is beyond me. Why would I like to be a tester? Because I like breaking things! I like feeding input to programs and watching as they explode. Creating things is great and all, but destroying them is so much more fun. It's very rewarding to figure out how to cause things to blow up. (For non-nerds, "explode" is just a generic term for what happens when a program encounters an unexpected situation and doesn't know what to do, but tries to do it anyways. Symptoms include bizarre output, crashing, ...)
Anyways, yesterday I was grading an assignment involving some image manipulations. Part of the assignment requires the student to write code to expand an image by some arbitrary integer (>=1) factor. For example, make it twice as wide and keep it the same height. I was reading some student submissions, and noticed that two of them turned in code that treats black as a special (basically a sentinel) color.
So I figured I'd see what happens if I fed it a pattern of black stripes looking kind of like a UPC code. The program exploded, though rather unspectacularly. It would expand the image by the requested factor but also get rid of all the black. Watching it blow up caused me an odd feeling of immense satisfaction.
I think my Muslim roommate is rubbing off on me.
In other news, apparently Maylene's friends call her a cradle robber because she carries around my baby pictures in her wallet.
Where does the insanity end?!!
11:37PM
Wednesday, February 21, 2007 (2 comments)
As luck would have it, the day after I blast some poor girl for being pompous, I own myself. I was in CS today, the algorithms and data structures class, and the professor was talking about linked lists and various operations on them. Of course I thought, "I am a freaking CS wizard. Why should I listen to him when I am so amazing I might as well have invented this course and written its textbook?" I think being a TA for this class just makes me excessively cocky. So I read Slashdot and browsed Facebook for an hour instead of listening about how to insert a node into a linked list.
20 minutes later, Google calls me for my phone interview. Blah blah why do you like computer science, why'd you choose econ, tell me about your past projects, etc.
Then bam! Write a function void insertNode(Node head, int index,
string data) that inserts a Node containing the
data as the indexth element in the linked list given
by head. (Insert a node into the middle of a linked list.)
Argh!!
11:54PM
Tuesday, February 20, 2007 (2 comments)
This girl in Chinese drives me nuts. (Don't worry, Maylene... not like that.) She answers half of the teacher's questions to the class by saying something in Chinese in a slow, pedantic way that seems very patronizing. It's like she's saying, "listen class, I'm better than you at speaking Chinese... repeat after me!" Whenever she does that I just really want to take a decomposing pumpkin and slap it across her face.
For the first half of last semester, when the class read passages out loud together, this other girl would always read louder than the rest and try to lead the pack... until she realized her Chinese is not actually that much better than everyone else's, and kept stumbling on words the rest of the class knew. Ugh!
As always, since I complained about people on my Zhanga, they will inevitably read about it tomorrow and be very offended. I apologize in advance. This blog is not really a serious place, as should be evident from the comparison of my girlfriend to turd in posts earlier this month.
I was clicking random buttons in Amarok, when I encountered a window called "Statistics." Some of these were pretty obvious, such as Everytime We Touch and 我们的爱 being among my favorite tracks, and Oops! I Did It Again being near the top of my favorite albums. I had to laugh when I saw this one, though:
(I don't re-tag genre information after getting songs, so this may not be an accurate reflection of what I listen to. However, I will not deny liking Communist music.)
By the way, Amarok is seriously the best music player ever. Even putting aside my Linux zealotry for a moment, Amarok is far better than Winamp, QCD, iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. in sooo many ways. It's currently Linux-only but will run on Windows when KDE 4 comes out later this year.
10:37PM
Thursday, February 15, 2007 (8 comments)
I am going to cockslap all of you except Gene, because he spoke the truth.
In other news, my roommate now listens to LMNT - Hey Juliet, most of The Click Five, some Kelly Clarkson, and the Chinese version of M2M - The Day You Went Away. Of course, this doesn't include the Cascada, Michelle Branch, JoJo, Hilary Duff, DHT, and I don't remember what else that he's already been listening to. Am I owning or what?
Hanif also asked me to send him 童话, but I don't think I've heard him listen to it yet. I bet the Chinese filename got lost in his hard drive and corrupted something so he's now unable to access it. Sounds like a typical Windows bug. Or maybe PEBKAC and he lost it, I don't know.
By the way, I had an interview with Microsoft and failed. I couldn't figure out a simple Fibbonacci problem and was shown the door pretty soon thereafter. That (the technical part of my interview) was the most embarassing ten minutes of my nerd career.
12:42AM
Sunday, February 11, 2007 (12 comments)
Maylene: i'm never tellin gyou my problems anymore
Maylene: you keep making me get rid of them!
(Insert generic "Ughhhhhhh, why are girls so dumb??" comment here.)
7:48PM
Thursday, February 8, 2007 (4 comments)
Conservatives who try to impose all their beliefs and morality and etc. onto everyone else just drive me nuts.
I hate when stupid people ask me whether I feel empty because I don't believe in God therefore I have nothing to live for. Well, maybe I should ask you if you feel oddly full because on a weekly basis you eat the flesh and blood of a guy who's been dead for 2000 years. Apparently, one has nothing to live for unless he has the carrot of heaven dangling in front of him on the treadmill of life.
Then there's the guy who claims everyone should be Christian because the threat of going to Hell is the only thing keeping him from lying, cheating, and stealing (even though he more or less does all of the above in some form anyways). How do you argue against someone who is so severely lacking? "Not everyone is weak like you" clearly is inadequate for someone who believes that every action a person takes is purely selfish. "Some people do things because they want to do the right thing, not because they're going to personally gain something out of it" is unacceptable to him because he finds it completely illogical to do something if he won't benefit. He even thinks Christianity is good for the country because churches donate money to good causes. As if nobody donates out of the goodness of their hearts. Just because he needs a church to force him to act like a slightly less selfish bastard doesn't make it necessary for everybody else.
Typical narrow-minded ultra-conservative.
While I'm angrily bashing Christian conservatives, I should probably note that atheist conservatives aren't any better. (Luckily, a total of only six atheist conservatives are known to exist on this planet.) I read a news article about a school where some kids wanted to pray in homeroom (something along those lines) but the school wouldn't let them because religion isn't allowed in schools. First, I want to note that this is clearly impossible in America so this news article was a lie. But anyways, if it did happen then it's stupid. If they want to pray then so what? As long as they aren't disrupting school functions, and the teachers aren't making it a school activity, then what's the problem?
11:19AM
Wednesday, February 7, 2007 (1 comment)
Next person to make fun of Maylene gets double-cockslapped. Once the standard way, once with a dead chicken of my choice.
Linux never gets the recognition it deserves. People keep asking me "Ooooh, is that a Mac?" just because they saw some sort of eye-candy graphical effects on my screen. When's the last time an ugly gray Dell was made by Apple? A few have asked me if I use Windows Vista, including the guy sitting behind me right now. Vista doesn't even come close. All it's got going for it is the cool new alt-tab switcher. You really haven't seen cool desktop effects until you've seen Beryl (scroll down to the cube... that's one of the coolest parts). Too bad it works on neither Windows nor Mac OS.
Uhh, so yeah this is another one of my really useless posts where I don't actually say anything (wait, that's like every post!). Sorry, I got kind of annoyed by people getting all excited about Vista because it "looks nice" when (1) that's a dumb reason to get excited about an operating system which by definition is supposed to operate, and (2) the eye-candy is what people are most excited about in Vista yet Beryl owns it.
5:18PM
Friday, February 2, 2007 (9 comments)
It seems that Gene and James want me to "dump that shit." James even attempted an economics argument for dumping that shit. By the way, if you're Tiffany and don't like to read about my toilet activities, you should probably skip the rest of this post.
I will now try to show why James is wrong. First, for the sake of argument, let's make the following assumption:
- Maylene and shit are completely equivalent and interchangeable.
Currently, I spend 3% of my day on the toilet. Based on my budget constraint and indifference curves, choosing to spend 3% of my day on the toilet and 97% elsewhere is my utility-maximizing point. Spending time on the toilet, just as spending resources anywhere else, comes with diminishing marginal utility. At 3%, my marginal utility of spending the next minute on the toilet is still quite high, but that next minute could be spent just as well elsewhere, which is why I choose to spend only 3% on the toilet.
My marginal utility derived from toileting drops below zero once I start spending about 10% (I'm guessing) of my day engaged in these activities. That is, my total utility starts to drop once I spend more than that amount of time emptying my bowels because each additional minute I spend on the toilet brings me negative utility.
If all of a sudden I began spending 55% of my day dropping shit, I would be racking up some serious negative utility. Therefore, as a rational, utility-maximizing consumer, I would not choose to spend this amount of time dropping shit.
Of course, that whole argument was unnecessary because Maylene is, in fact, not shit. I've considered this thoroughly, and it's surprisingly simple to disprove.
See, everybody thinks it's somehow funny to make fun of me twelve times a day about how she is underage. But would you call a sixteen-year-old turd underage? No, because shit that old is practically a fossil and is kind of disgusting. It is definitely not, by any means, "underage." Therefore, Maylene is not shit.
Actually, there are a lot of other reasons too, but those are rather subjective and don't make great arguments.
Ok, I think I'm done talking about shit for the month.
4:20PM
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