Zhanga: December 2007

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

Friday, December 28, 2007 (4 comments)

Maylene: Ok I'm going to go eat now.
Me: Ok, bye.
Maylene: Bye.

20 seconds later:

Maylene: Hey! Why'd you hang up on me?
Me: Because you said bye?
Maylene: But I didn't mean to!

I'm going to be rich when I invent the female-mind reader.

1:17PM

Thursday, December 20, 2007 (5 comments)

For the past few days I've been in Cancun. They make you pay $20 for Internet access, so I'm sitting in their lobby stealing wireless instead. For whatever reason, they think they can secure their network by hiding the SSID (the name of the network). Kismet FTW. (The SSID that they charge you $20 to know isn't anything special anyways. It's the name of the hotel.)

Anyways, in China when you go shopping at those perfect-competition places with a lot of vendors selling the same stuff, they hassle you pretty badly, but this place (Mexico) really defies comparison. When you walk past any vendor, they are guaranteed to block your path and say things like:

Vendor: Come look at my store!

Vendor: Miss, jewelry for you!

Vendor: Twenty dollar! Almost free! Ok, I give you one dollar off! Ninteen dollar! Almost free!

You'd think these people are poor, and they sure seem like it. But they must be making a lot of money, because let's say Super Bargainer manages to buy a widget for $2. That means the marginal economic cost of that item was $2, or maybe a little tiny bit less than $2. The asking price on that item was probably $10 or $20, so most people paid at least $5 for it.

That's $3 of pure economic profit, which isn't supposed to happen in pure competition. Also, because each seller faces a perfectly elastic demand curve, price discrimination (two consumers paying different prices) is in theory impossible, but in practice obviously happens in these types of places.

Which brings me to my next point. It's a conspiracy! They're all working together to gouge you, and they aren't really competing at all. Even if competitive firms face a perfectly elastic demand curve, the market doesn't. So if they all work together, they can price discriminate to get more money out of noobs.

11:23AM

Saturday, December 15, 2007 (0 comments)

After another programming marathon and a presentation which included a live demo of our creation, the professor asked on the spot if any of us would be interested in a summer job with him.

Oh, boy. Wait until he reads the actual code. Ok, well, it wasn't that bad (ever read The Daily WTF?), but it did cause a fair amount of brain trauma. Here's an if (potential employers note: this wasn't my code!):

if(!((((String) myFieldTypes.get(i).getSelectedItem()).startsWith("OR:")) 
	|| (((String) myFieldTypes.get(i).getSelectedItem()).startsWith("EN:"))))
{ ... }

You know it's a sign of great style when your line starts with if(!(((( and checks for two unexplained string literals.

11:00PM

Tuesday, December 11, 2007 (5 comments)

Hi, Dad.

Why aren't you using Firefox?

Did you enjoy reading my site?

By the way, since you Googled me, I should point out that very few of those are actually me. Just so you know, I haven't learned Japanese, don't have a profile on pinkbike.com, don't spell my name LiKe DiZ, and don't belong to a Viet forum. These icydogs are all posers, in case you were getting worried.

8:27PM

Monday, December 10, 2007 (5 comments)

You thought it was impossible, but I did it anyways. I have reached a new level of nerdiness.

Yesterday, I went to the engineering building at 3 PM and started programming at 3:20. One of the other guys in my group arrived around 3:35, and he decided to evict these two greedy folks who were taking up an entire conference room by themselves, so at 3:40 we relocated to that newly emptied conference room.

. . .

I didn't get out of my seat until 4:10 AM, over 12 hours later. I didn't realize this until after I got up and felt the need to pee. So for 12 hours, I didn't eat, drink, or perform vital bodily functions (including my favorite, taking refreshing dumps). I don't think I've gone that long before without getting up at all. This is a new record.

After leveling up today, I'm now a level 68.92 nerd. I can never max out at level 70^* though -- actually, it looks like I can't quite make it to level 69. Oh well, one day...

^*World of Warcraft reference... sorry, it fit pretty well here.

5:55AM

Friday, December 7, 2007 (4 comments)

Ugh... one of the annoying girls in my Chinese class gave her final presentation today and used her laptop to show a PowerPoint. I was happily eating my dumplings listening to her when she finished, closed PowerPoint, and revealed her desktop... filled with glamour shots that partially disguised her grossness (but not completely, as that would be impossible). I almost gagged all over my laptop.

I think that torturously annoying girls whose facial similarity with pigs exceeds a certain threshold shouldn't be allowed to be excessively narcissistic. Have some shame, woman!

1:53PM

Monday, December 3, 2007 (7 comments)

Two months ago, my dad took my old laptop, which I was using as a backup Windows machine. So I didn't have anything left running Windows.

Fast forward to now, and Microsoft sends me an intern form in Word format. OpenOffice correctly opens pretty much every .doc file I've ever gotten, and even if it doesn't, usually it just makes the file look ugly. This file causes OpenOffice to crash repeatedly. There's just no way to open it.

I have to fill it out and reply... now what?

11:56PM

Zhanga: December 2007

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