Zhanga: September 2008

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

Tuesday, September 30, 2008 (4 comments)

Why do I feel like I always make new posts whenever James or Gene posts a comment, just so that they don't show up on the front page?

Anyways, I just got a 5/15 on a problem on my CS quiz, which is the worst grade I've gotten in anything in my major since uh... never. Ok I swear I had something more interesting to say, but I forgot what.

...

Ok let's talk about CS until I figure out what I really wanted to say. On Friday mornings, there is a section taught by the TA, named Harish. I didn't go for the first month because it was impossible to wake up that early, and then I got a homework back with a misgraded problem. So I went to Harish's office and saw a white guy and an Indian guy. I looked at the Indian guy and said...

Me: Hey, Harish?
Indian guy: Sorry, Harish stepped out for a minute.

I felt stupid.

That Friday I finally managed to get myself out of bed and to class. I sat down next to the two other students in the classroom, next to the black guy. He just stared at me with wide-open eyes like he had never seen an Asian before, and it was hilarious. Eventually he told me that he didn't know I existed and was surprised to see somebody new in that class.

The other story about Harish is that the professor was talking about hashing and hashes (a hash is a type of mathematical function), then called Harish "Hashish" three out of three times that class period. Nobody said a word.

I still don't remember what I wanted to post, so one last thing about homeless people before I go back to paying attention in class. I was at Kroger with three Asians, loading groceries into the trunk, when this guy on a bike comes up to us and opens by telling us how he doesn't want money, he just wants some food to eat. He even says that we can go into the Kroger and buy it for him. At first everybody was like "naaahhh..." and for good reason.

But I felt kind of bad so I said, ok I'll buy you food, what do you want? After a long story about how he has meat for his sandwich (something about how he can't carry meat on his homeless self because then animals will come, or something) and just wants tomatoes, I offered to buy him tomatoes. Then he gives his schpiel about how he needs to do laundry and take a shower, and asks for money.

I told him it's not cool to ask for food not money, then be annoying and ask for money not food, and he gave up. He got angry and yelled, "I CANNOT HUMBLE MYSELF TO WASH YOUR TIRES!" (Not that anybody asked him to.)

This is why I will be a grumpy old Republican in a few years. Bah. Go find a job and buy your own drugs and alcohol.

5:11PM

Friday, September 26, 2008 (5 comments)

I added a quote to the funnies page in the first time in about two years. I also updated the scores. Gene is of course still in the lead and probably always will be, so I'll have to come up with a prize for him. Too bad I made the funnies page back when I was a noob, or it would be so much cooler — you'd be able to search/filter by name, date, etc. As it is now, I don't even know what year some of these quotes are from. Some of them are a bit nostalgic (#23 on page 1):

[Drew bumps into Tricia.]
Ryan Yük: That is sexual harassment of Korean girl.
Mr. Edelstein: Is Drew sexually harassing you, Ryan?

That quote is so very Yük. Can't you just hear him saying that, in his ever-so-manly voice?

11:34PM

Wednesday, September 24, 2008 (2 comments)

Just for Charles, here's how to add Zhanga to your iGoogle (worst name ever):

  1. Click the link on iGoogle somewhere that says "Add stuff."
  2. Type RSS into the search box to find RSS readers.
  3. Choose one of the RSS widgets. Any of them should be fine.
  4. Customize your widget and "add" or "subscribe" or something to my RSS feed. The URL is http://www.icydog.net/zhanga/rss.

I'm in math right now. The guy sitting next to me just got his quiz back with a 7/20 on it. Nice. Amusingly, there was a question that says to prove (sum of some stuff) = (some other expression). There were no variables in the equality so I just crunched the numbers and found that 70=70. Apparently this was not the correct method and I only got 1 point for it. Oh well.

Generating functions, boxes and distinguishable balls, marbles, so boring. Why am I even here? I should be in the dining hall watching Yan Can Cook, since he's on campus. Just kidding Mom, I love math and all the rest of my classes!

I especially love religion. Yesterday I had to give critiques to the authors of two essays in that class (and they critiqued me). I think it was the biggest load of BS I've ever spouted this year. Blah blah, I liked the point you made about women espousing Christian ideals to promote their cause, but I think your point about religious revivals coinciding with times of crisis is easily countered by considering the Cold War era. (I did not make this up.)

I hope the MySpace guy and his visitors like the new goatse that's about to appear on his page.

12:04PM

Sunday, September 21, 2008 (7 comments)

There's this guy who has been hotlinking an image on my server from his Myspace profile. (Look how cool he is, with that fashionable sideways bathroom pic and that backwards R.)

Anyways, it's getting kind of annoying because it eats my bandwidth. I'd send him a message to tell him to stop, but it requires me to make a Myspace account which would be pretty much admitting I lose at life.

So: should I just block it? Redirect to goatse (is that too evil)? Any other ideas?

3:25AM

Friday, September 19, 2008 (2 comments)

Advice for the rest of you: make backups of the stuff on your computer. The (lack of) wisdom is that one only begins making backups after losing all of his data at least once. I guess I'm a bit slow because I've lost a bunch of data a bunch of times and still don't back up often enough.

Two nights ago, I was reading a really boring text about religion (as opposed to the really interesting ones... uhh, yeah...) and I fell asleep about 10% of the way through. I woke up a few hours later to the sound of my laptop crashing against the hard tiled floor and the sound of my hard drive making horrible scraping noises. I guess I pushed the laptop off my bed while making retarded movements in my sleep.

The fall was only about two and a half feet, but apparently enough to wreck that drive. It doesn't spin any more so it's now impossible for me to retrieve any data. Estimates for getting data off of it (I only need about 1 GB of data) are around the $1500-2000 mark. I bought a new hard drive and paid $20 for overnight shipping (never done that before in my life for anything), but I just lost 35 days' worth of calendar, to-dos, emails, and a bunch of less-important stuff since I hadn't backed up since August. 35 days = the entire semester.

Good thing recruiting season is just starting, or else I wouldn't even know when my interviews are, or who my recruiters are.

I'm going to automate nightly backups of emails and calendar data from now on. Gah. I guess it's better than having my data stolen... maybe I should encrypt my laptop too.

2:48PM

Thursday, September 18, 2008 (7 comments)

The career fair was this morning. I got up at 8 AM, which is like half a day earlier than I usually wake up, but whatever. Free stuff is as good a reason as any, especially this year...

free stuff from career fair

Metal water bottles! The ping pong ball is from Microsoft, which leads me into...

How bad Microsoft products are. I'm being a little facetious because a lot of these things aren't actually made by them, but whatever. I won't talk about their software because it's still recruiting season, but let's talk about the free stuff they gave me.

Thermos
Well, it does its job of preserving the temperature of whatever's inside. But the lid is retarded. Instead of including a plain screw-off lid, it comes with this fancy contraption that doesn't work. If you push in the middle, it sort of makes an opening for you to pour water out. But don't try drinking out of it -- it will just spill all over you. Twice. While sitting near the front at a Steve Ballmer talk. The cap is also hard to clean because it has so many pieces.
Zune
Ok, this is an expensive toy so I can't really complain, but seriously, the Zune has been out for 22 months and still can't show Asian scripts! That's right, half my Chinese songs are called "?? - ????" and the other half have boxes instead of question marks.
Bottle opener
You have to use something to open the free beers they give out in the office, you know. This is the only item in this list that works.
Tool set
Screwdriver, needle-nose pliers, some other stuff. It was by far my favorite Microsoft item (besides paychecks) until today, when I tried to tighten Rosie's bike's brakes*. As I was trying to loosen a nut, the screwdriver's plastic body literally split in half lengthwise. It is now totally useless because what's left of the screwdriver gives me no more torque than my bare hands.
Scarf, Mickey Mouse hat
Not that useful.

So the only Microsoft-branded thing I have now that actually works is a bottle opener. Which sees so much action because, you know, I open so many bottles. I haven't gotten a chance to test the ping pong ball yet, but based on this track record it will probably explode after a couple hundred rallies.

*Rosie doesn't ride her road bike, so I do. Her brakes are terrible. Before I tightened everything today (which took forever), the front brakes could bring me to a stop on level ground but forget about it on a downward slope. The rear brakes were so bad that they seemed to speed me up even if I was going uphill. Yesterday it rained, and I was biking to class. I was rolling at probably 3-5 mph out of the parking lot towards the intersection. A car was coming so I tried to stop. Didn't work. I continued rolling at a ridiculously low velocity right into the middle of the intersection before I stepped off and used my feet to stop. At this rate, I might as well just use a fixed-gear without brakes (and carry a stick) like Charles has been raving about.

Other story: I was biking on Erwin, a road with two lanes in each direction and a turn lane (apparently it is inaccurate to call these "suicide lanes" because not enough people die in them) in the middle. A couple hundred feet from where I was about to turn left, I switched to the left lane since there was nobody in that lane as far back as I could see. At this point I was going fast enough to keep up with traffic and even to pass some cars, so it's not like I was being annoying. Then some stupid woman sped up on my right, rolled down her window, and yelled at me, something something something "LEFT LANE!!!"

When people do that, I keep hoping that when they are busy yelling out the window (or flicking me off... I got one of those this summer because some woman was unable to cut me off on the interstate, despite the fact that I had been in the same lane and on cruise control for about 80 miles) they aren't busy looking at the road and will just run themselves into a fire hydrant.

1:44AM

Sunday, September 14, 2008 (3 comments)

Drew!

DrewL434: hey it's pat
icydog1: hey
DrewL434: do you still have the thing set up so i can set drew's hosts so google is leia's metal bikini?
icydog1: it should still be up
DrewL434: ok so how do i do it?
icydog1: set google.com and www.google.com hosts entry to 66.156.89.63

40 minutes later...

DrewL434: hey
DrewL434: this is drew
icydog1: hey
DrewL434: so
DrewL434: patrick did something to my computer
DrewL434: how do i fix it?
icydog1: hang on let me channel my supernatural powers to identify what exactly is wrong with your computer over this AIM window
DrewL434: excellent
DrewL434: well
DrewL434: i mean, i knew he was talking to you, i'm assuming he asked you how to do it
DrewL434: anyways
icydog1: i have no idea
DrewL434: he set it so my firefox and internet explorer always re-directs from google to lemon party
DrewL434: so, like, if i go to to google, it redirects
icydog1: is that a lie?
DrewL434: um, no?
icydog1: thats pretty funny
DrewL434: yes, hilarious
DrewL434: anyways
DrewL434: how can i fix it?
icydog1: i don't know? contact google and tell them to stop redirecting you?
DrewL434: what?
icydog1: google's redirecting you right?
DrewL434: i go to google.com
DrewL434: or anything related to google
DrewL434: and it automatically redirects me
DrewL434: how can i fix that
icydog1: are you sure it's not google messing with you?
DrewL434: positive
icydog1: it probably knows you were just going to look at lemon party anyways so saved you a step
DrewL434: this isn't helping

Lemon party eh? Was he too embarassed to tell me the actual site (safe to click, though perhaps slightly NSFW) he was being redirected to?

5:16PM

Friday, September 12, 2008 (1 comment)

Did somebody ask for the exciting adventures of Donger?

Since it's September 11th (well, it was an hour ago), let's take a moment to look at how this country will end. Here is our potential VPILF (btw, whoever registered www.vpilf.com is a genius) speaking to a retarded 1st grade student. Seriously, the way she talks drives me up the wall even more than her complete and obvious lack of mental ability.

1:00AM

Wednesday, September 10, 2008 (5 comments)

You're probably tired of seeing Eric's car by now, so here's a new post.

The Large Hadron Collider was switched on last night. Some nutjobs think that the LHC will end the earth by creating a black hole that will eat everything, or something like that. For those of you who would like real-time status updates on the status of the earth, I direct you to Has the LHC destroyed the earth.com. It also has an RSS feed, which makes the site that much more useful.

EDIT: Found a live stream of the LHC. Definitely worth a look.

My math professor walked in this morning and said today is a good day because we still exist. That's one of the few things I've heard in this class all semester (the other thing was something about distinguishable balls).

The lack of girls in this class reminds me: the first day in Compsci 130, there were at least 7 or 8 girls, which is almost half the class. I was so shocked that I don't even remember what else happened that day... that's like 120% of CS major girls at this school! Yesterday during that class, there was one girl left, and that would be Tiffany. In the words of the well-endowed black man from Harold & Kumar, "The universe tends to unfold as it should."

Also, what the hell is this? In the first two days after the release of Google Chrome, there have been SIX exploits (and just on this one site)!

12:16 PM

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