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Journal | Archives
It's been a long time since I've felt like smashing my head against a glass display. It's no fair that a single class could make me want to drop my major completely.
The chances of running into an old friend increase dramatically when one goes outside. Take, for example, Keiko, who was in my group last fall, who I haven't seen in ten months, who walked into Espresso Royale while I was doing homework. Small world? Big coincedence?
So I spent eight hours out of the apartment today while still being on campus. That was a decent break from these confines.
Yup. CS373 can die. And I need real fruit juice so that I don't go through Woodchucks so fast.
Jamiroquai's ‘You give me something’ is so addictive. The bass line and everything. Irresistible. It makes me want to dance all hip and funk-like and close to my [imaginery] girl.
(|) If you've ever wondered how to typeset pretty equations in a straightforward, non-Word-bashing manner, check out MiKTeX. It's a software package incorporating LaTeX.
What exactly can it do? Here's a snippet:
These two formulas were made from the following text:
$sum_{k=0}^{infty}{Omega}(k times
!big(frac{1}{k^2}big)^{Phi})$ newline
$int_{pi}^{6.9}!!int_{1}^{tau^2}
!bigg(frac{x^{k^2}}{sqrt{1 - y^{1.5}}}
big(y - {lg}(y^{y^y})big)bigg)dxdy$
Of course, there's much more to it, such as creating lengthy documents with automatic section numbering and whatnot, but the math typesetting is what makes this awesome.
I've been playing around with it a lot lately. It feels as if half the time spent on an assignment is solely for formatting. It's inconsequential as far as grades, but I feel better when the assignment looks nice.
There are downsides to using LaTeX, unfortunately. For starters, you can't specify an exact typeface size, nor can you specify leading. I don't think you can even change typefaces. The learning curve is also a bit steep when it comes to getting everything to work harmoniously, and it's annoying to have to recompile the source file each time you want to preview it. It also seems difficult to import (and place) an image into the document. And other things which I haven't yet discovered.
My hope – though highly unlikely – is that they'll release a LaTeX plug-in for InDesign. It could really make InDesign the top choice for typesetting. I mean, there's really no end to scientific textbooks. And, it'll allow me to use Rotis Sans for assignments.
If you actually bothered reading all that…you must be very bored. Because even I don't find that half-interesting.
The past several days have been wasteful. I'm tired of school. I want out. Today's actually been a bit productive, but, overall, I'm just constantly negative. Constantly. Time goes by and I sit here just…bleh.
I don't want to think about what I'm going to do after graduation, either, because there's nothing I could do to support myself (at least nothing sure-fire) short of working for the state again, or some job involving the programming I've grown to despise.
It might do me well to be broke and alone in, say, Manhattan or something. A position where I won't feel so comfortable and lazy.
For now, I need something uplifting, something more than this.
I'm tired.
Yesterday was definitely the culmination of all things negative. Reverse now, dammit.
Here we are at Luigi's Restaurant, out on Route 14 by the airport. Two customers have just started their fried appetizers. One of the customers begins choking, and signals for help using the international sign for choking. His friend is verifying the international choking sign and signalling the waiter with the international sign for ‘My friend is choking. I don't know the Heimlich maneuver – could you call for help?’ The waiter responds with the international airport sign for ‘I don't understand your last sign. I was raised in the mountains of Japans and do not know all of the international signs’. The friend is not familiar with his airport signs, but he tries his best to sign in Japanese kabuki, ‘My friend is now almost unconscious’. The waiter has mistaken his dance for the Tibetan dance of ‘The waiter is on fire’. He begins doing the international sign for ‘I'm on fire’, which, unfortunately, closely resembles the Pueblo sign for ‘I hate accountants’. Several local accountants, outraged, respond with the Accountant Dance of War. The manager, hearing the disturbance, gives the international cry of ‘It's okay, big misunderstanding, everything's fine. Except for the guy at table four, who's unconscious’. Calm returns to the restaurant and the waiter signals for a busboy to get a stretcher for table four. The busboy, however, being dyslexic, mistakenly brings table four a year's supply of radishes. Crisis averted, the customers take their seats and finish their meals.
[Friend is signing for the check. Waiter responds.] ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’
It's only a matter of time before The State is released on DVD, but the wait is too long.
I went in for a bit of hair trimming today because the back was becoming a bit unsightly. The girl who cut my hair (Janna, from what the receipt tells me) said she would have to take just a bit off on the sides to get the tapering and whatnot even with the back.
That broke the promise to myself of not tampering with anything other than the back for a year. But it's for the greater good, because my hair looks better now. I think? Maybe 5% better.
Oh, but I did get it shampooed in the salon. I've never had that done before.
So, 2004 January 15 is the quasi-official one-year mark.
The time has finally come for a new – and, sadly, the last – season of Charmed. Let the counter be your guide in planning out each week.
The triquetra needs to be a standard symbol in all character sets.
I could be a programming genius. Maybe I already am? My work speaks for itself.
Yeah, that's how I'm spending tonight.
Here's what you'll need:
—a car (sedan, or anything with a sloping back windshield)
—flat, plain piece of cardboard
—rain
—street lights (turned on) overhead
All you have to do sit in the back seat, lifting the cardboard so that it catches light. The falling raindrops create this pretty display of shadows and light that move like a flat lava lamp, or an electronic imaging of growing bacteria. It's much better than MTV.
There was a large crowd gathered around in a circle on the quad today. I had an idea of what was going on, but I wanted to make sure.
Sure enough, it was a preacher. There were even two cameras. But it wasn't Preacher Dan. Thus, it wasn't worth checking out.
I miss Preacher Dan.
Because of yesterday's grocery shopping – and further strengthened by a (ahem) missing-in-action dinner partner – I was motivated to cook up a nice dinner for myself, something beyond the excrutiatingly repetitive or unsatisfying things I'd come to rely on over the past several days. (Ice cream, bread, fishsticks, ice cream cake, stuff. Eh.)
Tonight's menu was something I hadn't done in several months: omelettes with chopped vegetables and toast. Something very simple, yes, but over the summer I'd come to like sunnyside-up eggs with a few dashes of salt and pepper – the yolk & whites sandwiched between a piece of buttery toast was too much to break away from.
Anyway, I started by washing and chopping my vegetables – mushrooms, orange bell peppers, serrano chiles, onions – collecting everything in a bowl. Once those were all cut and ready, I threw them into a hot pan of olive oil for sauteeing.
I quickly realized that there were far too many vegetables for three eggs, and that presented a problem: if I set aside half for another time, the flavors and textures would all be bleh.
No worries. A few seconds later I realized that I could set aside half as a side dish. As close to a side dish as one can get around this apartment, anyway. Problem solved.
The vegetables were finally done. In went three beaten eggs with some of the nicely cooked veggies and a bit of salt and pepper. A few patient moves with the spatula yielded one monstrous omelette. Slices of bread were heating in the toaster oven.
The small amount of effort yielded a nice little feast: three pieces of perfectly toasted bread with Country Crock spread seeping in, the large omelette cut in half, and sauteed vegetables, all nicely arranged on a plate.
Sauteeing blended a bit of the chile's spiciness into the other vegetables. Pleasant surprise. It was all delicous.
(I can't stay away. Sigh.)
Me and 6/7 bottle of wine plus Andrew and several cans of Old Style equals four hours until the extremely late boundaries of night in very interesting conversation. The best I've had, I daresay. Just nice to get these ideas out vocally.
I'm not secure in sharing these thoughts in my journal. Not that they're embarassing (for the most part), but it's just not the same. Or even with most other people. There's a security level in knowing someone for over eight years.
Regardless, back to my boycott. And time to sleep.
Time for another absence.
God gave us the gift of perversion so that we may better gauge the line of normalcy separating squares from circles.
I also have an idea for my first short story in several years.
I haven't been overly sappy in months, so I'll make a list of 23 things to be thankful for. In no particular order.
01. A loving – albeit disharmonious – family.
02. Friends who care for you more than you deserve.
03. Great music of all genres and styles.
04. Charmed (and other good television shows).
05. Sustenance and good health.
06. Delicious food.
07. Inspiration.
08. Close shaves.
09. ‘Untainted’ hip-hop.
10. Kisses.
11. Cute children and animals.
12. Phone conversations gone good.
13. The idea that not all dates are doomed to failure.
14. Hope.
15. Laughter.
16. Firm arms.
17. Tapping into your full potential.
18. Chili Lime Ramen noodles.
19. Pretty eyes.
20. Woodchuck cider.
21. Compassionate people.
22. Supernatural things.
23. A mom that will embarass you, but in a good way.
To Toby, your industrious and optimizing mind in the area of cleanliness & order has resulted in less networking clutter in the hallway.
To Andrew, I've made you addicted to Charmed, and thus are the only soul I can converse with regarding characters and plots and whatnot.
To Christine, thank you so much for the book! Although I'm tempted to return it to you because I really don't deserve it. You are seriously insane.
(The book in question is Typography: An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques throughout History, by Friedrich Friedl, et al. It's hella neat.)
This morning sounds and feels delicious from the inside. Walking around will confirm this.
[Confirmed. The cold has also helped to purify the air as well. Be on the lookout for that high school ‘fresh from PE’ high endurance roll-on deodorant scent, for it travels far now.]
I will adopt my nickname as my middle name. Andrew says it can be done fairly cheaply. So whenever people ask me what my middle name, I'll give them something.
At the same time, I like that most non-Bengali people don't know my nickname. Not that I'm embarassed, but it's just one of those things, like a secret.
More thought to be given.
(I could just give myself another Arabic name and keep the Bengali one to myself.)
Things that could make me cry if I have the determination to do such things:
- large tuition bills
- spending a nerve-racking two hours on simple circuit analysis, only to realize that my understanding of open- and short-circuits were switched up (which completely fudges everything, obviously)
Yup.
I might also have to make the unpleasant decision to drop my design class. It's been over two weeks and I just haven't had the focus to do anything for it. I don't want to half-ass it, either. Sometimes it just has to be all or nothing.
In an effort to test my generally high patience, some residents in an apartment building across from my room decided to play extremely loud music late at night. All I kept hearing were thumps and droning basslines. Nonstop for what seemed like ten minutes. Then a welcome silence. Then more thumping.
Initially, I did a good job giving up to my half-asleep side. The thumps worked their way into my dream. At one point, I thought there was a man in the courtyard of an apartment complex I was at playing music, so I ran outside and started yelling at him to play something different, which of course saddened him and made me feel bad. The Olson twins were also in it somehow – they were dating this guy in a band who was friends with my brother, or something vaguely along those lines.
The dream dwindled when two people split up from my group, and the four of us that were left walked away crying. I had to pee, and thus walked my extremely groggy self to the bathroom.
Back in my room, I couldn't take it any longer. With a little Yellowpage.com'ing and further encouragement from Ryan, I called the Champaign police at 3 AM. I gave them my info, they said they'd check it out. Good deal.
Back in bed now, trying to ignore the music. Waiting. Waiting. Twenty minutes later, silence.
Finally.
If I was a normal person I could've peacefully gone back to sleep with no problems. Instead, I kept waking and turning, and had a strange dream about my mom having another child, and me waiting in the hospital, talking to an eight-year-old boy who looked fifteen who said he wouldn't be able to become a good athlete when he's older because he's so big for his age (I told him he could do it if he just practices), and I had a mohawk-mullet-type haircut, and we were gathered around after the baby was born, with all these weird people I'd never met before, and we passed the baby around, and other odd details and events which escape me now occurred then. And it was just another one of those weird night of dreams and unrestfulness. The damage from the noise pollution had long been done.
A momentary end.
