So it's Thursday of Finals Week, I haven't stayed up all night studying even once. I have one last final tomorrow and I just don't care anymore. I don't even remember what the class was about. Linux stuff. Bash and Perl and socket programming. Maybe I should go over my notes.

I am getting better at this programming stuff, I think, at least I think I'm better. I have a better idea about how to put together my poetry program. And I have a new assignment from Clint: implement 'Asteroids' for a couple of different platforms. I dunno, I may have crossed a line somewhere this semester. I've spent all semester writing programs in languages I don't know, and that was tiresome and unnerving, but now I'm a little bit inured to the feeling. So all the dorky little projects I have in mind aren't really intimidating me so much anymore; sure I don't know how to to write them, or even what language to use, but so what, that just makes them like every other project I've done this year. I need a program to convert text into image files for the fridge magnets poetry project. Oh I know, I'll write one. Hey, I haven't written anything in Unicon yet, I'll just write it in that.
Right after finals we're driving back to our hometown in Oregon. We'll stay with Colleen's folks and then my mom, and probably want to sleep a lot. But we'll also get to see our friends.

Update, and so on.

So I got into Grad School for the fall. This will be good, if I also can get a tuition waiver and a job in the department. But at least in means I'm on track for the Masters degree now and can skip some of the non-CS related Bachelor's requirements. I could theoretically skip the math, but that is such a bad idea, besides, I like the math.
We went to another poetry reading last Thursday. Jory Mickelson, a TA in Colleen's poetry class was reading from his new chapbook. It was good work, possibly not totally butt-kicking, but solid, coherent, playful. He's totally deserving of the MFA he's going to get next year.
And an interesting contrast with the woman that read before him. Whereas Jory's poems had a strong rural western style and voice, Ciara Shuttleworth set most of her poems in San Fransisco. It made me wonder if it is even possible to write anything but a youthful/urban-alienation poem set anywhere near SF, and if not, what is the minimum distance from SF you have to be in order to write something non-alienated? Or at least non-foggy? The fault may be mine. I am a poor critic, and I can't even remember what she was saying. It was trying for urban and edgy and it involved cigarettes.
I got started on my automatic poetry generator project, just an hour or two, enough to realize that it was a huge problem that I didn't have time for. I need a lexer and a parser to go along with my bag full of fridge magnets, also some composition rules. Hm, I wonder if I can't do a touch interface that lets one move the fridge magnet word blocks around on the screen, letting the user supply the polish that the machine probably can't. Hm.

Spring Break

Is upon us. I just hope we can rest. These semester thingys are long and quite tiring. We're half-way through. I've been mildly over my head the whole time. I guess it's fun, but when I get tired it seems a bit frightening as well. I'm working for the Dean of the College of Engineering for the rest of the semester, which is great, except my job involves stuff I can't do yet, like programming our new Surface computers to do Neat Stuff which we don't know what is yet using a optical touch-screen interface I don't know anything about in a language I haven't learned. YeeHaw! I'm a CS major, yes I am, and I'm finding that my ignorance on the subject of Computers and Computing really is infinite insofar as the upper limit of it is undefined. And people are going to ask me how it's going, and I'm going to say that I'm learning a lot. Which is true. I can now write a "hello, world" program in four languages.
Gotta pack.
This here blog needs more pictures.

Faith and Cynicism

While I was laughing because of one of our dear friend's poems, (and it was really funny) my own excellent Colleen informed me (blandly) that I was the most cynical person she knew. I thought 'this cannot be true!' I don't think of myself as being especially cynical, especially not to the degree of being an outlier. So I went to look it up, on Wikipedia, of course. I'll just insert the first line.
"Cynicism is an attitude or state of mind characterized by a general distrust of others' apparent motives, or a general lack of faith or hope in the human race."
Oh, well, that's OK then. A general lack of faith in the human race doesn't seem particularly inappropriate; but I don't want to belabor the point, many better thinkers than me have been over that ground. But I also hope that by now I've assimilated more of the Gospel into my thinking than that. Sure we're going to do bad things, and suffer in our turn, and then die lingering, painful deaths (as Evan Wilson assures us), but in the middle of that, in the middle of all of that, God loves us, and nothing can snatch us out of his hand. Perhaps I don't have faith or hope in the human race per se, but I don't really feel the lack. God's faithfulness gives me faith. His love makes it possible for me to love, and this inevitably mitigates my cynicism a little. I hope.
PS: Colleen, my sister, my bride, be my Valentine.

In which we stop and ponder cars.

Well here I am buried in Language and System software, wondering how I can translate a CS degree into designing and building cars. There's no giant rush to figure it out, I just have this small obsession that won't go away. So I am going to humor myself for a moment and put up something about my own fantasy garage. Ok, not the garage per se, just the cars that persistently present themselves to my imagination. Here we go.

This, being my own car, may not qualify as a fantasy. But it sort of is; sometimes I just want to pinch myself and make sure I'm awake. The Mazda Miata is on everyone's list of the best sports cars ever, to the point that Jalopnik has banned it from it's own weekly top-ten lists on the grounds that it would be on all of them and can therefor be assumed. The same sort of deal occurs at LeMons races, where anyone showing up with either a Miata or a BMW E30 is handed a liberal collection of penalty laps, because otherwise no-one would race anything else and that would be no fun. Ask a question to the folks at Grassroots Motorsports. The answer is always Miata.
I've already mentioned car number two, also near the top of everyone's top ten list: the BMW E30. E30 refers to the chassis code of BMW's 3-series cars from 1985 to 1991. Still pretty light, but stiffer than it's predecessors, the E30 was very popular and they sold a lot of them. Which is good. Slightly bigger and heavier than the Miata, it is also holds more stuff and seats more people. BMW invented the whole idea of a sports sedan, and a lot of people still think this was their best one.

A lot of people will demand that I resign my Enthusiast card for this next one, but I can't help it. It is the 1995-2000 Buick Riviera. Not a performance car, but a luxury coupe. What's compelling about it is just the shape: it unites the sleek with the voluptuous in a way that I find irresistible. I'm not going to resist.

Here's another picture, because hey, I'm feeling a little defensive about it. All cars provide a means of transportation, but they could and should do more than that. This Buick does. If it's more sensual and soothing than exciting, that's still good, and it is very lovely to look at.

Just for comparison, here is a Jaguar XK6 from roughly the same era.

The design is more restrained in its elegance, more conservative. It has read Browning's "My Last Duchess" and learned it's lesson. I would like to drive them both, then decide.

But now to try to win my Enthusiast card back. Another persistent favorite of mine is the Lotus 7. Still in production after more that 50 years, it's simplicity and purity put it in a different class. The tiny Miata is a thousand pounds heavier.

At this point I'm way over-due to say something about the almighty Subaru WRX. This is Idaho after all, and when we have to go somewhere, sometimes what we need is a lot of power and some undefeatable all-wheel drive. All Hail.

I doubt I will ever be able to obtain anything other than 1:43 models of some of these, so I might as well round off the list with some cars that I love irregardless of the fact that other people own them and I never will.
Something with a Pininfarina badge, because art: the Fiat 124 Spider.

In the years between 1952 and 1962 or so, Studebaker made some really lovely cars.

A 1953 Studebaker Starlight.

A 1961 Studebaker Hawk. These cars were much smaller than most American cars of the era, and are as sleek and lovely as nearly any of the comparable European cars of the era. Just for comparison, here's a 1960 Ferrari Superamerica:

It makes me go back and puzzle about the Studebakers. Where did they fail? Did they have all that style lavished upon them only to be cursed with lame mechanicals? I want answers.

On a sunnier note, here's a  BMW 2002:

Oh, hey, every BMW.

Here's a pair of Porsches. There is no substitute.

A Cayman and a 911. I'd drive either if I had to. Ezra Dyer says that the Ultimate Porsche Driving Experience involves sliding backwards into a tree at 200 miles per hour. So at some point prior to that I should just settle. I guess. Got a Porsche in your barn? Consider donating it to me, you know, for Science.
These are a pair of micros from the fifties: A Messerschmidt Kabinroller on the left, and a BMW Isetta on the right. I have this feeling in my heart that the world will rediscover Micro cars in the not too distant future. A few companies are playing with the idea now. I want to get in on the fun.

I really like the concept of the Kabinroller, Cabin Scooter in English. Besides being a fun layout, something like this might really work in the Pacific Northwest: economical, eco-friendly, and rain-proof. Add modern mechanicals, modern materials, maybe AWD, and yes, I can see a market here. Must have enough power to go up these hills. Easy to do with today's engines. Ok, I'm on it. Raise some money, hire some engineers...

Lambda Calculus

So today I learned of the existence of Lambda Calculus. When I explained to Clint that it was the mathematical foundation of Recursion (and Caculability) and that I was changing my middle name to Recursion (or at least making it recursive somehow), he walked me up to his office and pulled a bright yellow book off of his bookcase entitled The Lambda Calculus: it's syntax and semantics by HP Barendregt (North Holland Press, 1981), put it in my hands and said: "This book will kick your ass."
So today I started getting my ass kicked in a slightly more serious way. I'm very glad now for the class I had last semester in discrete math, as my first glance at LC showed some symbols that were a little familiar. But my first glance also showed me a typesetter's nightmare of symbols that really really weren't. In fact, it looks like the kind of text that Lovecraft might have described in a story shortly before the protagonist's clothes are found in a noisome puddle of primal goo. My lucky day, then. I probably need help.

Spring

Spring invariably starts with a big heaping dose of Winter, so I'm not surprised that my plans have been changed. As a post-baccalaureate student I'm not really eligible for much in the way of financial aid, and being new to Idaho, I'm still paying Non-resident tuition. This is the rate that they are charging wealthy Saudis, which is private-school high. So I'm only going to take one class this Semester: CS210 Programming languages. I'm not too discouraged, I will just keep plugging away at it until I can either get residency or get into graduate school and get the non-resident tuition waived.
A slight edit is in order. I have discovered that I need to take six credits per semester in order to qualify for financial aid at all, so I have added CS270, System Software. This class will put me deep into the guts of Linux, emacs and so on. And thus hopefully I'll get less in the way of frosty glares from Clint for not knowing how to do anything.
The down side to this turn of events is that I only have one class with Ser this semester. She in taking Calculus II.