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Below are the 14 most recent journal entries recorded in
The Wu-Tang Clan's IT Team Lead's LiveJournal:
| Tuesday, December 25th, 2007 | | 11:35 am |
| | Friday, October 26th, 2007 | | 1:44 pm |
| | Thursday, October 26th, 2006 | | 9:50 am |
Would you move to Seattle to write software? I think my bike would get wet. | | Monday, October 16th, 2006 | | 11:27 pm |
Me vs. On Campus Recruiting
=1= [Awkward Chat] "When you were at FlusterCo, you wrote..." "Primarily EJB components, crap like that." "Crap?" "Well, the individual pieces, they weren't crap. Just the entire framework. The whole EJB debacle. The ridiculous industry that used peer pressure and free mousepads to convince managers that they need slow web frameworks and giant relational databases in order to put together a site on the web where you can buy boots. That sort of crap." "Ah. We use that crap." "You do?" "Yeah. We're very happy with it." "Did you get a free mousepad?" =2= [First "Technical Question"] "So now that you've seen what this function does, can you write some code for me that might do it?" "Sure. Do you have a language preference?" "No. Whatever you'd prefer is fine." "Okay, I'll do it in Scheme." "Um." "Yes?" "Don't do it in Scheme." =3= [Second "Technical Question"] "Let's say you had a series of formulas like 2 + 3 * 4, and you wanted to store them so that you could process it easily. What data structures might you use?" "Stack." "A stack?" "Best just to convert it to prefix notation on the fly, use a stack. Then we can pretend we're an HP calculator. You ever use one of those?" "What if you were committed to infix?" "How about I tell you how I'd convert it from infix to prefix, and then use a stack?" "I'd rather you didn't use a stack." "I like stacks." =4= [Second "Technical Question," Continued] "And what if we didn't want to have all of these if/then statements? What if we wanted to be able to add new functions easily?" "It's easy to edit if/then statements." "But if we wanted to add something new..." "And you didn't want to write a new if/then case." "Right." "Well, I suppose you could subclass the object and implement this function separately in each subclass." "Right." "And then every time you have an error, you get to check each subclass definition." "Yes." "And of course since each of those functions does almost the same thing, we could write all of our error checking and preparation in the parent class." "Exactly. That's what I'm getting at." "And then when one subclass works differently, you'll override the parent method and so you won't be sure exactly where you are on the call stack when you get your error." "No. We would discourage people from doing that." "Yeah. Code commenting. Maybe you could write in capitals, 'DO NOT OVERRIDE THIS METHOD.'" =5= [On the Phone] "Hey, this is K-, from the interview today. I'm delighted to say that we'd like to have you back again to talk more about the position." | | Wednesday, September 20th, 2006 | | 8:23 pm |
Dearest Professor
"Classify all groups of order p 3, then write explicit formulas for multiplication of elements, particularly when one of them is a factor group of the semidirect product of two cyclic groups of order p^2" my fat sore ass. Thank you. | | Monday, May 1st, 2006 | | 7:21 pm |
What I Learned from the Great American Boycott 2006
It is going to be a bitch to get a burrito once the Department of Homeland Security ships everyone back where they came from. This leads me to suspect that Taco Bell is sponsoring immigration reform legislation. | | Tuesday, December 27th, 2005 | | 5:34 pm |
why does nobody like my Sesame Street spec script?
HARRY: Bob isn't going to like it, your being here. ERNIE: You saying I should leave? HARRY: Did I say you should leave? Did I make a prescriptive statement? I did not, sir. I made a statement about what Bob won't like. I graced you with a little of my furry blue insight. ERNIE: It sounded like a threat. HARRY: You've got a guilty conscience. THE COUNT appears behind the bar. He speaks with an Eastern European accent, and his eyes are cold and dead. COUNT: What'll it be? ERNIE slaps a fifty dollar bill on the bar. ERNIE: Glass of milk. COUNT: Just one? ERNIE: Don't start with me. [He turns to HARRY.] They still call this place Hooper's? The old man's been dead... what, twenty-five years? HARRY: Bob keeps it just the same. HARRY motions to a trio of old men playing cards in the corner booth. HARRY: They like it that way. Same signs, same menus. Abierto and cerrado at the same times. They come to talk old times, smile at Bob, learn how to say "butterfly" in sign language. It's called atmosphere. THE COUNT places a glass of milk before ERNIE, and slaps down a wad of bills, chuckling. COUNT: Forty-eight! Forty-eight dollars on the... ERNIE: I heard you the first time. HARRY: You show that kind of cash, Bob's going to hear about it for sure. ERNIE: That's the idea. HARRY: Not that it's any concern of mine... ERNIE: It isn't. HARRY: But this isn't about your old roommate, is it? ERNIE is silent. HARRY shakes his head and laughs. HARRY: He was always the smart one, that's for sure. Too smart for this. You think he'd be here for you? Shit, man. He wasn't sentimental like that. He'd adopt a couple more pigeons and call it even. BOB has slipped behind ERNIE. He has one hand in a pocket, and places the other on ERNIE's shoulder. BOB: It's been a long time, E. ERNIE: Eight years, three months and fifteen days. BOB: Put down the duckie, and let me buy you a drink. | | Tuesday, December 13th, 2005 | | 5:35 pm |
infirmities
You would think that someone taking three math classes a semester would be able to: 1. Remember the sine and cosine addition formulas without rederiving them from Euler's identity. 2. Remember the formula for the volume of a cone instead of just integrating the area of a circle with r going from 0 to h. 3. Multiply a matrix in his head without grunting and making weird hand gestures to represent the dot products. 4. Recall how to integrate by parts without differentiating f(x)g(x) and then using the linearity of integrals. And yet, I cannot do any of those things. I sometimes feel like I am faking it. | | Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005 | | 12:46 pm |
Fundamentalist Christian cleric Pat Robertson calls for the execution of an infidel. Funny how you don't see responses from so-called "moderate" Christians condemning assassination and extremist violence. When will they speak out against far right Christian terror? Probably never. But you'll continue to see the media treat Christianity as a "religion of peace," instead of as a death cult whose members are told they'll be rewarded in the afterlife for their unprompted aggression. This will continue until Christians decide that they love human life more than they love blowing up South Americans. | | Friday, June 10th, 2005 | | 10:57 am |
Boring stuff
I'm playing around with writing a library to do matrix arithmetic in my dinky Scheme implementation. I decided to compute determinants by expanding cofactors, so I wrote this function to get the minor of row n and column m of a matrix (that is, the matrix left when row n and column m are deleted). Since I am treating a matrix as simply a list of row lists: (define (minor matrix n m) (transpose (except-nth (transpose (except-nth matrix n)) m))) If I'd written this in C, it would have been a nightmare of for statements. I like Scheme. | | Thursday, June 2nd, 2005 | | 9:39 am |
When you get into Berkeley, they send you a certificate of achievement, suitable for framing. It says: This is what you've been waiting for, the good news. You've been admitted to Berkeley. The sound you hear is the world opening up at your feet. It's the sound of ideas popping. Of every language, every point of view. Of conga drums, carillons, and a thousand things you've never known before. There is truly no place like Berkeley. Anywhere. And you've earned a place here. We think you can take this excitement and make it your own. Take the world's ideas and forge new ones. Learn. Imagine. Experiment. Create. Change the world. Funny, when they rejected me last month, they didn't send me a letter that read: Hey, you hear that? Over the wall there? It sounds pretty good, doesn't it? You wouldn't understand it, though. It's complicated. Have a good time at Chico State. I like the idea of just collecting acceptance letters from prestigious schools and putting up a Wall of Possibilities in the office. Something that says, "Hey, I may be a dropout and something of an underachiever, but I do well on standardized tests." | | Thursday, April 28th, 2005 | | 4:35 pm |
Deeply Upset and Offended cornered me outside my Advanced Composition class today, wanting to know how I did on the latest in-class essay. Better than her, it turns out. Which prompted a tirade: our professor is unfair, insensitive, out of touch. I practiced my interested but non-committal look; I don't always remember to side with labor over management, especially when I'm doing well in a course. DUO ended by complaining that papers in which she disagreed with the professor's opinions were graded more harshly. "I wouldn't know," I told her. "I just write what I think she wants to hear." DUO blinked. "What if you don't agree with her?" "Then I write something insincere." "Why would you do that? Just to get an A?" It was my turn to look incredulous. "Of course I do it to get an A. I'm not here to win arguments with English instructors about the effectiveness of causal assertions in Virginia Woolf essays." She sniffed. "I can't write something I don't believe in. It doesn't feel right." "It feels fine," I said. "There's a song in my heart. I'd whistle but I have this thing with my lips." "I just can't. If you want to sell yourself out for a grade, that's okay with me. I care about my integrity." And she stomped down the hallway. So here's the thing: none of what I told DUO is true. I love to argue with my professor; at least half the time, I pick a topic that I think will annoy her. I love to fight so much that I was pretending to be conflict-averse, hoping that DUO would be disgusted enough to yell at me about it. I am not a well man. | | Tuesday, April 19th, 2005 | | 4:39 pm |
You know all that crap that your guidance counselor and your parents fed you about finding a career that would pay you for doing what you wanted to do anyway? I used to listen to that and snort. There wasn't much that I actually wanted to do. When I was programming, I used to evaluate my days based on whether or not I had accumulated more stress than I'd released. Being relieved--that I'd met a deadline, that a product had shipped, that a manager hadn't yelled at me--was the closest that I came to enjoying my day. I've felt more or less the same about my studies since returning to school. I am relieved when I do well on tests and papers, but the actual process of studying and writing about this stuff is mostly drudgery. Until this semester, and in particular, my linear algebra class. Yesterday the teacher didn't show. No note. After twenty minutes or so, most of the class left. But a few of us stayed to talk about some of the problems from the homework. I started writing out some of my solutions on the board, and in response to another student's questions, I began to expand upon and explore the ideas behind the problems. "Let me see if I can prove this theorem over the field of complex numbers too," I said, and started to write. When I finished with that, I tried to explain some problems on weighted inner product spaces to a couple of other students. And in the middle of my explanation, it hit me with perfect clarity that I could do this for the rest of my life, that I would be perfectly happy to talk about these silly, abstract, trivial results forever, even if nobody paid me to do it. And I looked in the faces of the other students in the room, feeling simultaneously grateful that they were listening to me and very sad that at some point or another, they were going to wander out of the room, and I'd have to wait for another day, another chance to talk to other people about the most interesting ideas in the world. I'm studying right now for a test in this class, and it's so much fun that I feel like I'm cheating, somehow, like I'm getting away with something by playing around with linear algebra and calling it studying. I can't believe I got to be thirty-one years old before I figured out how much fun this stuff was. I am so grateful that I didn't have to wait longer. | | Wednesday, September 17th, 2003 | | 11:36 am |
System Status Update
All Wu-Tang primary and secondary systems are online. The Shaolin instance of the Suckas database (SHAO-SUCKA) will be down between 18:00 and 19:30 Eastern for scheduled backup and maintenance. If your team needs access to this data, please use the failover instance (SHAO-SUCKA-MYNGAZ) during that period. Please contact us if you have any questions. |
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