Mark’s beer face

I plan on writing later about how I’m becoming increasingly put off by how women are treated in Stranger in a Strange Land, but I don’t want to get into that now because I need to start on my algorithms homework soon. So, I’ll just share with you this photo I took on my phone of Mark sampling my Franziskaner beer today:

Mark trying beer
My friend Mark after sipping some beer

You might surmise that he does not like the taste of beer… And you’d be right.

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paper done and slow-ass clinic

I finished my programming paper! I’ve sent a copy to Jon to review it and should hopefully mail it off to my professor tonight. After the semester’s over, I plan on releasing my programs for that class on here, probably under the GPL as I’ve done in the past. I’ll stick that paper up here, too, since maybe some of y’all care about my ideal programming language. Contrariwise, maybe some of y’all care what I did on my summer vacation (I worked), or whether I like long walks on the beach and heartfelt poetry (meh).

Jon and I went to an urgent treatment center earlier for his sinus infection and the pink eye he has developed as a result of infection. Turns out he doesn’t have a sinus infection, despite all his congestion and coughing, but rather has an ear infection. I told him his head’s all messed up since he has the pink eye on his right side and the ear infection on his left. I sat in the waiting room and read Stranger in a Strange Land the whole time while trying to ignore Are You Smarter than a Fifth-Grader and other daytime television crap. Also, every time I hear some Republican gripe about socialized medicine, one of the main concerns I hear is that it’ll take forever to see a doctor. They always reference the shortage of doctors and abundance of lines in Canada; having never been to Canada, I can’t verify this. If any of y’all are from Canada, let me know how it goes when you need to visit a doctor, will you? Anyway, obviously these conservatives have never been to American doctors’ offices, because it took forever today for Jon to get in and get back out. We sat in the waiting room for maybe an hour to an hour and a half, then Jon went back and sat some more, waiting on his doctor to get around to him. All in all, he said he talked to a nurse and a doctor maybe ten minutes, got a prescription for some antibiotics, and we were out the door. He essentially paid $90 and we waited for three hours in order to get permission to pay $4 at Rite Aid for some drugs.

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page nine and Santa humor

Well, the ice on my car has melted and the brief snow we had this morning is over, so now it just looks like your average gray winter day out there. (On a side note, you people what spell “gray” with an ‘e’ wig me out. I’m lookin’ at you, Melissa.) I stayed home from work today to work on the algorithms homework and programming languages paper that are due Thursday, with promises of making up time later this week after school has calmed down. Jon ended up staying here today instead of driving back to Cinci after his boss sent him a text message saying the roads were hell up there. I’m glad for the extra company. :)

I’m on my ninth out of ten pages for my programming languages paper, but I’m scrounging for ideas. I’m writing about what an ideal language, at least for me personally, would look like. I’ve talked about unit tests, static and dynamic typing, if and unless, symbols, and open classes. I suppose I can talk about how loops would look in the language, and talk about how I’d like Ruby’s iterators to be included.

I think it was Melissa (different Melissa this time!) who posted Sketchy Santas on her Twitter, and I’ve been laughing my ass off at some of those photos. This child is the most morose-looking creature I’ve seen, and I don’t think it’s the Santa in this photo that’s sketchy so much as that saxophonist in the really short shorts. Most of the photos consist of screaming kids who look like they desperately want to get away. I don’t get why a parent would subject their child to that; of course they’re going to wig out, I’d wig out too if you had me sit upon some stranger’s lap!

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new theme: Tetrad

Despite having lots of school work to do, I have managed to create a new theme: Tetrad. The name comes from Color Scheme Designer, which I used to create a tetrad split of colors; the four colors are used on the four main sections of this site. I’ve tried viewing the site in Firefox 3 in OS X, Chrome in Windows, and IE 8 in Windows. The round corners look best in Firefox (they’re actually applied everywhere I specified! IE and Chrome slack off on this). Let me know if the theme looks awry in your particular browser, please. Other feedback and comments welcome, too. :)

If for some reason you’re not seeing the new theme, you can try explicitly choosing it. I’ve had trouble in the past such that I had to clear out a 3till7.net cookie from my browser before I could see a chosen theme on all pages. The old theme Block Pastel is still available if you prefer it. You can read more about all available themes (just these two right now), including credits, on the About page.

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finisher of summaries and snuggler of the sick

I’ve been pretty productive today, considering it’s a Saturday and I usually try to slack off on Saturdays. I have accomplished the following:

  1. Finished the final three paper summaries for my software engineering class, which is fortunate since they were due today;
  2. Wrote a good part of a new layout for this site (guess it doesn’t have to wait till after finals after all);
  3. Took out the trash (o lord, if you had seen it… three bags! three!).

Jon is sick and has been for the last few days. He’s all concerned about getting me sick because he thinks it’s a cold or the flu, but I haven’t been worried and keep waving off his fretting so I can snuggle him more. He’s sleeping right now, for which I’m glad because last night he woke up every couple of hours to cough or blow his nose, and apparently didn’t sleep well even when he was able to sleep. His aunt loaded him up with a nice cocktail of drugs, the half of which I don’t even know about but it’s enough to where he has to keep them in one of those little daily pill holders so he knows what all to take per day. I’ve been trying to convince him that if he still feels crappy on Monday, he ought to just stay here–nuts to driving back to Cinci. We’ll see how that pans out, though, because he feels obligated to go in despite being sick. Guy’s got a stronger work ethic than me…

I’m trying to use up some leftover juice and I’ve come up with a pretty tasty combination. It’s, oh, we’ll call it 3/4 orange juice, a splash of pineapple juice (I drained what was left of the jar), and maybe 1/4 cup black cherry juice. It’s that Grovestand orange juice, too, so I practically have to chew through this drink–just the way I like my O.J.

Also, I was a good Samaritan today (er, at this point, yesterday), at least in a minor way. I went to Starbucks to fetch up coffee for myself and tasty, tasty artisan roll sandwiches for mine and Jon’s breakfast, and when I pulled in, one guy was leaving with his gas cap off. There’s a gas station nearby, so I figure he just left there (I sure hope he wasn’t driving around the city for very long like that!). I didn’t want to reverse and talk to him from my car, so I hastily parked and ran over to his window. I made the universal sign for “roll down your window, dude!” and he fumbled for a bit with the buttons before he got it down. I informed him of his gas cap and the little gas cap door (gas flap?) being open, he paused for a moment, then seemed to understand me (he was Asian; language barrier?). He put the car in park and I felt satisfied enough to head into Starbucks; I saw him screwing on his gas cap as I went in the door.

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