huffy Facebooker

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People online sometimes need to take a chill pill and not assume everyone they deal with is like an angry Fark commenter or 4chan poster. A friend of mine on Facebook said “Luna Nueva” in a wall post, and some other friend of hers responded about how the adjective comes afterward in Spanish. I responded with “Actually, for some common adjectives, including ‘nueva’, the adjective can be placed before the noun. See http://www.dur.ac.uk/m.p.thompson/adjectives.htm”. My intention was only to say, in a friendly way, that there are exceptions to the general rule of adjective placement. Well, the guy got all butthurt over someone poking a hole in his blanket statement and responded with the following:

Sarah- I studied Spanish for 4 years but thanks for the ‘link’ I’m sure that will inform me more than any multitude of text books ever could. Actually it comes as a result of common placing which dictates its use, in the sense Jennzah was using it the adjective still comes after so ‘actually’ don’t patronise me, it’s still a general rule with exceptions.

I had to respond because, damn, way to get your dander up for no reason. I wrote back “Wow Harry, way to take my simple suggestion and blow up over it. No offense was intended, and I wasn’t trying to patronize you. Sometimes information can be offered simply with the intention of informing others about alternatives, not starting a flamewar.” Sheesh.

end of the semester rush

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I don’t know how, but I got a B on my last algorithms homework. I rushed through half of it because I ran out of time. For one I straight-up put “I don’t know how I’m supposed to get this from that” and he still gave me half credit on that problem. We have one homework left in there and I’m sure it’ll be painful, for one because all our homework has been painful (do you know how many elements there are in Z sub p to the e star? because I sure didn’t in that last homework) and also because this homework will be longer since he didn’t cover all the material in time for our last homework, so one of the problems that should’ve been on that will be in this homework. Ugggh, after Thanksgiving break, I’m going to have to work my ass off. I have to write a paper “on the order of” ten pages for programming languages, do that algorithms homework, and also read + review nine papers for software engineering. Tonight, my goal is to finish my software engineering project paper. I am now off to play some Sims and relax for a while before I get cracking on that.

Sims 3 World Adventures arrived

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Whoo, The Sims 3: World Adventures arrived today! I had preordered it on EA’s site but was dubious about it 1) arriving the day it was released (i.e. today) and 2) actually being left on my doorstep/mailbox versus being stashed in some package center for me to go and pick up with my little paper slip in hand. EA and UPS teamed up to make me happy, though, and I found the package left by my door this afternoon. Yay, no driving across town to pick it up myself from UPS or FedEx!

I got it installed with no trouble, though it took a while (maybe 10-15 minutes). There was a little silliness when I went to run it, surprisingly. I thought “do I run the usual Sims 3, or should I run the specific Sims 3 World Adventures program?”. Well, so I tried running the World Adventures launcher, and it prompted me to update with a game patch. Already? Fine fine, go ahead. So I got that installed and it shut down my launcher. Whatevs, I figured I’d try opening the regular Sims 3 launcher this time. So I did, and it prompted me for an update… Wait, didn’t it just do this? Seems like the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing. I was concerned that it would somehow be undoing whatever the World Adventures update had just done. When it finished installing, I opened the World Adventures launcher to have it bing! at me and say it couldn’t do anything with the Sims 3 because some other Sims 3 thing was already open. Er… So I closed that and opened… Well, I can’t remember which one I opened next, but I opened one of the two launchers and started playing the game. *shrug*

Though I’ve been playing with one family for some time, all its members are old and near death (and actually they live with three ghosts currently; how’s that for foreshadowing?) and it just doesn’t seem right to drag them out to a desert or to learn martial arts when really they should be relaxing at home growing Death Flower Bushes, just in case. So I made a new family and got to try out some of the new traits. I have a girl that’s Adventurous, Snobby, a Natural Cook, and she just happens to be dressed in the Sims’ version of Parisian attire. I made a husband for her that’s some kind of Asian, and he’s Disciplined and Brave, and I plan to martial arts it up with him. Sooo, now I’m building a house for them with a nice basement for storing Nectar (way to skirt that higher ESRB rating, Maxis!). I’m tickled with the fact that basements are finally an easy thing to make in the Sims, since always before you had to manually dig in the ground to a certain depth and it was always a bit wonky. I’ll be sure to post some screenshots once I have my Sims doing craaaazy foreign and adventurous things. I was pleased to note that the guide for World Adventures noted highly skilled martial artists will be able to teleport, as in The Sims 2 Bon Voyage.

giving up on the day, possibly due to frozen milk

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I probably ought to go to bed and as soon as I take a shower (which will happen promptly after I finish this post…), I will. I don’t know why I have such a time getting to bed, but I always seem to drag my feet about it. Tony commented once that he’s the same way, and it just feels like you’re giving up on the day. That idea has stuck with me, and I think I agree. If I go to bed now, who knows what cool stuff I could be missing! Usually for me, given my rather dull daily life (OMG why do you read this??), that cool stuff would be occurring online or somehow involving a computer.

So I’ve been working on a program for class wherein we’re supposed to write a rational class (i.e. a class that represents fractions) that supports dimensions (e.g. 1/2 foot, 2/15 Newtons, 1/4 seconds), and we’re to do it in Java and Smalltalk. My Java version is progressing nicely, I’m enjoying JUnit for unit testing, and it’s generally all going about as I planned (though with increased verbosity and frustration due to said verbosity that seems inherent in Java–grr). It makes me worry about the Smalltalk version, though, with Smalltalk’s lack of static typing and generics and interfaces and access control… Aaahhh! I’m sure I’ll come up with something and it’ll probably be quite akin to my Java implementation, and really, what has happened to me? I’ve been coding in C# so long that the dynamicness and duck-typing of Ruby seem more foreign now, all because of having to declare what my variable is and what interfaces it must implement and what methods it supports before I go using it. Darn conservative C#, wacking out my liberal Ruby zen.

All right, and now I will go to bed and I’m sure I’ll grumble to myself (and Jon, too, when I call him bright and early) when I have to get up for class tomorrow. I gave my milk a good thaw tonight (my fridge is serious) by running it under the tap till it was more or less liquid again, in most parts, enough to make some macaroni and cheese at least. So, I can make a nice latte in the morning with the already-scooped coffee that’s been sitting in the espresso-machine filter in the fridge since two days ago when I got a hankering to make a latte but was thwarted by my milk. Pfhew.

PC hard drive dying

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I don’t know if I blogged about it, but I certainly complained on Twitter about my Macbook hard drive eating itself at the beginning of the semester. Well, just this morning my Windows hard drive in my PC started acting up. When I booted the computer, I got a “DISK READ ERROR INSERT SYSTEM DISC” message. I unplugged and replugged my hard drive, both data and power, and it booted. However, when burning a backup CD of some Sims 3 data, it crashed. Jon unplugged and replugged the hard drive and it booted again afterward. I played The Sims 3 for a while as a test and it was fine for maybe half an hour, but it crashed again, first to desktop and then I got the Blue Screen of Death. (In Windows 7, no less!) Jon’s poking around in there now, trying out a different hard drive cable (it’s an old, old IDE hard drive that I wouldn’t mind replacing) and unplugging/replugging from the motherboard instead of just the back of the hard drive. If this doesn’t work, I think we’ll go to Best Buy today and get me a new, fast SATA drive because, seriously, I don’t know how old this 70GB IDE is, I just know I’ve had it forever as my Windows drive.

Update: Jon switched out the IDE cable for the one that was hooked to my CDROM drive, so I can’t currently use my CDROM drive but the hard drive so far has been fine. He plugged it into a different port on the motherboard, so I don’t know yet if the problem is 1) the hard drive, 2) the port on the motherboard, or 3) the first IDE cable. I’ve been playing The Sims 3 and nothing has crashed or acted up, so maybe it was the motherboard port or the IDE cable, and my hard drive is actually fine.

Here’s what I’ve been doing with my Sims:

ghost Sim
Right, so one of my [normal, living] Sims got an Opportunity to take the remains of a loved one to the science lab so they could be brought back to life. I didn’t have any dead loved ones, so I had my other Sim, a kleptomaniac, go steal something from the graveyard. What she stole was Vernon Carpenter’s remains. So my first Sim took them to the science lab, but the experiment didn’t go fully as planned, and I ended up with Vernon Carpenter as a ghost, but part of my family. He’s completely controllable and is just another family member. I designed for him this snazzy bedroom shown here.