Worus

Now Listening to: Force Your Way
Final Fantasy VIII OST

Saturday evening I went over to Dean’s. We were going to play Super NES for a while and go down to the Art Festival.

Earlier at work, I mentioned that we were going to the Art Festival that evening. Kim Pritchard really, really, really wanted to go. She said that if she wouldn’t be intruding, to give her a call.

I went to Dean’s, and we laid around for a minute or two. We discussed our days and I told him that Kim had wanted to come along with us this evening, and that we should give her a call to let her know what time we were going to go down to the Art Festival. Just as that conversation ended, the phone rang.

Mandy called and ask what was up. I told her, in a vague fashion what was going on. Enough to let her know, but not so much that she starts to stop caring. She ask if I could hang out for a while before hand. I told her that I kinda had plans, and that it would probably be easier to just wait. (Starting today, I should have more free time; knock on wood). She didn’t take that for an answer. So, after so much discussion I said “Fine, we’ll be over in a little bit.”

Dean said that he didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to either, but that was just because everything that was supposed to happen wasn’t going to. I called Mandy back and told her that he didn’t really feel up to it. She ask if I could just go instead. I was worried that if I said yes that Dean would feel like he was less important and being abandoned or something, but if I said no, it would be rude. Reluctantly, I told her okay.

We watched Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back at Josh and Abbi’s. It was great to get to see everyone again. I was only there for like an hour, but I was glad to see everyone. I felt really bad, though. I felt like the stuck-up snob who doesn’t have time for certain people. I felt like I’d given everyone the impression that I didn’t want to see them, which was absolutely false.

After I left, Dean and I went to Kim’s. I started to tell him how I felt, and he got way pissed. He, rightly, took it as a personal attack when I said that when he tells me that I should just go that he doesn’t care to ever spend time with my people. It certainly feels like I spend a hell of a lot more time with his people than my people, and if I’m going to spend time with my people it needs this huge appointment thing. In reality, he doesn’t think as I felt at all, so that’s good.

The other problem that I have is that I’ve been away from everyone for so long that I feel way self conscious about calling people up. At the beginning of school last fall, I remember feeling distincly out of place at an outing, and I think that’s the root of it. In any case, I can’t just call people anymore, and I think it makes me come off as antisocial.

After the Art Festival, Dean and I talked more. We fought, and there were small bits of yelling. It was all quite scary, but then again, fighting is always scary. Once we got over it, we just kinda laid in bed for about forty-five minutes, when I needed to go home.

Last night and today, I was working on my last programming project for computer science class. This one, we had to write an encryption and decryption algorithm. The algorithm worked in binary, but all input and output had to be done in hexadecimal notation. Needless to say, there were about 150 lines of utility functions that I had to write just to manipulate the hexadecimal and binary strings, and to convert back and forth, plus convert to the decimal system.

Eearlier today I had finished the encryption algorithm. I tested it, it worked, and life was good. Unfortunately, we never went over decryption in class, so I had to hack the decryption algorithm. After doing that, I coded most of the decryption algorithm.

g++ -o lucifer lucifer.cpp

Anyone that’s familir with the g++ compiler and UNIX can probably guess where I’m going with this. Most UNIX shells, including the one that I was using, have a nice feature that if you begin to type a filename at the prompt you can hit [TAB] and it will complete the filename as best it can. If there are multiple matches, it stops with only the common characters, waiting for some more input to continue.

By naming my binary “lucifer” and the source “lucifer.cpp” typing “luc[TAB]” produces “lucifer,” which is a really fast way to get to the name of the binary. For maintenence sake, I periodically remove the binary. It’s a habit I picked up last time I wrote a program because make couldn’t overwrite the binary for some odd reason.

siryn [58] rm luc[TAB]
siryn [58] rm lucifer.cpp
siryn [59]

I had just deleted my entire program. 430 lines of code down the drain. It was 5:30 in the afternoon, and this represented over ten hours of coding. There was no buffer on the terminal window going back to my code. It was totally gone. The program is due tomorrow.

In four hours, I successfully recoded the entire program. It is now not only more efficient, but only 319 lines, and at least two functions shorter. So, all’s well that ends well, I guess. Still, rm is a dangerous beast. Long live a.out and makefiles.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 2nd, 2002 at 00:05:09 and is filed under My Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.