More weekend reviews
May. 26th, 2003 06:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsIt was a good, long weekend.
Saturday, I didn't do that much, I'm afraid. I went up to Bellevue where I met a woman I was to tutor in the fundamental of C++. She's taking an extension course and her instructor is from the pedantic "Everything is an Object" school of OO. She's very bright, but she's like many programmers in that analysis and design don't feel like programming, so even though she's been through an A&D class where she learned both CRC and UML, when given her current assignment she just circled the nouns in one color and the verbs with another. Unfortuntately, this got her in deep because she didn't abstract enough in one case and over-abstracted in another. The assignment was a game simulation, and she had Game and Player, but she also had Turn, a class with no fields-- a good sign that something is wrong. She also hadn't noticed one other abstraction: the homework assignment included something about the game for which she had no noun: Rules. Given these hints, she was able to create a much saner collection of classes. I think we worked well together.
She has very slobbery dogs. Her husband works as a network engineer so, where I have a rinkydink Linux box as a router in my home, he's got a rack with Cisco hardware in it. Nifty.
I stopped by a computer store on the way home to pick up a new hard drive and some high-quality IDE cables, and without much fuss managed to get the whole system up and running in short order. It was quite nice; by the end of the day I had managed to get both Battlezone and Jedi Knight running. I struggled mightily with the cryptosystem, though; RedHat implented only AES, and I wanted to install others. It took me a while to work around the kernel headaches RedHat had given, but I finally got it. Still no 3D, though, on the Linux side.
And yes, that's mostly all I did Saturday. I geeked so much that I even forgot to eat until the very end, when I grabbed a frankfurter.
Sunday I decided to go with the family to Folklife. I had had enough geeking (didn't get much sleep, didn't want to do that again) and besides, it would be unfair of me to stay home and not help Omaha with Kouryou-chan the whole time. I set up a few downloads and headed out.
The first thing we did after reaching Folklife was listen to a father/daughter folk duo named "Katie & Mike Stern." I'm sure they were very sincere people, but the whole time I was listening to them I couldn't help but be reminded of Tom Lehrer's observation that "The reason most folk music is so atrocious is that it is written by the people." The stuff was so sappy. There was a song that the lead described as "a classic" about the world finally signing a treaty banning all war. Y'know, in 1927 all the major European powers signed a treating "banning all armed conflict on the European continent." The problem with such a treaty is obvious: it only takes one insincere person to ignore it for the whole idea to be a horrible, fatal mistake.
And you're not going to ban insincerity without some equally horrible regime.
Kouryou-chan got her face painted with a beautiful unicorn, and the artist was smart enough and good enough to balance it with some decorative filigree on the other cheek so she wasn't completely bizarre-looking. While I was there a young woman passed by me with convincingly Romulan hair: black, thick, cut to tab-stop bangs in the front with pageboy curls down the sides. Is there a name for that kind of haircut?
We went to lunch. Kouryou-chan had peanut butter and jelly (we were smart enough to bring lunch for her this time!), Omaha had something Indian, and I went and got a sandwich from Dixie's. Dixie's is where they sell The Man, the hottest hot sauce natively made in Seattle. I put a tiny amount on my sandwich, what I could effectively smear on a toothpick, and it was a mighty big sloppy pork barbecue sandwich. On the way back, I noticed some wetness on my finger; thinking that I had dripped some barbecue from my sandwich, I licked it off.
And then I Met The Man. It seems that what I had actually done was drop my finger in a small splash from the bowl where they kept The Man, and had just gotten an entire fingertip's worth onto my tongue without any bread or meat to moderate it. It was agonizing. I ate my sandwich just to distract myself from the pain and then polished off a 32oz. lemonade on top.
While we were there,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fallenpegasus found us. We watched a pale, scrawny guy with a t-shirt that read, "Chicks dig pale, scrawy guys," tie himself into the most frightening of knots. He was some kind of amateur contortionist, one of those lucky fellows who can apparently suck himself off.
Pegasus and I wandered over to hear Thione Dope, but the show was overbooked and there was no way we were going to get in. So we watched some belly dancers-- quite lovely-- indulged in some pomegranate juice-- yummy!, but overpriced-- and caught up with Omaha and Kouryou-chan while they listened to a Celtic band called Jiggery Pokery. JP had some nifty tunes, mostly traditional; a little raw around the edges, but they'd be perfectly in place in a tavern with people drinkin'.
After the band was done, we went to the wading pool where Kouryou-chan got in and ran around. I had to track her down by wading in myself, getting my pants soaked in the process even through I rolled them up completely. We ran into some acquaintances there, others from the pagan community and their collection of three-year-olds: twins, but very different in size and attitudes. The taller one is very cheerful, but has this almost scary rictus grin when she smiles, pulling her lips back like Jack Nickolson as The Joker. There was a small band of street performers behind us and they were quite talented.
The next paragraph contains TMI. Skip it. You have been warned. It prepares you for what comes later, which is even more TMI, and probably banned by the EPA.
Kouryou-chan said her tummy was bothering her and Omaha noted that what Kouryou-chan needed were some prunes, given that she had been acting a bit constipated. We found some at the grocery store across the street from the festival. While Omaha went dancing, we stopped on the grass to rest, and Kouryou-chan proceeded to turn me into some kind of art installation, hanging our belts and bags from my shoulders, draping a towel over my head, and then covering the towel with grass "so you'll be pretty!" Then she would tell people to "move out of my way, I'm looking at my art project!" as she paced around me, crossing her arms and going "Hmmm."
While we were there, Pegasus walked over to a woman with beautiful boots and complimented her on them. "Did you get her phone number?" I asked. He said he hadn't. "Did you ask for it?"
"No. Never was very good at the asking-for-you-phone-number thing."
I mean, what's the point in his working out so hard to get a hot body if he's not going to exploit it properly? She was a lovely woman in a colorful skirt and black top.
We caught up with Omaha doing the Balkans Dancing think at the Center House, but Kouryou-chan got squirmy so I took her off to ride on the carousels in the Northeast corner of the Seattle Center. She had blast, waving to me every time she came around the circle. On the way back, we paused at the open stage where a marimba band was playing some amazing stuff. I was dancing with Kouryou-chan on my shoulders and, suddenly, the back of my neck was warmer and wetter than it should have been. "Daddy," she said. "I'm wet."
Grief. We went to the center house where I pulled off my shirt and put on my sweatshirt; it was cool enough for that anyway. We took her into the bathroom and changed her, and then it was definitely time to head home. She didn't fall asleep in the car, but the moment we were home she said she was tired and ready for bed, so we let her sleep while Omaha and I stayed up for a little while longer.
I geeked, getting Quake 2 and the Linux X drivers for NVIDIA working, so I have really good 3D on Linux now.
Saturday, I didn't do that much, I'm afraid. I went up to Bellevue where I met a woman I was to tutor in the fundamental of C++. She's taking an extension course and her instructor is from the pedantic "Everything is an Object" school of OO. She's very bright, but she's like many programmers in that analysis and design don't feel like programming, so even though she's been through an A&D class where she learned both CRC and UML, when given her current assignment she just circled the nouns in one color and the verbs with another. Unfortuntately, this got her in deep because she didn't abstract enough in one case and over-abstracted in another. The assignment was a game simulation, and she had Game and Player, but she also had Turn, a class with no fields-- a good sign that something is wrong. She also hadn't noticed one other abstraction: the homework assignment included something about the game for which she had no noun: Rules. Given these hints, she was able to create a much saner collection of classes. I think we worked well together.
She has very slobbery dogs. Her husband works as a network engineer so, where I have a rinkydink Linux box as a router in my home, he's got a rack with Cisco hardware in it. Nifty.
I stopped by a computer store on the way home to pick up a new hard drive and some high-quality IDE cables, and without much fuss managed to get the whole system up and running in short order. It was quite nice; by the end of the day I had managed to get both Battlezone and Jedi Knight running. I struggled mightily with the cryptosystem, though; RedHat implented only AES, and I wanted to install others. It took me a while to work around the kernel headaches RedHat had given, but I finally got it. Still no 3D, though, on the Linux side.
And yes, that's mostly all I did Saturday. I geeked so much that I even forgot to eat until the very end, when I grabbed a frankfurter.
Sunday I decided to go with the family to Folklife. I had had enough geeking (didn't get much sleep, didn't want to do that again) and besides, it would be unfair of me to stay home and not help Omaha with Kouryou-chan the whole time. I set up a few downloads and headed out.
The first thing we did after reaching Folklife was listen to a father/daughter folk duo named "Katie & Mike Stern." I'm sure they were very sincere people, but the whole time I was listening to them I couldn't help but be reminded of Tom Lehrer's observation that "The reason most folk music is so atrocious is that it is written by the people." The stuff was so sappy. There was a song that the lead described as "a classic" about the world finally signing a treaty banning all war. Y'know, in 1927 all the major European powers signed a treating "banning all armed conflict on the European continent." The problem with such a treaty is obvious: it only takes one insincere person to ignore it for the whole idea to be a horrible, fatal mistake.
And you're not going to ban insincerity without some equally horrible regime.
Kouryou-chan got her face painted with a beautiful unicorn, and the artist was smart enough and good enough to balance it with some decorative filigree on the other cheek so she wasn't completely bizarre-looking. While I was there a young woman passed by me with convincingly Romulan hair: black, thick, cut to tab-stop bangs in the front with pageboy curls down the sides. Is there a name for that kind of haircut?
We went to lunch. Kouryou-chan had peanut butter and jelly (we were smart enough to bring lunch for her this time!), Omaha had something Indian, and I went and got a sandwich from Dixie's. Dixie's is where they sell The Man, the hottest hot sauce natively made in Seattle. I put a tiny amount on my sandwich, what I could effectively smear on a toothpick, and it was a mighty big sloppy pork barbecue sandwich. On the way back, I noticed some wetness on my finger; thinking that I had dripped some barbecue from my sandwich, I licked it off.
And then I Met The Man. It seems that what I had actually done was drop my finger in a small splash from the bowl where they kept The Man, and had just gotten an entire fingertip's worth onto my tongue without any bread or meat to moderate it. It was agonizing. I ate my sandwich just to distract myself from the pain and then polished off a 32oz. lemonade on top.
While we were there,
fallenpegasus found us. We watched a pale, scrawny guy with a t-shirt that read, "Chicks dig pale, scrawy guys," tie himself into the most frightening of knots. He was some kind of amateur contortionist, one of those lucky fellows who can apparently suck himself off.Pegasus and I wandered over to hear Thione Dope, but the show was overbooked and there was no way we were going to get in. So we watched some belly dancers-- quite lovely-- indulged in some pomegranate juice-- yummy!, but overpriced-- and caught up with Omaha and Kouryou-chan while they listened to a Celtic band called Jiggery Pokery. JP had some nifty tunes, mostly traditional; a little raw around the edges, but they'd be perfectly in place in a tavern with people drinkin'.
After the band was done, we went to the wading pool where Kouryou-chan got in and ran around. I had to track her down by wading in myself, getting my pants soaked in the process even through I rolled them up completely. We ran into some acquaintances there, others from the pagan community and their collection of three-year-olds: twins, but very different in size and attitudes. The taller one is very cheerful, but has this almost scary rictus grin when she smiles, pulling her lips back like Jack Nickolson as The Joker. There was a small band of street performers behind us and they were quite talented.
The next paragraph contains TMI. Skip it. You have been warned. It prepares you for what comes later, which is even more TMI, and probably banned by the EPA.
Kouryou-chan said her tummy was bothering her and Omaha noted that what Kouryou-chan needed were some prunes, given that she had been acting a bit constipated. We found some at the grocery store across the street from the festival. While Omaha went dancing, we stopped on the grass to rest, and Kouryou-chan proceeded to turn me into some kind of art installation, hanging our belts and bags from my shoulders, draping a towel over my head, and then covering the towel with grass "so you'll be pretty!" Then she would tell people to "move out of my way, I'm looking at my art project!" as she paced around me, crossing her arms and going "Hmmm."
While we were there, Pegasus walked over to a woman with beautiful boots and complimented her on them. "Did you get her phone number?" I asked. He said he hadn't. "Did you ask for it?"
"No. Never was very good at the asking-for-you-phone-number thing."
I mean, what's the point in his working out so hard to get a hot body if he's not going to exploit it properly? She was a lovely woman in a colorful skirt and black top.
We caught up with Omaha doing the Balkans Dancing think at the Center House, but Kouryou-chan got squirmy so I took her off to ride on the carousels in the Northeast corner of the Seattle Center. She had blast, waving to me every time she came around the circle. On the way back, we paused at the open stage where a marimba band was playing some amazing stuff. I was dancing with Kouryou-chan on my shoulders and, suddenly, the back of my neck was warmer and wetter than it should have been. "Daddy," she said. "I'm wet."
Grief. We went to the center house where I pulled off my shirt and put on my sweatshirt; it was cool enough for that anyway. We took her into the bathroom and changed her, and then it was definitely time to head home. She didn't fall asleep in the car, but the moment we were home she said she was tired and ready for bed, so we let her sleep while Omaha and I stayed up for a little while longer.
I geeked, getting Quake 2 and the Linux X drivers for NVIDIA working, so I have really good 3D on Linux now.
