Today is a TODO kind of day:
(no particular order)
– Des Moines Register Academic All-State application
– FAFSA
– MENSA scholarship application
– Thrivent scholarship application
– GMFCU scholarship application
– other scholarship applications
– Christmas thank-you notes
– Mancala hacking
– practice piano for Festival (yaah!)
…will edit this post as more come to mind…
Blog
[sigh] YAAAAH! [sigh] YAAAAH! [sigh] …
'Twas an interesting but aggravating day. I spent four hours in my car, a couple hours stocking children's shoes and looking bored, two hours picking out Christmas gifts, and a good six at work.. I need to detox.
I'll spare you the story of my sister's and my misadventures in navigating Sioux City. Suffice to say that I am a country driver, and it shows. Kind of unusual to see an SUV yielding to a tiny Ford Escort, but welcome nonetheless. Thanks to all the Sioux City drivers who could have killed me or flicked me off, and didn't.
Finished all my Christmas shopping, and actually started planning for upcoming birthdays. Some members of the family are harder to shop for than others, and I need all the head start I can get.
Hmm… definitely time for bed. My eyelids are drooooooopy. [sign off]
Darkness and Candlelight
Sioux Center, Iowa
15 December 2003
I'll be brief, because the lights still flicker some. I'm making this blog post in a text editor, since my ISP still isn't back up from the power outage.
It has been odd, these past few hours, not to have electric light. The power had been threatening to go out for a while, and so we were mostly prepared when it finally went for good. It wasn't like the pictures I've seen of the NYC blackout this summer — no long walks home across the bridge, no nipping down to the gas-powered Chinese take-out place, doing a brisk business with no competitors. The drizzle had been falling for a while when I left school, my head hooded to block the wind more than the water. I bought my blue-books for tomorrow's literature test, came home, browsed the Web, and programmed a little. By the time we were ready to head to Donna's band concert, the rain had turned to snow but hadn't yet started to ice. We arrived at the church only to find the concert cancelled, and returned to the safety of our home after stopping at McDonald's to procure supper.
Then the lights went out for good. Matches at the ready, we soon had illumination back, paraffin in lieu of electrons. My mom came home and we finished our supper, and then manhandled the garage door to put her van away. My sister and I had concentrated the candles on the kitchen table so we could see to eat, but it quickly morphed into a general family gathering, the McNugget boxes and hamburger wrappers discarded like artifacts of another era. Like moths, we were all attracted to the light, only venturing away from it briefly to use the bathroom or find a book. Just those candles in the face of the darkness, an aura of light, peace, and security in the midst of dark and cold and wind and snow. I could easily comprehend how people's imaginations could take over in those small hours of the night, before electricity, always on whenever it is needed, drove their demons away. It felt very 19th century, the family gathered around the table, the candles creating a soft, pervasive glow. Our pursuits were oddly appropriate for that era — I read Much Ado About Nothing, chuckling occasionally at footnotes; my sister studied the career of Napoleon; my mother read Christmas cards and then cut off their fronts for use later as gift-tags; my father read the newspaper. The candlelight concentrated us, forced us to share each other's company, yet not too grudgingly. There was truly something romantic about the candlelight, somehow a return to something simpler and purer. It was almost a disappointment when we heard the whir of the furnace fan and saw the digital clock on the stove turn on. We reluctantly snuffed the candles, as though we were losing something unusual, something precious, in those half-dozen waxen blazes. My father flipped the switch, and our eyes were assaulted with the blazing, cheery glow of electricity flowing through the house's nerves once more.
I didn't really want it to end. But end it did, and this child of the modern era is left to cope with a certain sense of loss, that nags me in a place I'd thought long scarred-over and forgotten. Some desires are best kept unsummoned.
LegalTorrents is (are?) quite good. I'm listening to binary's "ivor commodore part 3" off the Monotonik vol. 1 torrent right now. Also like the 8 bit people compilations. Trying to figure out a way to display an RSS/RDF feed on this page from AudioScrobbler just for kicks and giggles. I've got one final left at Dordt, so it probably won't be for a while. On the other hand, there are new developments at my mancala project — we may have a GUI after all, since graphics programming with SDL is turning out to be a breeze.
Anyhow, onward and upward… to cramming!
Hmm… In case you were wondering, my political views are (-6.00, -6.15) — that is, I'm a moderate libertarian leftist on the Political Compass. Basically they divide the US's Democrat-Republican dichotomy into economic (left-right) and social (libertarian-authoritarian) dimensions, and use a quiz to plot your political position. I'd say it's pretty accurate.
Ran into LegalTorrents at Lawrence Lessig's blog — freely-licensed MP3s are always cool. I'm currently downloading this and will report back whether it's any good or not.
Came across this gem on Theresa Nielsen Hayden's Making Light, a wonderful blog by a Tor copyeditor. Since my family was always of the rodent persuasion, this list of things to make your guinea pigs write on the blackboard was especially funny. I enjoy reading the blogs of people who know more than I do. 🙂
Hmm… just had an idea for my independent art class next semester. Will ponder.
Y'know, tabbed browsing is nice, but I'm to the point where I'll have a dozen tabs open at once. Sure, it doesn't clutter the taskbar, but is it really much of an improvement?
Was going to say something about how the Internet killed my attention span. It'll come back to me.
…bzzzzzzt… That sizzling you hear is the sound of cells dying from caffeine overdose. Methinks the two and a half cups of coffee was a bad idea… I am wired — I feel like I'm plugged into an electrical socket or something.
So I tried out The Coffee Fools' "CopHee," a roasted-to-order supposedly low-acid coffee. Their whole thesis is that freshly-roasted coffee beats the year old Folgers tins all to heck, and I have to say that it was a darn fine cup of coffee. It wasn't as big a difference from Folgers as I thought it would be, but it was still pretty good. Part of the problem is that I don't have a grinder, so I asked a local coffee-shop owner to grind it for me. She ground all of the half pound or so of coffee beans, however, and according to the Coffee Fools, something is lost after an hour or two. I wouldn't mind a coffee grinder for Christmas. 🙂 It is low on the acid, however, which is a very nice change of pace. I actually made a doubly-strong batch, and it still wasn't bad.
According to the site, their Arabica beans are lower in caffeine than the Folgers Robusta beans, and I can verify that too. The problem is that I was pretty well caffeine-free for a couple of months for All-State Vocal (grr…) — I didn't notice the rush I normally get from coffee or Mountain Dew, and so I figured I could have a couple of cups. Gotta finish off the pot, I mean. Then the caffeine hit me. Hard. It's slow-acting or something. So I'm wired now. Hey, at least I got my calculus homework done in record time. If you're into coffee, check out the Coffee Fool site — their prices are quite reasonable, and the product is pretty good.
Did some more work on the mancala project today in lieu of homework… sigh. I am proud to say that my first attempt to use function pointers worked as written and needed no debugging. Basically I cleaned up the makefiles a little bit so they're more extensible, and I added a function that sets up the ai functions — I was duplicating a lot of the code, so it made more sense to stick it in its own file and pass it the ai function in question. It should have made its merry way to the Web-based CVS repository by now. (checks.) Yup. ai-init.c revision 1.2. Coming along nicely, it is… (contented sigh)
Coming down off the caffeine now. I'm not crashing, at least, like I normally do. I've still got a current event to do for government class. Shouldn't take long, and then off to bed. Good timing, I guess.