confusion

Yea! You ever do something, maybe it was really nothing in the grand scheme but just something, that made you feel good about yourself because it was about the way things should be? I went to a lecture on International Human Rights tonight at the Inn’s of Court School of Law here in London, hosted by Amnesty International. The first half of the lecture was about stuff I have no understanding of—British Law, specifically the 2000 Human Rights Act. But I did learn something; the courts here have no way of over ruling an “Act of Parliament.” One of those problems in a country that has no formal constitution and all the laws are based on tradition… But the second half was very cool, it was about the ICC (International Criminal Court) and the history behind it. Very cool stuff, the lecturer talked about the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and how what hinders them—the main thing is the lack of a police force to carry out their orders, and the inability to prosecute aggression. Anyway, I was suffering from intellectual withdrawl here in London, I have only a few people to have meaningfull conversations with—one of them left for Paris recently, and I have not had a chance to go to any really intellectual things. I felt real good to think about something that is both intellectual and important in the world. Go out and do something intellectual! Learn about things like this, it’s good for you and good for the world!

Are all Computer Science Deans Assholes or is it just me?

I am working on a project for my Language Processors class; modifying a Parser and a Lexer to work, they took the short circute bool’s, the for loop, and the switch statement out of the language and we have to put it back in. Now a lot of people have been posting questions on how to get the for loop stuff to work (thats the first part of the projects) to the class discussion site. Well in my infinite wisdom I hacked together a solution that worked but involved changing the input files (adding one word to the definition of the for loops) I thought that maybe this had just been left out by accident, because without it the for loops look just like c/c++ for loops. So I posted an explanation of my hack to the website, with the question: “Is this right?” Well, an hour latter there is a reply from the teacher, who is the dean, which consists of a single line: “Maybe it’s your for loop semantic definition thats wrong?” Am I the only one who detects a note of sarcasm here? It would not be too bad except this is not the first sign that Dean Bolton has his head stuck somewhere between his sphincter and his spleen—in class, if you come in late he stops class the tell you not to do it because you are disrupting class, he does not seem to realize that HE is the one disrupting class and that if he would just shut his mouth and keep teaching none of us would have felt there was any interruption. Also, while his lectures are good, he seams to be a ok lecturer, his home work and lab assignments don’t seam to be understandable. Argh! Oh well, at least he does teach class, not like Dean Hamburger at Mason—he just hold a one person discussion about what he is going to teach in class, and the only person invited to the discussion is himself!

I’ve just had a shitty fucking day to end a fucking horrible week, which comes at the end of a fucking bad month!

My course work was late, because of bad network at school, shitty compatibility between windows/linux, bad implementation of eps in windows (take your pick) and being late means 10 points off of an already bad project because I was sick out of my mind while doing it. In fact I have not been out of my dorm except to turn in the two course works and eat all week. A bird shit on my jacket while I was walking back from the University, my cold is still fucking with me, and I found out that since last night the girl that I had a crush on is dating the guy two doors down from me. I don’t know why this bothers me so much, because I knew there was no chance of her dating me. But it still seams to be bothering me. To top all that off I found out that a guy I have known since I was eleven dropped dead on Valentines day! And I have a list of about 4 people who want me to fix their computers again. I have fixed about 10 in the past two days, people should just leave their fucking computers alone. They should realize when they don’t know what the fuck they are doing and just leave well enough the fuck alone!

I’m tired of being Mr. nice, Mr. grown up, Mr. has the answers to other peoples problems. I just don’t really give a shit about other peoples issues right now, because I hate to tell them—they don’t fucking know what issues are!!!

Fuck it all!

Valentines day was a real bummer… nuff said.

I finished the Brothers Karamazov last week, it is an am amazing book. The more Dostoevsky I read the more I see why his is considered one of the best writers ever. His books are filled with review, insight, criticism and adoration for the human condition.

I read Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist after that. It only took a few hours, it’s not too long and the language is simple and easy to read. That a good thing, I needed something simple and short after the 800 pages of Brothers K. But The Alchemist is a beautiful story about life. The main lessons I got from it where that one has to leave home to find home and take a chance on life. And that the answers are there we just have to stand back, take a breath and look for them. Life will take us where we need to go.

I read Watership Down in three days. I love that book. It is filled with morals and ethics, life and death. But like Tolkien’s Lord of the Ring trilogy, you have to read between the lines to see it. Richard Adams does not push it in your face, it reads like a myth; at times funny, tragic, depressing, heart warming—it talks of life.

I am currently reading The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. I am only a little way in, but it is a very interesting story. Unfortunatly it will be a while before I finish… I have a lot of Coursework due next week…

Haveing no luck finding a job in Europe…

What do you do when your whole world comes crashing down around you?
One day the sky is blue and clear.
Then a few cracks appear.
“No problem” you think, “I can fix those.”
Then before you can fix anything, the cracks become holes,
large chunks of your sky now block your path,
and above only darkness.
What do you do when your whole world comes crashing down around you?
It takes years to rebuild…