confusion

Ok, so Friday morning after language processors class I went to lunch with my friend Liana, while we where there a couple of the Americans I know from my database class show up. We sat around talking about what we wanted to do for the weekend and one of the Americans, A█████, liked my idea of going to Dublin for St. Patricks day. So we walked down to STAtravel‘s office on campus and purchesed two round trip tickets to Dublin—departing Sunday morning at 9 am and returning Sunday night at 9 pm! What could be better than 12 hours of Dublin on St. Patricks day?

Anyway that night I got a call from another of the Americans, Sherman, that they where all going to go out to a bar in Angel to drink Guinness because if you drank 5 you got a free hat (it’s big, green-black-and-white and says Guinness – St. Pat’s 2002,) whats not to love about a free hat? I’ll tell you, 5 pints of Guinness! That shit taste like used motor oil! Not to mention it has almost 1000 Calories a pint! Lets just say that we where all quite drink by the time we all hat the hats! And for some reason we decided it would be a smart thing to eat spicy Thai food afterwords! Oh… my stomach!

In the morning I got up at a quarter past 5 to take a shower and meet A█████ down in his room. I had to remind him to bring his passport—which lead to much comidic irony later, but I am ahead of myself. We walked, in the pooring rain down to Barbican station. It was closed. The tube does not open till 7 on Sunday’s. That was not a good thing, as we thought we needed to be at Herthrow by 7ish since our fligh left at 9… So we took at cab—cost: 50 pounds! (25 each!), not a good beginning to this story…

We got to the airport, it stoped raining, and checked in, they told us we did not need to be there till 8, meaning we could have taken the tube and saved ourselve a collective 50 pounds! So we sat in a cafe in the terminal and drank OJ to help recover from the Guinness binge of the night before.

At 10 am we landed at Dublin Airport, and we got off the plane and line up for immigration. But I could not find my Passport! So I ran back to the plane and found it on the seat! (ok thats a little bit of comidic irony but just wait.) Then took the city bus to the city center. It was raining. The next 9 hours is like a modernist novel—short extracts of situations that don’t quite fit together to form a coherent story…

…pub-beer-statue of James Joyce-bar-Bailey’s-rain-parade-pub-beer-jumping fence to take pictures of statue-parade-pub-Bailey’s-beer-driving wind and rain-gift shop-pizza-beer-“should we buy Sherman that sheep?”-rain-beer-Bailey’s-bought Sherman that sheep-beer-pizza-Malaysian Grande Prix on tv at bar-Bailey’s-“why did we buy Sherman a sheep?”-beer-rain-choaking statue of James Joyce-Bailey’s-“Because he will like the feeling of soft sheep wool against his skin at night.”-beer-buy post card of Joyce and burn him in effigy-beer-bus-airport…

After all this we checked in at the airport and went to get a beer at the lounge—at this point we are completly drained, but hte buzz is waring off after a 40 minute bus ride and we have another hour till the plane takes off. So while we are sitting drinking our last Irish beer I start looking for my passport—lo and behold I could not find it! So I’m sitting there going through all my pockets and my camera bag trying not yot A█████ know I cannot find it again and thinking to myself—I just had it in my hands when we checked in and when we ordered the beer. So A█████ says to me “Don’t leave you damn passport on the plane this time dumb ass, you loose that thing and your screwed—especially at Heathrow, they’ll do a full body cavity searh on your ass.” So I, hand in my camera bag feeling for my passport, says to him “I won’t loose it, just as soon as I find it.” “What? Tell me your joking.” “No, I just had it but it’s not in my pocket. Where the hell…?” So I look over to the bar and there it is… (p.s. for those among you too slow to pick up on it, that was the comedic irony alluded to above!)

Anyway, we managed to get back to London sans full-body-cavity-searches, and guess what. It was rainning! Anyway, we stumbled back to dorms and all was well… We even gave Sherman his sheep—now named Molly, the failed first copy of Dolly, the organs did not clone so well. (Note: Molly is a fake sheep skin rug about 3 feet long with an oversized stuffed animal head.) The only thing Sherman could say was; “What made you think of me when you saw this?” Answer: Beer & Bailey’s!

Last note, on the subject of Irish Beer: Guinness is nasty, see above, but A█████ and I ordered one in Dublin to test the old tale that it is better in Ireland… it’s not true. And half way through the pint A█████ looks down at his and says, “I really don’t want to finish this.” “Neither do I.” I said back, “Want to leave it?” “Yea.” So we turned and walked out of the pub while the bartender just looked at us.

A Zen Poem:

A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself over the edge.

The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.

Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man then saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other.

How sweet it tasted.

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!