Jan. 28th, 2007

I have been too lazy to post the last few days, so I'm going to make a couple catchup posts in quick succession to hit the highlights, so to speak. This one is about a phone conversation I had with mecha on um Thursday I think. I will copy-paste from IM.

[19:58:16] The Jennybork: I was telling him about the assignment I'm going to have in one class, where we'll be split into groups and each group has to write an interface to do something with "phidgets", which are things like LEDs and motion sensors on little circuit boards that plug into computers via USB.
[...]
[19:59:11] The Jennybork: He decided that what my group should do with the phidgets is make a system whereby a program running on his computer monitors his work in, say, a word processing program, decides when he has been working hard enough to deserve a break,a nd then sends a signal via phidget to light up an LED...
[19:59:36] The Jennybork: The LED will signal a Lego Mindstorms robot to trundle over to a mini-fridge and signal another Lego Mindstorms robot...
[19:59:55] The Jennybork: The second one will open the fridge, give pie to the first one, and close the fridge. The first pie-bot will bring the pie to him at his desk.
[20:00:03] The Jennybork: He calls it PieNet.
[20:00:14] [livejournal.com profile] emsworth: Errr. Wow/
[20:00:18] The Jennybork: Apparently if I do not help build it then PieNet will, from the future, send back a Piemanator to kill me.
[20:00:20] The Jennybork: Yeah, wow is right.
[20:00:20] [livejournal.com profile] emsworth: Could that actually work?
[20:00:25] The Jennybork: Actually, possibly.
[20:00:27] [livejournal.com profile] emsworth: What size pie is he thinking of?
[20:00:41] The Jennybork: A slice, on a paper plate, plastic-wrapped with a plastic fork in it, so there's no dishes to take back.
[20:00:50] [livejournal.com profile] emsworth: And not all that heavy.
[20:00:55] The Jennybork: Yeah.
[20:01:06] The Jennybork: He is bizarrely insistent that my group has to build PieNet for him.
[20:01:13] [livejournal.com profile] emsworth: Wow.
[20:01:15] The Jennybork: Or else he will murder them.
[20:01:26] [livejournal.com profile] emsworth: And he's not on medication?

The people I already told via IM about this said the following:

[20:02:34] [livejournal.com profile] emsworth: Tell him he blew my mind.

[20:12:50] m************: is he on any medication that might be affecting his mental capabilities?

[20:21:49] d***************: YES
[20:21:50] d***************: PIE
[20:21:54] d***************: FROM A ROBOT

Let me tell you it is pretty peculiar to have a phone conversation where for almost an hour someone is waxing enthusiastic about a system whereby robots bring him pie before he even consciously realizes that he needs it.
Yesterday mechamom and Quentin came down to take me grocery shopping and bring me some stuff that was up at their place in Indy. Turns out that there was a gun show in town, though, and since Quentin was driving, that means we wound up driving around a little until we found the fairgrounds where said gun show was being held. It was a fascinating experience to follow Quentin around and listen as he extolled the virtues of various firearms, many of which I had no idea how he could ever tell them apart. For a while I followed mechamom around too but she just looked at some crocheted baby clothes and stuff that were over to one side, which was boring. I bought genuine gun show beef jerky! It is branded "Boone's Choice" and the inkjet-printed label has a picture of some guy presumably pretending to be Boone. Yum beef jerky.

I only saw one guy with Confederate flag merchandise. That was something, anyway. There was one vendor who apparently felt the need to warn me and mechamom to be careful around his politically incorrect merchandise, I guess because our delicate female sensibilities might be overwhelmed by the sight of bumper stickers reading "I LOVE My Country / I FEAR My Government", but eh.

At another table there were little stickers reading "PROTECT YOUR COUNTRY -- BUY A GUN". I, uh. I don't think purchasing a firearm actually increases the protection level of this country in any way, fellas. By your logic, every time someone buys a pistol with the sole intention of armed robbery, he is still somehow making the country safer because, hey, he bought a small machine that was designed expressly to kill. What a patriot!

I have nothing against gun ownership. But you're not providing a public service by owning them, and you need to reexamine your priorities if an instrument of death seems the best way to "protect" your family. Guns are kind of neat; it is fun to take them to a shooting range or an isolated bit of land and blast at a target (or in my case the ground). Just please stop worshipping them, k? K.

As the three of us were driving back to town proper from the fairgrounds, Quentin joked that we should go to the Army/Navy store and then a strip club, thus completing the trifecta of turning me into the son he never had. Oddly enough mechamom was not interested in such a plan! Man what is with chicks anyway, they don't know how to have fun. Or something.

Eventually we were done grocery-getting, and the mechaparentals bid me good day and left. Then I took my new gloves that I mentioned in passing a few days back, and the needle and thread that mechamom provided me with since I can't find my own needles anywhere, and I stitched off the fingers that Quentin cut off for me. I don't think they were going to unravel any more than the little bit they already had -- certainly the pair he did up for himself some time ago is holding up -- but I was paranoid. So now I have Army-style wool gloves, with the thumb and first two fingers cut off at the tips, and the raw ends stitched up neatly. Hooray for dexterity.

That more or less was Saturday.
This one is going to be the hardest to write because it requires me to feel.

First of all, mecha. The results of one of his medical tests came back and said that, basically, the thing that was wrong with him for so long is now all better. We pretty much know what it was, why it was getting worse over time, though not why it started in the first place. He is still weakened and illish, but he is officially recovering.

Pity we don't get to be gallbladderless buddies, but then, at least he gets to avoid surgery this way.

I'm feeling relatively on top of school, at least so far. Of course, that may just be because as of yet I have had little in the way of assignments and no tests. The test that I expect to be awful is coming up Wednesday, and I guess then there will be either a shaky sense of "okay that is not so bad", or tears and terror. The professor told us that the usual score on his tests tends to be in the 60s, and that he curves "some but not that much". This is potentially worrying depending on whether he's talking about the mode or the mean. All I can really do for now is slog through the horrifically dry textbook and do my best to memorize the couple of hundred definitions of very similar-sounding terms, many of which are actually circular (such as the definition of "information system" starting out as "an information system that[...]").

Huh. That's lovely, that class's website has apparently decided that I am not allowed to log in anymore. Well, that's okay, there certainly haven't been enough things going wrong in my life lately. Let's have some more! Big problems, small problems, it doesn't matter, apparently, as long as I'm suffering.

Which of course leads into the part that is whiny enough to need a cut in case you want to skip it )

Profile

blarg

January 2016

S M T W T F S
     12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31      

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 24th, 2025 08:38 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios