[insert name of beatles song here]

Posted on 24th April 2011 in Something Daily

Yesterday I got the first comment ever to be perpetrated on this blog that involved a positive reaction to one of my computer tutorials. It was the one where I explain how to make the keyboard backlight buttons work on Macbooks running Ubuntu. Surprisingly, someone actually followed the steps and it worked for them! Unexpected, for sure. Yet, of course, totally awesome.

I spent most of this wonderful afternoon in central park with my friend Sarah, just chatting and enjoying the very nice weather. I would have felt awful not spending at least part of today outside. I was tempted to wear shorts – that’s how warm it was, you guys. I got over my fear of sitting in the grass in new jeans, and I was reminded of the Tower of Terror by all the buildings surrounding central park. You know, they kind of look like this when you’re in the park and there are trees blocking the lower portions.

At least that’s what I think whenever I’m in the park. It reminds me of when we went there, and I rode that ride for the first and last time. Falling straight down isn’t really my thing. I like falling sideways, or forward.

I continued learning assembly, C, and as a result, memory architecture, today, and learned an interesting lesson in the process. Of course, this makes total sense, but I had to learn it firsthand. I’m following a tutorial that uses Linux and the GNU debugger to step through programs and teach assembly, and I decided to try it on Mac. I downloaded XCode and started running all of the tutorial examples, but soon found out that all of the register names are different under Mac. EIP wasn’t doing anything for me other than causing an unknown register error. So I examined the registers, and sure enough, they were all totally different from the Linux ones. I’m sure they have similar functions, but for now, I’m sticking to Linux, because that’s what the book I’m using covers, and it covers it very well. Interesting lesson, though. I also noted that the memory addresses that my Mac was displaying were twice as long as those on my Linux system, which makes a lot of sense as the Mac has 4GB of RAM and the Linux box only has 2GB. Hooray for learning.

Maybe I’ll go watch a movie tonight. Maybe I’ll just keep coding. Both are fun.

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I Almost Hit an Elderly Man with my Skateboard Today

Posted on 5th March 2011 in Something Daily

I had a somewhat rare day today, in that I was incredibly active for the majority of it. There were three times today when I sat down and started to work, and then for one reason or another, ended up not doing that at all, and instead going out to play in the wonderful weather we had today. At first it was because I realized that it was way too nice out not to go skateboarding, so I headed to Stuyvesant Town again, where I managed to land 3 180s in total – something that I’ve never been able to do before now. I’m definitely getting the hang of it. I also came very close to hitting an old man with my skateboard, and it ended up getting stuck under his little old-man shopping cart thing that old people always seem to have with them on the streets. But I went to go pick it up and I had to go right up in front of him, and as I was getting it he glared at me and said something along the lines of “thats not so smart….I saw a skateboarder get hit by a cab yesterday – the cabs don’t stop….that’s not so smart.” I was embarrassed so I pretty much just said “I’m sorry, I’ll be careful” and kind of skated off…I went home after that. He was a grumpy man.

So I got back and Eric’s friend Rachel was still around, and London was recording in my room. It being a great day, my sometimes-talked about plan to make half shirts was brought up again, and Justin, Eric, and I each made our own halfshirt (mine is sleeveless, and I got an anchor ballpoint tattoo from Eric). Dressed in this ridiculous manner, we went to central park to play frisbee, which was awesome, as it was something that I hadn’t gotten to do in months, it being cold and schooly. But it was a great time. This dad brought his son over to play with us (the son was probably about 3) and they had matching red shoes….awesome! I got back from that and pretty much immediately went for a stroll with Sarah, so this is really the first time that I’m getting a chance to sit down and clear my head today. I don’t regret it though, everything about today was pretty much awesome. It’s good to not worry about work every once in a while, even though that’s something I don’t really like to do too much.

I’m going to learn some more about PHP now, and hopefully also get my data structures homework started, because these things usually take a little while. Oh also I just ate a Blue 9 meal in five minutes, and I kind of feel like I’m going to die. Talk to you guys later.

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