the resounding silence

Darkside and I made no commentary at each other regarding yesterday's "You do know you're hitting on me, right?" comment on his part. I sat slightly more aloof from him. We still played "my claws are sharper than your claws" with our fingertips barely brushing.

Later today, as I sat deep in a programming trance, I felt a resounding WHACK! to the back of my chair. I spun around with claws out, ready to tear out some throats, to find Darkside grinning at me.

Grr.

I think he'll learn to not break me out of programming trance like that. He could have broken my trance far more effectively in a way I'd much more like simply by walking close up behind me and placing his hands on my shoulders. I wouldn't kill him for that. I might be a little grouched, if it'd been something serious I was working on, but I wouldn't turn on him with claws fully deployed and lunatic face on.

As regards romance, I think it's safe to say that direct romance must wait; the indirect games continue.

Programmer Humor

Thou shalt not call a subroutine "Alice" merely for the pleasure of calling Alice because, as the internal documentation says, you "think she'll know".

bonk on head

Came to school at six -- on time for once -- and groggy as all hell. Darkside bonked me over the head with a heavy textbook a few times, investigated some of my more accessible pressure points, and then bought me a very cold can of Mountain Dew, which he applied to my neck until I woke up.

It's hot and soggy and I think raining a little.

Ooooooops. Heh.

Y'know Slackerprep?

Well, that paper I typed for him... absolutely riddled with spelling errors.

Y'all may not know it, but I suck as an editor now that I've started writing and copying code. I can take something and type it up letter for letter pretty well, though, which is exactly what I did with Slackerprep's paper.

I'm not used to spell-checking. I used to be such a great speller, so I never had to do that. But once I turned autoedit* off to compensate for the odd spellings/conventions in VB...

I guess I'm SOL until I learn VB better and learn how to keep spelling correctly for both English and VB but not at the same time.

*Autoedit: the thing my brain runs to make sure I'm not making typos by making sure that everything that comes out of my fingers at least seems somewhat like English.

A long ten years...

5th grade.

Anybody out there who has clear memories of themselves when they were ten or eleven years old?

I was ten when I began writing my journal. I started it on January 16, 1991, the day the Gulf War started. I had, at the time, become very fond of the Anne of Green Gables series. Now, it so happened that the last book in the series was the story of Anne's youngest daughter, who was fifteen at the time WWI started. Rilla had a diary and there was a war; I identified a lot with Rilla and there was a war; I must then start a diary.

The content of the diary is inane, mundane, poorly spelled. I kept up the diary for three days in a row after the war started; I took it up again maybe a week later to report the death of my favorite pet; a week after that I noted that I was in the finals for the geography bee.

By March, I'd read back to the beginning of the diary and been appalled at my own melodrama. The end of June saw me writing occasional long entries about various stuff happening; this would prove to be the model for most of my future journal writing.

I've got a very good picture of the inside of my mind from that time period thanks to all this writing. Not only do I reveal myself through the writing, the writing summons up the memories I've got of being that person...

In case you're wondering where my perpetually online self is...

My computer and I are installing Windows XP.

Go read Penny Arcade.