Farsong Blog-o-Matic - February 15th, 2008

It's two hours after I normally get up. I don't have my 9-o-clock class this morning, and by going to my 12-o-clock, I'm probably going to be getting extra credit. For some strange reason, everyone wants to take to-day off.

Yesterday, I had an epic fall on the way to the bus stop. Walking down a 30° incline*, I slipped on a patch of the crusty icy dirty shit that now passes as snow. I made to grab a nearby sign post (one of those embedded in the concrete), swears punctuating the flailing. Instead of arresting my fall, I fell on my tail and slid towards the signpost. Straddling it. The post was inches from my nose. It was also mere inches from other places.

I'm glad I didn't slide mere inches further forward. But you think it's done, right? I did, too. Wrong; it wasn't. I now spin around the pole (as vertex/centrepoint for this translation) and proceed to roll backwards over my bag and over my shoulder, still swearing, and complete the tuck-roll. Like the kind I'd imagine doing from a moving vehicle.

I hope no one saw that, I muse.

I sit up, check my bag for damage, and swear once more realising, Damnit, I'm going to have to draw this now.

Precisely five hours later, my left ankle starts yelling at me, and proceeds to interrupt my concentration so much I could not complete my math--I just wanted some acetaminophen to dull the stabbing pain. I had to hobble out of the library, across two buses, and back home, which was all quite fun. The ankle's just stiff now, so no worries there.


Last night was also interesting. I was up late doing math (precisely because I didn't have class in the morning). Last night, I didn't dream about snakes**--I dreamed about maths. Factoring equations. Simplifying expressions. That's all there was in between my dreaming state and my waking state. No self, no others--just numbers floating past, factoring and simplifying themselves. This is the first dream I've ever had like that--about math--and it's probably also the first CS-related dream. We'll roll with this; see what happens.

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*This is a guess at the incline. It's seems steeper than it actually is. You want I should carry around an astrolabe?
**I'd actually forgotten the story about snakes and such until yesterday. I think I may have cleaned the story up more after this, but that's probably not anywhere online. This was also shortly before I finally got another laptop, and I do recall the story being written on a sketchy, loud linux box here at home. Sketchy because it was 800x600 on a 17" CRT and I still don't think the HDDs are bolted in there, and loud because it was all metal and no rubber for reducing HDD vibration. It also has a fan like a jet engine.

I think I might need to write more short stories. I'm actually pleased with this story. It feels like a blur--a vignette where there are only two people in focus, surrounded by the lights of the city, blurred against a deep depth-of-field.

What do you notice wrong with this picture? Bear in mind that this is on the campus of Eastern Washington University, where I attend.