2004-04-25 - 7:26 PM
There were these two moments today that kind of made me go "Eh..." In a profound, grinning kind of way.
We were walking, Andrew and I, to get some caffeine and break up the monotony of the computer lab. It had been around 5 hours, and I was so fried I couldn't wrap my head around a simple if/else statement and had been completely confounded by an array-out-of-bounds exception.
For the non technically oriented, that meant I had become stupid.
Walking into the university equivalent of a quik-E-mart (no booze, no papers, no not dogs, no Apu), there was this freckly, dejected-looking blonde gazing mournfully through the window at the clouds floating rebelliously along the burning Arizona sky. "How are you doing today?" Andrew said by way of conversation, as I tried with all my powers of will to decide between Code Red and Cherry coke, between beef jerky and a milky way to munch on.
"You know...
I wasn't even supposed tobe here today.
I snapped up from the jerkey aisle and looked at her, as though I had just solved some mighty mystery.
"Dante?"
She laughed and told us she had roof access, but no hockey sticks, and we laughed and bought our caffeine and left. But in my head, I'd just met Dante.
The other moment was walking back toward the computer lab, idly musing with eachother.
"You know, " I started, "The chalkboard isn't nearly big enough for that many of us to sketch out anything meaningful. We should just have a UV light and some of that paint, pens or something. By day that brick wall right there," I stopped and pointed, "Would just be a brick wall. But if you shined a UV light on it, oh man... Nested table tags, 'new' and 'malloc' and 'typedef' everywhere."
He stopped walking and paused and looked at me. "It's interesting you use Time and Malloc in the same thought process,' he said slowly, speculatively, a long, lanky arm running his balled up fingers through wild, curly hair. "In the story The Time Machine, the villian guy in the future, that was his name. Remember? There were a bunch of cavedwelling sub-humans who were afraid of sunlight and obeyed Malloc. And we're headed back to a computer lab. With a bunch of cavedwelling sunhaters, worshipping Malloc..."
I dunno, he said it better.
-Alex
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