why i am destined to be a workaholic...

you know, when i was little my dad was finishing up graduate work and would take me to his office all the time... there i would hang out, if you could call it that, frolicking in the row after row of cubicles under the ground... there i developed my inner sense that offices are home, carnegie mellon university are home, and home involves lots and lots of computers. for some reason, cubicles did not quite make it into that definition of home... and neither did ridiculous amounts of summer air conditioning. anyway.

i thought of that because when i am here later in the evenings i often think back to when i was little and would wander around mostly-empty corriders at cmu...

how little we end up travelling when we think we can get away...

summer

last week i saw someone taking money from a homeless person and then punch him. i am not sure what happened; either s/he (i couldn't tell) was stealing from the homeless person or the homeless person had stolen from her/him. i was on the bus and couldn't do anything about it and it was very frustrating. that day i lost faith in humanity and became very sad.

something happened at some point later that made me think that humanity is great. i suppose it was the return of my human vanity.

anyway, the main point of this post was to say that i like summer because there is time for working hard and time for playing hard, but then i remembered the above story...

my journeys in europe... (pre-robocup)

this is going to be a boring, overly detailed chronicle of my trip to london and bremen, germany for the robocup world cup 2006. so i flew out with andrew friday the 9th... we took a red-eye type flight, which was kind of terrible because sleeping on planes is never very fun. i read a lot of the brothers karamazov. the highlights of our trip were the very long customs line, the little boy licking the railing in the customs line, and having to carry our luggage and the computer moniters all over the tube and a temporary bus because of "engineering" along the tube line.

anyhoo... andrew and i were very tired by the time we got to london, but that day we managed to see the tower of london, where they imprisoned and executed various traitors (including some queens as well), the london bridge, and shakespeare's globe. we also got to walk along this cool pedestrian footbridge.

the next day, after seeing some things with the group, andrew and i did some sight-seeing on our own, which included the big ben, the houses of parliament, westminster abbey, and buckingham palace. we saw the CUTEST parade of old men who were former guards to the queen. (it was so so so so cute.) we also went to picadilly square and realized there was nothing fun there. we also walked through a park--hyde park, maybe?

that night, we once again got no sleep as we spent that night in the airport... it was not that fun; i don't like getting no sleep much. it was all right though; i got to read some papers. the next morning we took a plane to berlin, at which point we realized we had too much lugguage to see the city. it was all right, though, as we got to see some of the city on the train. i greatly enjoyed using my german dictionary.

after spending a few hours at the most pimped train station ever in berlin, we finally got on a train to hamburg. this train was a lot of fun because the seats slid down and we could sleep on them. i didn't get much sleeping done, because as soon as i fell asleep jie started tickling me. after hamburg, we went to bremen...

...in bremen, we discovered the most pimped out dorm rooms ever. which was very nice. i was very very tired and slept very much the first night--very fortunate, as i did not sleep very much the rest of the nights. once again, we were somehow a day late for setting up. a bunch of us ended up sitting on a grassy knoll for a long time while jie, kristina, and alex attended some sort of mandatory meeting about which we had not been told. we made all these elaborate plans to meet up with the others of our group who were arriving later, but it turned out they were all unnecessary as we ran into them as we were leaving to carry out the plans.

the next few days involved setup, work, work, little sleep, work work watching robots. the other leagues there included the aibo, mid-size, humanoid, robocup junior, and robocup junior dance. this entry is becoming quite long, so i am going to start a new one...

thus beginneth another week

and in this manner i live, not understanding just how much i will never be young like this again.

syntax highlighting

i must say, syntax highlighting is going to make my summer about 100 times better. yes, i am easily satisfied; yes, i like pretty colors; yes, my summer was going to be that bad. for those of you who don't know, syntax highlighting for code is when they color different kinds of statements different colors--for instance, they will color "if," "print," etc. statements yellow, literal strings pink, etc. if you don't program, this probably does not mean much to you. ever since i found out not only how to highlight my code, but also how to adjust the colors to the ones i want, i have been incredibly, incredibly happy. my window at present is dark gray with very light blue text. my red is a pale salmon color; my yellow is a soft pastel. ah, the small joys of life...

haha let's give this another try

i'm not good at keeping up with things, but we'll see how this goes. this summer i have a desk in the closet (well not so much, but just as good), which affords me just the right amount of lack-of-privacy for me to write in this. i'm pretty excited.

i'm pretty bad at writing for the public, even if the public is not actually going to read what i write. maybe i will tell no friends about this and see how long it takes until people start coming across it. i predict it will take countably infinite number of milliseconds... to be precise.

maybe to make myself seem like a more colorful character i will start italicizing things and spelling things in the british manner.

anyway... how my life has been. i am reading buddenbrooks, which marianne told me is one book i should read this summer if i read any books at all. of course, since i became afraid of not reading any books at all this summer, i decided to read this book as soon as possible.

i've also started work, which is quite exciting. i sit at my desk and eat nutri-grain bars all day. it will take me quite a while to adjust to the working lifestyle--i really don't comprehend sitting at the same desk for hours on end every day of every week all the time forever.

speaking of work, i am still there--so i should probably go. a bientot, mes amies.