Geocaching - posted by magicite
The last few weeks have proven to be rather uneventful, outside of my newfound desire to go geocaching all the time. If you find yourself in the TC area and would like to go geocaching sometime, just let me know.
Memories of a Good Friend - posted by magicite
I'd like to talk about my best friend when I grew up, Randy Feidt. I've only mentioned him once before in this post (briefly). The ensuing paragraphs meander and perhaps serve no obvious purpose, but I feel as if they are important. Please read them.
When I was growing up, I had but one male cousin my age: Randy Feidt. As you can imagine, we did everything together when we could. Up until the mid 90s, he lived about ten miles away, so I would on occasion either go over to his house, he would come over to my house, or we would bump into each other at our grandma's house.
I remember one time when I was spending the night at his old house and we closed a door in his room for some reason. When we awoke, the door had been mysteriously opened. When we went to go investigate, a motorized firetruck of his on a high shelf started to spark and move. We hightailed it out of there. Being the kids we were, we thought it was a ghost. To this day there's still no explanation for what happened. It was not our imagination.
In the mid 90s, Randy and the rest of his family built a house more or less in my backyard. Let me tell you, it was awesome. Now, we could do whatever we wanted to do all the time, and we wouldn't have to get rides from our parents to do it. Since we lived amidst a creek and woods, we'd often find ourselves playing there. Like I had done with my brothers, and had continued to do after Randy moved nearby, we'd build dams in the creek and forts in the trees (dams and forts are what every young boy lusts after). In the wintertime, we'd pull out some sleds and go sledding both at my house and at his house, since we were both on hills. We'd have competitions to see who would slide the farthest. It was fantastic.
At some point my brother Joel and I bought a pet hooded rat after seeing a segment on them on TV. Little did we know that the rat we bought (we named her Milo, by the way, from Milo and Otis) was not only female, but pregnant at the time of purchase. One day, Milo gave birth to numerous new hooded rats. Randy ended up with one of them, and it grew and grew until it eclipsed Milo in size. How both of us convinced our mothers to let us have a rat, I'll never know.
As we got a little older, we continued to do these things, but we expanded our hobbies a bit. We were now old enough to have BB guns, so we would shoot pop cans or the mud (to make it splatter) or other things (like old barn windows...I mean, scratch that). We were also in Boy Scouts together, which meant we went camping together often. Two summers in middle school, we were both on the same little league baseball team. Even though I was beyond terrible, he continued to practice with me and we had more good times.
In early high school, during one of the summer breaks, I introduced Randy to a couple games I was playing, and he was hooked. I do believe he came over every day that summer (or so it seemed) just so that we could play video games together on the computer. At the time, Randy and his family had an older computer that couldn't run these games, so he started an unsuccessful campaign to get his parents to buy a new one. After he figured out this wasn't going to work, he started to seriously consider saving up to buy one for himself. Granted, he didn't have a real job yet, but he was convinced he could do it.
On multiple occasions I went with Randy and his family to their cabin up in northern Minnesota. This would have been before Randy started to smoke. How do I know? Well, a friend of Randy's stepdad came to visit one time and brought his daughter and her friend with. Of course, they just happened to be our age. The normal high-school-age flirtation ensued (Randy really liked one of them), and eventually they both took out a pack of cigarettes and lit up. They offered us both a cigarette. I quickly declined, but Randy hesitated. Eventually, he declined as well, but I'm fairly certain he only declined because I did. He really wanted to impress the girl, but didn't because he knew it would be bad for him, and my rejection reminded him of that.
Not that it mattered. Starting around middle school, the path in life that Randy and I were on began to diverge. We started to have different interests, different friends, and different habits. I became, and remain, someone who worried about school all the time. Randy, on the other hand, did the exact opposite. He stopped studying altogether. His friends all smoke and drank (who knows what else, to be honest), and he followed suit. By the time Randy and I graduated from high school, we had nothing in common but our childhood memories. Even so, we still got along great, and every time we'd see each other, we'd shoot the shit and talk about the good times we had growing up.
Randy's path took him to the workforce after highschool graduation. I went to college, so it is here that we really went our separate ways, since we were now in different places. Honestly, it's a shame he didn't try harder in high school and choose to go to college somewhere, because underneath it all, he was intelligent. Perhaps he didn't have the patience for school; I really don't know. I do know he tried. I vividly remember what I did after 8th grade graduation. For some reason, I found myself staying at my dad and eventual stepmom's house with Randy. I don't remember why we were there or what we were doing, but I do remember eventually having a very long, prolonged discussion with him. While I don't remember everything we talked about (girls and reminiscing probably entered the conversation; so ok, perhaps not as vividly as I alluded to), I do remember two things. One, we talked until the sun rose. Two, we talked about our future and our goals in life. Randy and school had never really gotten along (again, despite this, he was intelligent), so his grades were never the best. But it is here that I told him that everything he had ever done with regards to grades up to this point was meaningless. That, in fact, ninth grade on up is when grades actually started to count, and that if he had any intention of going to college, that now was the time to start caring. Upon telling him this, he remained silent for awhile, as if processing what I had told him. Having not known this, he believed he was screwed, destined to stay in Northfield his entire life (which there's nothing wrong with, but for some reason, teenagers seem to hate their hometown and want to get far away from it). When ninth grade rolled around, he put a ton of effort into school... for about two months. Then, just as before, he slacked off and began to fail his classes.
As I mentioned, we went our separate ways after high school. I do not know what Randy did at this time. I saw him working at the Tacoasis in Northfield on a couple occasions, and I saw him at my dad's wedding three summers ago, and my brother's wedding one summer ago. I also know that Randy had a baby boy about one year ago, shortly before my brother's wedding. As I write this, I've still never seen him.
You know, I'd like to tell myself that Randy's path in life has led to happiness. After all, in spite of his life's difficulties, he's had plenty of fun in his life, has a healthy baby boy, and many friends. Even though he remained "stuck" in Northfield, he had much of what many of us would consider essential to one's happiness, and that is the most any of us could ever hope for.
As I said, it'd be nice to tell myself that, but it's just not true. You know, Randy and I were born only three days apart--he beat me by three days (that bastard). Of course, growing up, Randy never stopped rubbing this fact in. Since he was three days older, he was therefore, however infinitesimally small, wiser than me. It is with exceptional sadness that that I report that, in about twelve short, short hours, I will be older than Randy.
It turns out that Randy, unbeknownst to me and presumably everyone else who knew him, reached a level of deep sadness few of us have ever or will ever reach. In spite of, or perhaps because of his circumstances (having a child, a job, friends), Randy chose to cure his sadness by removing himself from this world. Sometime this past Wednesday, Randy shot himself in the chest, and then simply ceased to exist.
But I'll always have my memories.
***
His obituary has been posted to the local newspaper website.
FAIL - posted by magicite
This one's geeky. You have been warned.
So it turns out that aliases in a shell are not inherited by any of its children. So, if you wanted to write a Perl script to examine a user's aliases, you're out of luck. The reason for this is that aliases are not part of the shell's environment, and thus, do not get inherited.
It is true that if the aliases are stored in a file somewhere (.bashrc, for example), you could just parse that file, or, launch a new bash shell from within Perl, and parse the output from the alias command. But that doesn't capture aliases added in that particular session, which is exactly what I need it for.
I'm not gonna lie, this is the first time a shell has failed me. I understand why it is done this way (Suppose aliases were inherited. Then, if I were to log in to my account from your shell, I would have all of your aliases), but it still makes me unhappy.
Mou Sukoshi - posted by magicite
Well, I survived. My first year of graduate school, that is. As hinted, this past semester demanded the entirety of my time. Taking Algorithms and Parallel together was probably not the best idea. However, they're both over now, and as a result of working hard (in all three classes; the third being real time / embedded systems), I did well.
I highly recommend trying out Crystal Light On-The-Go packets.
Hmmm.... so much to say, it has been several months since a real post. But I've forgotten any significant events in the past few month... (not that there were many)
I will do a site redesign... sometime this summer. :) Of course, I said this last summer... I twitter often nowadays. I'll be sure to integrate that in somehow. It's essentially micro blogging.
Can't wait for iPhone OS v2.0. I plan on (but have not started, no time 'til recently) developing for it. I'm already (relatively) familiar with Cocoa, so there shouldn't be much of a learning curve for me.
I've already been working at Cray for two weeks already. Time flies! I'm working with Carl Albing and others at Cray in the ALPS/WLM group.
Nick and Emily are back in MN/WI! Yay! Still haven't seen them though.
I've been making an inordinate amount of pizza recently (all from scratch; I make the dough, pizza sauce, and put it together with cheese and toppings, so I don't feel that guilty). I need to expand my food horizons once more.
Mario Kart Wii came out ~1 month ago. Awesome game. If you happen to have it and I don't have your Wii number, let me know so I can add you (in order to play together online).
I found Orange Box for the PS3 at Target for $15 the other day (it's normally $50-$60). I win. :)
I need a new alarm clock. Thinking about the Luna X2 or the iHome iH9. Both work in tandem with iPods/iPhones. Though, they are non-optimal with regards to the iPhone since the iPhone's GSM chipset (like most/all GSM chipsets) interferes with speakers. This can be fixed by having properly shielded speakers/cabling, but that's more expensive, and companies tend to be cheapasses. The Luna X2 was supposed to come out last Spring, but it is now rumored that it will come out at the end of the summer and will use higher quality components that block the noise from the GSM components in the iPhone.
Someone owes me a Mac Pro.
I need to make useful, productive blog posts. I'll work on that.
Pulse Check - posted by magicite
Yup, I'm still here. This semester has been spectacularly busy. Nothing new to report, other than we now have a cat in apartment 701. Yay!
Goldmine - posted by magicite
The recently released iPhone SDK by Apple is a total goldmine. I plan on whipping up some apps in my freetime (read: the weekend after my last final and before my first day of work).
Work? Yup. I'll be working at Cray again this summer as an Intern. The company stock is quite low at the moment, which is kind of sad. Hopefully it goes up again. If it goes much lower, I'll have to buy some... unless someone tells me not to. ;)
I'm in the middle of midterms. Whereas last semester was relatively slacker, this semester is absolutely brutal. Two of my classes have homeworks due every other week, (each of which seem to take several days to complete), and one of my classes has something "big" every week: a test, homework, or a lab.
But hey, I'll be mostly done with my breadth courses at the U after this semester. Then I can focus on whatever areas I choose (of course, that's pretty much what I have been doing thus far).
Who knows what I will end up doing. I'm definitely at least getting my masters. Will I follow through and get my PhD? That's the current plan (and I am officially PhD track), but who knows, plans change. If the economy cooperates, a job isn't a half-bad idea...
It's 3am and you're all safe asleep. But there's a loaf of bread cooling in my kitchen and I'm hungry. Very very hungry. It's time for supper.
