Fricative

Man, you guys like Six Feet Under? It's very pretty good.

I hung out with Kevin Wasserman for a while yesterday (Ed.: July 4th, actually). I love that guy! He's real into cigars now (don't worry, he still likes HDTV)

I'm happy because I made some thread improvements. They didn't fix the real fucking problem, which is driving me absolutely bananas, but more on that in a second.

It's been a while since I wrote anything here.

I'm struggling to pound out this e-mail to my old senior project adviser, asking for a grad school recommendation. Do I really deserve a recommendation? The project was supposed to be about molecular biology, and I didn't learn that much about molecular biology. I'm worried that he'll want me to come up to the 'Have to discuss it and want me to pour forth on whether or not I've ever had an original idea in my life, Richard Yang-style. These are the types of thoughts that are always sub-pathetic and irritating to hear from other people but that are no less completely consuming when you're having them yourself.

gzochi's got a Heisenbug. For the non-technorati among you:

Heisenbug is a term used in software programming to describe a computer bug that disappears or alters its characteristics when it is researched.

A common example are bugs that occur in a release-mode compile of a program but do not occur when researched under debug-mode, or some bugs caused by a race condition. The name is a pun on the physics term "Heisenberg Uncertainty principle", which is popularly believed to refer to the way observers affect the observed in quantum mechanics.

In my case it's a TCP message -- specifically, the one that delivers a "game entry token" to a user -- that never gets sent when I run gzochi-server from the command line, sometimes gets sent under gdb, and always gets sent under valgrind. After making myself crazy with it for the past two weeks, I've decided to ignore it and forge ahead. Hopefully it will present itself in a more obvious way later. But like I said, I did fix some other important stuff.

I had lunch with an old acquaintance yesterday. I'd been kind of hoping to rekindle our friendship -- we hadn't spoken much since 10th grade, really, mostly my fault -- but she was pretty concertedly ambivalent on the prospects of hanging out as far as I could tell. Or maybe she was just really depressed. Oh well, that's just the way life works.

My birthday's coming up. I could use a new wristwatch; mine loses time all over the place.