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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Sunday 2 November 2003 (Day View)

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02.11.2003 – Sunday 2 November – Wretched Java

Divine Intervention

• Just when all hope was gone, a friend I didn’t know I had found me on IRC, and then MSN, and helped me with my COMP2500 assignment. We worked on it all night, until he fell asleep on a stack of textbooks, later falling to the floor when his music scared him (as one is wont to do), and I alternated between doing my assignment, laying in bed thinking about my assignment, and losing chunks of time.

Morning

• I managed to complete my assignment to a high standard, with no errors and, apart from it not working, nothing else wrong – and went to eat my third bowl of coco pops since dinner last night. Apparently, pineapple juice is the secret.

Recursively objectifying

• The idea of the assignment is to learn object-orientated recursive parsing. The traditional “Hello World” equivalent would involve instantiating an Alphabet object, which would recursively call 26 different Character objects, which would each implement English, extend Vowels, Consonants, Wingding, Words, Plurals, Misspellings and Nonsense, and be subclasses of Alphabet itself, hence recursively calling themselves, and at some stage some magical coitus between complexity and ridiculousness is reached, at which point the entire process somehow collapses and prints “Hello World”. Apparently, this is the right way to do it because recursion is “beautiful” and “mathematical” and object-orientated languages are “better”.

12:47am

• Having spent all night and all morning working on my assignment and having reached an impassable impasse – and quite frankly, being totally sick and tired of it and no longer concerned about the lousy 6% it’s worth, another friend I wasn’t aware I had helped me work towards fixing the last few annoying and very stupid bugs. Strangely, it ends up she’s a good friend of my divinely sent early morning guide, but neither were aware the other was helping me, and thus began my suspicion, which resulted in the strange tale of conspiracy and intrigue outlined below.

My Fan Club

• It appears that I have a fan club. I guess it had to happen eventually, but I was surprised to find that there’s apparently a group of people who’ve all read or read my journal, and seem to know a scary amount about me – but I know nothing about them. It’s strange enough having people know me by site and name when I’ve no idea who they are, but it becomes almost alarming when they seem to know everything from who emailed me what and when to who I sit with at any time at uni – but it’s still cool having my own fan club – t-shirts coming soon.

4:20pm

• I submitted my assignment. Big thanks to Matt and Ana for guiding me – perhaps one day I’ll be able to understand things on my own, or start assignments before 3 AM the day they’re due, but I’m not holding my breath. My current study methods – extreme stress, panic, desperation and an infeasible timeframe seem to work – if they ain’t broke, why fix ‘em?

Afternoon

• Tim and Michelle dropped by, and unlike the past few times, I was actually awake – as I hadn’t gone to sleep last night.

Night

• I drove up to the Smith Road shops to get some scratch-its for Joe and chips for us both, which we ate while watching an interesting documentary on walruses (the polar bear won) and the finding of GB’s last great warship, the iconic HMS Hood, sadly epitomizing the end of an era, and the rise of the new American Empire.

1:42am

• Funnily enough, I’m not sleepy, despite staying up all night, but I shall go to bed or I’ll never wake tomorrow – as they say, if you’re not wasted, the day is.