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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Thursday 20 November 2003 (Day View)

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20.11.2003 – Thursday 20 November – French, Morons, and Michelle

7am

• I got up and caught a train into uni to study – which I managed to do for most of the day.

French

• I was banned for the third time from the BITS IRC channel. It’s pretty funny really – yesterday someone said French was the second most popular language, and spoken by one fifth of the world. This is obviously not true, so I said as much, and the majority of the speaking people in the channel then had an argument with me, over whether French was indeed spoken by one fifth of the world, or second most popular language after English, or more popular than Spanish... and several other wrong or ill-informed things relating to French. After I actually bothered to go find and paste the 2002 estimates of the percentage of people who speak French (around two percent (128 million), which includes all people able to speak French, whether natively or acquired – considerably less than those who speak Chinese, Hindi, English, Spanish, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian or Japanese. French ranks about twelfth in usage as a native language, and a bit higher overall), I was told it was always BITS versus myself, and they can’t all be wrong. I think Clint and I are the only people to have seen the irony in that. Then I was banned. Today I was banned again, twice, because of yesterday’s argument – it never ceases to surprise me how stupid and stubborn some people are. It’s just poor little me (and the linguist’s society, encyclopaedias, world books...) against all of BITS – as they so thoughtfully pointed out, they can’t all be wrong... dimwits. It does make for good entertainment though – normally no one much talks.

Lunch

• I met a guy from my tute while I was at POD printing out past tutorials, so went and had a look at a showcase of some of his art and animations that he’d made, which was impressive. I also bought a milkshake for lunch and met, by accident, the feared alexdlm – instigator of the biased bits bans from this morning. Then, feeling usefully sick, I continue studying.

5pm

• I stopped studying, having nearly fallen asleep in the labs, and walked to Tim and Michelle’s to do the social thing and say my goodbyes. Neither was home, but Tim’s sister was up from Melbourne so I stayed and had a chat until Tim and Michelle arrived. I’d planned to stay only an hour or so as I needed to get home and prepare for tomorrow, but people just kept arriving until there were many of us, and I ended up catching the last train home.

12:15am

• I got a lift down to Southbank Station, but it was boring so I walked to South Brisbane Station, which was much more interesting. There was the man who kept trying to walk off the platform and didn’t seem inclined to speak – the poor station girl had to keep him from being squished. Then there was a young (and probably ex) couple, who climbed off the end of the platform, somehow made a huge noise sounding something like a cross between shotgun fire and a car accident – and then the girl came back and tried to get a $5 note changed, phoned someone, cried and didn’t seem very happy at all. Some security arrived, and a man got very angry with them, claiming they were trying to rip him off, so they left. Then the stationmaster came, by which time the taciturn man with his strange attraction for the edge of the platform had retired to the phone box, where he seemed to be having a good time making loud noises throwing around some small change. The girl had disappeared off the end of the platform again, presumably looking for the body parts of her ex-boyfriend. It all looked semi-normal, and then the last train arrived. The girl appeared and ran up to the phone and had a screaming argument with the phone-dweller because he wouldn’t let her use the phone. Meanwhile the stationmaster was trying to tell the both of them that this was the last train, and train security looked suitably menacing just in case. They both were left behind. I wonder if either of them survived. I have a mental picture of the platform in the morning – with an uncommunicative man splattered along the rails, a distressed woman dead from cold or cockroaches or something, holding her boyfriends dismembered head and a boyfriend spread for a hundred metres off the end of the platform surrounded by debris.

3:23am

• Joe came and brought me Tim Tam’s, but I need to get to bed. I want to be up early and off to uni to study for my exam. This is all bad – I will be so sleepy and worn out during my exam. I am rapidly developing a dislike for this course. How is it possible to have something called “Programming in the Large / Advanced Software Engineering” and then teach Java? I believe I understand most of the software engineering concepts we’ve been taught, but I don’t know how to implement them correctly in Java, especially not on paper, without the ability to test or debug. I don’t believe this course should require Java, or any language – and it definitely shouldn’t be set out where a lack of understanding in Java means failure despite understanding the theoretical concepts, as it is. It’s effectively “Advanced Object-Oriented Java Kludge”, which is not good. Moreover, Java sucks.