So a weekend, a trip to the Thayer Street Gap, and 6 inches of snow later I am the proud owner of a pair of gloves, I have made a snowman, been involved in a snowball fight (not a full fledged one), and have seen someone make a snow angel (someday when I have more clean trousers, or am wearing waterproof stuff I shall make my own). I did promise a slightly less hurried entry, and I guess this is it. I cannot say I have no work, because I have tons of work sitting in front of me, I however am brain dead right now, and I guess I am going to write this entry and go to sleep so that I can wake up and get down to doing more work. I am still now allowed to talk about the midterm and I shall hence not talk about it now, though I sure as hell wish I could.
So yes about the snow, well snow’s beautiful, no doubt about it, and once you learn how to dress up for it, it’s not really all that bad, after snow however there’s ice, and some of the roads are so damn slippery right now. I had to walk down to the CIT today at 5 for a lab, and it was so slippery, and so many people were about to slide down, it was kindda scary. I am glad that I bought boots earlier, I doubt my Solomon urban wears would have lasted through this ice. It’s all going to melt away tomorrow in all probability, and then no more white stuff would line the road, sad, it was so beautiful while it lasted, so damn beautiful, and so short lived, I wish I didn’t have the midterm, and all that work this weekend (mostly the midterm, since it was a normal weekend otherwise), so that I could spend more time out in the snow through the weekend. Getting gloves was not a problem, and thanks to advice from people I stayed away from the reallllly expensive ones, and got good gloves, which didn’t cost a ton, but then they aren’t from Patagonia (they have really cool $30 and $60 gloves), aren’t meant to be used while skiing or anything like that, but they’re good gloves, they’re waterproof, perfect for picking up snow and the like, and they’re warm as hell. With my jacket, my hat, and my glove, it feels almost (though not quite) like I am indoors, and then it’s a good sensation. Drinking hot stuff while walking down a snowy path rates high on my list of cool things, arghhh, someday it shall snow again, and then I won’t have as much work, and I will stay outdoor longer, join the midnight snowball fighters at the main green, and build bigger snow men, someday soon… And we probably will have a blizzard while I am in Providence and before this (school) year is out, that’s a scary thought, since most of my friends assure me I don’t want to be in a blizzard. Hmm snow was beautiful, hopefully blizzards wouldn’t be too bad 
. Thanksgivings barely a week and a half away, and that’s a happy thought to hold on to for now, no more worrying about midterms and presentations after this Friday, and I might finally get to watch The Incredibles, the very idea of something like that happening makes me want to fast forward through the week…
Ice hockey, well hockey as it is called in America (for one field hockey is nothing like hockey as seen back home), is violent. Umm well not footballish violent, but the keep crashing each other into the side walls, and though college hockey rules explicitly forbid fighting, some of the shoving is done with such malice it’s unbelievable. And some of the cheerers and fans are so truly angry, it makes me wonder whether they are bitter about not getting into those places. Like we were playing Princeton this Friday, and it almost seemed as if the guy cheering the most for Brown had some sort of a personal hatred for Princeton. Now Princeton’s fortunately not Harvard, and no large groups of people went about jeering about how they sucked, but it’s still kindda sad, I would have loved to be in Princeton, but not bring there is no reason to explicitly hate it, and unlike Harvard and Yale, Princeton’s not exactly boastful or anything. I guess I am biased ‘coz I still like Princeton.
To all those people who sent me Diwali greeting (to those who are wondering about this, you probably didn’t send one, mail me or meet me sometime I’ll explain, this kindda does an OK job, though I don’t know all the details in there, and it’s kindda impersonal), thank you, I however did not celebrate diwali, due to more reasons than one. Happy Diwali nevertheless, and thank you for all your e-cards (hmm I would have said stop bombing my mailbox, but didn’t quite receive those many)...
Just as I am finally getting the hang of OCaml, I have begun to both love and hate the crazy type-checker, for one in that verbose a language, crazy type-checking causes it’s fair share of problems, and the fact that my code has to run without warnings means I have to go around raising exceptions every second line, and I can’t catch exceptions (well not explicitly prohibited but discouraged)... Beautiful coding, thanks to OCaml is now represented by a bunch of match with and pattern matching statements, regex, without regex, taken to another level (no seriously it’s beautiful, putting something like (0::c) pretty much tells you when you have a list such as [0; 1; 2; 3; 4], no cars and cdrs), and umm it’s good, compact and all but not all that beautiful. But then the last time I complained about it to Spike (my professor), he said something to the effect of trusting an aircraft running OCaml to one running C, on the other hand he also trusts an aircraft running Java code, more than he does one running C code, and that’s sort of scary, since Java code is scary, it’s random in my opinion, and though I love its concept of strongly implemented Object Orienting, honest I do, but well I don’t know it sounds kind of strange… I can’t believe I’m going to spend much of the next semester coding DP algos in Java, DP’s fun, Java however is sadly slow, oh well I came in with a bad feeling about Scheme, and I like all that Scheme offers now, even if I have spent most of this class forcefully exploring the vagaries of Scheme rather than learning anything really new. And now when faced with OCaml, I am wishing I could go back to the cozy comfort of Scheme, because parts of OCaml befuddle me, I don’t like spending precious minutes figuring out why my ‘a list -> ‘a function is in OCaml’s opinion an ‘a list list -> ‘a list function, why my perfectly defined ‘a -> float function when passed into map turns into a hideous ‘a -> ‘a function. I sure do wish I could give OCaml code for debugging questions in competitions back home, it’s so easy to confound and confuse people, God it would be fun.
Now, time to sleep….
Ze Panda
yawn!!!!
Ice hockey, well hockey as it is called in America (for one field hockey is nothing like hockey as seen back home), is violent. Umm well not footballish violent, but the keep crashing each other into the side