ThePanda

Are an abomination. It is laundry day, and since I never really have quarters on me (the vending machine at work serves up all manners of fabulous goodies for a quarter), I carefully got money out of one of the few ATMs in town which spit out 10s, rather than 20s. Actually this one's even more intelligent, it gives you a couple of 10s and a lot of 20s, which is cool, and infinitely more usable for somethings than the ones around Brown (the one inside Faunce Arch not only spits out 10s, but does not require that the amount of money you withdraw be a multiple of 20). Then earlier today I walked across to one of the publicly available coin operated laundromats to get quarters, and discovered my $10 could not be consumed by the machine, then it failed on one of my 20s. I have 80 quarters sitting next to me, because I only had one old 20 dollar bill and four dollars in ones. The new bills have been in circulation since at least 2004 (my 10 bucks are from Series 2004 A, so I know), and yet they cannot easily be changed into quarters. Starbucks really doesn't want to give out quarters, why oh why can't they find a simpler way to earn money from laundry machines. Where is the promised world where I could pay for everything using a mobile phone, or a credit card.

Panda

Anyone who's spent time on this blog before now, will notice that it has of course changed. Not to worry, this was not a pre-planned change, in fact perhaps the biggest catalyst for this change has been me hoping domain hosting services. This one's faster, offers somethings that the previous one doesn't, and is actually usable for things other than hosting this infrequently read blog. As a part of moving, I decided to not keep my old TextPattern install around, instead going with this swanky new WordPress install, and a bunch of scripts found around the tubes to migrate my TextPattern data over. That being said, more might change...
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Something about Caltrain’s been bothering me. It is an awesome service, and they do tend to run on time, except for the trains early on during rush hours. That being said there is some thing that freaks me out at time, maybe it is all the signage about how they are a Proof-of-Payment system (hint: so is every other transportation network in most of the world, unless it is free, you sort of need a proof of payment to ensure that people pay), maybe it is all the obviously bureaucratic stuff they seem to be doing this week, like having someone stand around waiting for the train to arrive and then try and count the number of people getting in. I don’t really know, something bothers me about what is otherwise a mighty convenient way to travel.

Ze Panda

Two countries, three states, and four cities, that is what these past couple of weeks have been about. And it has been good and all, in fact it has been awesome, and yet I can’t help wonder why it is that everywhere I go, outside of the East Coast, Catholic saints seem to be on a bunch of streets and a whole bunch of cities. Catholic saints in not one, but two languages, in not one but two countries, and funnily enough I speak neither of the two languages, and can go into neither of the two countries without a visa.

The Great North, Canada, was awesome, except for what turned out to be a fairly well defined line in terms of being bilingual. Before people who showed me around Montreal comment on how wrong that statement is, yes the main streets, Crescent, all of downtown, and places like Westmont seemed fairly anglo, but a lot of places were distinctly French, and just to make this even more prominent, the metro did not use any English, perhaps because this would give stupid tourists and such too much information. It was an amazing city, I wouldn’t go back for any length of time unless I knew French.

California, is awesome, except I wish I had a car or something, and didn’t have to cross a six lane road to get much of anywhere, and didn’t have to walk across this big clover leaf bridge thing which feeds into the freeway. It is all fun and games, everything seems to be designed so you can walk to it, and yet everyone will suggest that you not walk to places which are a mile away. Oh well I need to explore more of San Francisco.

Ze Panda

Most of my room is in boxes, the parts that aren’t either follow me to Montreal, or are going to be gone forever. Sort of weird to live in a room full of packed up boxes. Oh well, probably the cleanest my room has been this semester.

Ze Panda

Does it worry anyone that once I am done with school for the semester (almost anyways, see later thing about proof), I spend my time writing more code. Oh well, at least this is for research, and my quest to figure out more of this mass of code I modified for my purposes earlier. Sure I am going to the GCB later, or watching a movie somewhere, but yet I choose to code.

All I have to do now is meet with rt for grading, and write a proof up for eli, neither of which should be too bad, I am sorta looking forward to the proof part of it.

Ze Panda

Someday, I am going to stop printing out solutions for any of the CO programs I write, the print out will be fairly simple:

“Solution Verified”
or
“Failed to Verify Solution”

I like results, I like the creative process, but results make me happy. The way there, fun as it is, is often filled with anxiety. It is a lot like being in a mode of transportation for a while.

Ze Panda