Bread and Circus

One of my friends has a tendency to lash out at people when she's feeling frustrated or upset. I really don't like this, but I'm not sure exactly what I can do about it, because she's a wonderful person otherwise.

She was working on physics homework, and we were showing her the trick of manipulating equations to solve the physics problem.

I remember she said, "I can't do that. I just can't see that." And then after getting frustrated, "Sam and David (our two other friends) can do this because they're guys."

I get enough of this shit from the media for being a woman in the engineering profession, so I tried to get across my point as politely as possible in what I hoped was disarming humour. I tried to tell her that of course that wasn't true and I was a little hurt by her comment.

And she shouted at me and said, "Could you stop being such a fucking feminist for one second? I was joking!"

Aaaand I was just shocked speechless.

W00t, turned in my undergraduate thesis! *dance* Finally.

Queer prom, usually the final event in Proud to Be Out Week, is on Saturday, and I just got notified that I was nominated for Queer Prom Court.



I AM NOT THE QUEEREST PERSON IN THE WORLD, BUT I WILL DO MY BEST, DEAR FANS.

I LOVE my prom dress, which is my old one from high school. It's all poofy and rainbow-coloured, and pretty much THE most flaming piece of clothing I own. I'm sad I only get to trot it out for occasions like this. It's also kind of old fashioned with a corset and long floor-length skirt, so it will fit right into the theme for this year, which is Retrosexual. 

One of my friends also asked me to be her date last week, so that's settled too. SO EXCITED.

Soon after I started college, I began to think seriously about getting an external hard drive to backup all my things. I adore having a laptop. It affords me privacy and personal space that I never had on the family computer. But laptops are also nerve-wracking because they can have more hard drive issues than desktops because they're mobile and mass-produced, so you could just have the luck of a faulty hard drive right out of the box.

If you've ever salvaged parts from a dead computer and popped out the hard drive for curiosity's sake (or know a million CS professors who always find an excuse to bring their collection into class one day of the semester, cough cough), you know that a hard drive is an actual spinning disk with a mechanical arm that passes the read-write head over the surface of the platter.



This is why defragmentation your computer can help it run faster; consolidating all of your scattered data gives the read-write head less distance to travel to access your data. This is also why coders everywhere lost their shit when SSDs (solid state drives) hit the consumer market. These drives are sort of like a giant USB (yeah, I know I'm making some generalisations with this), in that they don't have any movable parts for data access, which is very very good. As my dad, who is a mechanical engineer, will tell you, moving parts are the weakest parts of a machine, because these are the places that experience the most stress and are often the first things that break and require replacement. 

( Read more about actuator heads. What I did there: please see it. )

That awkward moment when you walk out of the lab with wet-gel electrode leads still stuck to your arms and don't notice it till your friends point it out.

My professor was frustrated that our university's March Madness game was during class, and he wondered if the university would let him show it on the big screen in the auditorium (it's CS 1110, so there are a million people in the class) while he was teaching class. Apparently he decided it was better to ask forgiveness than permission.

Follow up post to MESSAGE TO THE BARTENDER THAT I HAVE BEEN STARING AT FOR THREE SEMESTERS

I love my new attitude, which is, "Fuck it, I'm graduating soon. I am going to do whatever I want." So I talked to him. The all-caps in this post have no relation whatsoever to the amount of alcohol I have consumed. I have managed to answer most of the insecure questions I posed in my previous post.

1) Meh, bet he has people flirting with him all the time. I'm a nobody.
LOOK AT ALL THE FUCKS I GIVE.

2) Should I order a beer from him sometime? That would require me biding my time till the servers stop taking beer orders and customers have to go to the bar to get something.
I ORDERED A BEER FROM HIM.

3) What else does he do besides bartending? Is he a student? Did he used to be a student? What keeps him here in this town working this job? Is he happy?
HE WAS A STUDENT. I TALKED TO HIM WHILE SLOWLY FINISHING MY SAMPLE BEER. He was an English + History major who wanted to be a corporate lawyer but then worked in a law office and hated it. So now he's working at Mellow earning funds and taking a break in our fantastic college town. He likes bartending more than he likes serving. He is happy here, he supposes.

4) My parents would fucking kill me if I asked out a bartender.
ENGLISH + HISTORY MAJOR. HELL YES, THEY WOULD KILL ME.

5) I'm not that kind of person. I've only asked out one person, and that was after about a year and a half. And I considered THAT really bold. Asians, and our pile of sekrit feelings.
I AM APPARENTLY THAT KIND OF PERSON.

6) If I tried to sit at the bar during a random quiet time by myself, it would be a better time to talk to him, but he would think I was totally pathetic drinking by myself on a weekday. Then again, I am an engineer.
HE ASKED ME WHAT I DO. I SAID ENGINEERING. HE THINKS IT'S COOL.

7) I have never wanted to ask someone out based on how they look. That's really odd. But I just want to stare at his aesthetic symmetry and find out if he likes Firefly. That's a date, right?
I ARRIVED FOR BEER, I STARED, HE IS MORE GORGEOUS UP CLOSE. AND NOW HE KNOWS MY NAME. *FIST PUMP*

A fellow Sherlockian and I met up while everyone else was at home watching the Superbowl, and we began phase 1 of our Believe in Sherlock campaign at our university.


You can find the detailed story of our exploits here. And yes, that is my Tumblr. (Why do I get the feeling my online self and real life self and merging together in a headlong collision that I can't stop?)

Okay, I had to write this paper for my Science, Technology, and Society class (a writing class for engineers), and I'm actually kind of proud of it. It investigates approaches to software development against a book we had to read called Shop Class As Soulcraft that addresses the state and history of craft or trade vocations such as mechanics. I don't usually post college work up here, but whatever. It's really as much for my records as anything.

( What Can Computer Scientists Learn From Mechanics? )

Thank you to tarlanx andx_mog, who sent me blue Halloween spiders! 

Went to the Brown College haunted house, where the students build this giant creepy place (this year the theme was Black Lung, and the house was a mine shaft), and led people through it. I went through it with my Operating Systems lab partner (yep, I'm an engineer, alright. One of the I Are An Engineer items on the t-shirt is: "I am going to name my first born after my lab parter." Yes.) because we had just finished coding and decided we still had time to go before they closed. In the middle of the haunted house she just nonchalantly says, "Oh, I've got a text message," and we were cracking up the entire rest of the time. This amused/bewildered many of the scary denizens in the house, and they devoted much of their time to scaring the people in the back of our group.

Protip 1: Going first in the haunted house is not like a roller coaster. Sometimes being in the front is the least scary location. 

Protip 2: They come at you from the sides.

Our literary and debating society had our Ghosts of the Past party yesterday when the alumni (the ghosts of the past) come back to party with us (the living). I went as a ricepunk character (steampunk in a non-Western cultural setting) so I wore a yukata with a thin studded leather belt that looked surprisingly like an obijime upon wearing. I had some steampunk jewellery I fashioned from embellishments and pieces I found at the M.I.T. scrap sale as well as two steampunk guns (pictures later) that I designed with hooks so that I could hang them from my belt. All in all, good times.

We were crossing the street on our way back from the party (which was thrown in the worst house ever for a party), and a car stopped for us and then proceeded to reverse like it was going for a run-up. We ran. 

Got home, proceeded to eat random food from the fridge because everything tastes delicious when you're tipsy, and you get alarmingly hungry at the strangest times. Then worked a bit on my second 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea fanfiction for the tail-end of Asexual Awareness Week (yes, I can do this in a coherent fashion, no matter the state I am in). I had mentioned in a semi-joking way to my other society friends that I would be writing fanfiction when I got back, and they semi-jokingly replied back that I should post it to the Soc (the society list serv). 

So I sat there for a bit deliberating whether I should post my first Leagues slash fiction to the soc, which would either be hilarious or keyboard-face embarrassing in the morning. Decided not to make these kind of important decisions while drunk and went to sleep.

Woke up today, had cold sandwiches and a few cups of tea for my grogginess (I don't hangover easily), and I'm still debating whether I should post it. For reference, it's this one: The White Whale