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  • A Happy Feeling

    I don’t know why, but I’ve had a happy feeling in my heart the last few days. Whenever that happens I wonder, “Why do I feel this way?” I never really find an exact reason, but of course it still makes me feel glad.

    Here’s one cool thing: I turned off the little thing that announces what track my music player is playing. When I had the announcement thing turned on, I would see a track and think “I’ve heard that a million times” and then skip to the next one. Well, without it I can’t do that, so by the time I’ve figured out what song it is it’s already played for a while and I start to remember why I like the song, even if I have heard it a million times. Due to that little change I’ve been discovering that I do have a lot of cool music!

    I’ve also been looking through old emails from around my freshman year of college. The combined effect is to have voices from the past all intermixing with my present—an old swing ballad from the 1940’s, an email from a friend from home in the summer before heading off to BYU. I could also throw in photos and journals and who knows what else. It’s like a teeny, tiny inkling of a taste of what God experiences that led him to tell Moses “all things are present with me, for I know them all.” The sensation I felt was but an imitation of the true eternal present through which God experiences things. There is no past or future: there is only being. Someday we will actually be able to perceive the world in that way. Right now it’s cool just to imagine it.

    Speaking of music reminds me that I still haven’t gotten any new music, in spite of all of the great recommendations I got from you loyal readers a few months ago. But I think I’m building up to it. Sometime soon!

    By the way, here’s what I worked on today:

    roles
    A class diagram illustrating the permissions system in my CS340 project.

    You have my permission to make a poster out of it. I know, it’s that cool.

    Later

  • Brain Dump

    Just a bunch of thoughts….

    • I’m really tired right now. Last night I got distracted by one of the most interesting and enjoyable conversations I’ve had in a long time. So I then spent the hours from 11pm to 1am working on my project, which I had planned to do earlier. Oh well, it was worth it.
    • Google sort of scares me, announcing a new operating system and all. I’ve long been a Google fan, largely because their manner of conducting business seemed benevolent. But now they almost seem grasping. Is it possible we’re collectively giving Google too much power?
    • My filthy-rich group member is buying pizza for our meeting tomorrow 🙂
    • Due to its recent attempt to go swimming with me, my trusty Nokia 6030 phone seems to have given up the electronic ghost. I purchased my late telephone for $15 two years ago. I ordered a new phone for about $30 (including shipping), and it should be an upgrade (Bluetooth! No, not for those dorky headsets, but for backing up my phone book and text messages, hopefully). I like being a cheapskate.
    • As I wondered aloud to my roommates a few days ago, could my whole way of understanding relationships be structured around justifying my own failures? We like to think we’re not to blame for circumstances we don’t like. But sometimes that’s not entirely the case.

    Okay, time for dinner. Bye!

  • This is for all you geeks out there

    I will liken my cleaning habits unto a garbage-collected memory management system. I store most objects in a heap (literally a heap on the floor next to my bed). When I have to allocate space to store a grocery receipt, a book I’m reading, or mail I don’t want to deal with yet, I put it on the heap. In my mind I try to keep a reference to each object, but slowly over time many of the references are lost and the objects become irrelevant.

    Then cleaning inspections come along, or maybe just a random cleaning urge. That’s when it’s time to collect the garbage—to deallocate the space taken up by stale old useless objects in order to make room for new useless objects! So I go through the heap, one object at a time, and when I come upon something that isn’t being used any more, I either shred it, recycle it, or trash it. Thus the garbage is collected, the heap size is decreased, and I can happily continue allocating space for random stuff with abandon.

    The main problem with this system is that I always have a huge heap of stuff on the floor, and I have to spend time sorting through it every once in a while. But boy it’s easy to use!

    More conscientious people probably manage space manually, thus keeping their heap size down (to the point of nonexistence, even) and avoiding the need to do periodic garbage collection. The danger there is the memory leak—if no system of periodic garbage collection exists, allocated space will just go on being used even if it’s forgotten about.

    But my metaphor is now way overextended. Ah, but we did just pass our inspection. Go GCMM!