Eleanor Casey: Failed Romance.
If you really must write your own [romantic poem], then remember - it doesn't have to rhyme. Specifically, you should never ever ever try to rhyme the girl's name with something. Never. Even more specifically, do not try to rhyme "Eleanor" with "smell of her". No.
If I ever write a poem comparing Helen to cantaloupes, I will be sure not to mention the process of smelling the melons to determine ripeness.
I'm taking a Pomona class called Acquisition of Language. Here are some notes from the first day:
Why study acquisition of language?
- Lets you see mechanisms behind language.
- You can see dramatic changes over short periods of time. For example, most kids start having real conversations around 3 and a half.
- Kids are cute.
I like this class.
After Friday night anime, we had our first Tournament of Shame (air hockey). A tournament of shame is a sequential pairwise game in which the loser stays to play the next player in line. Very fun with a sufficiently silly group such as Michael, Erika, Jeff, Gabe, Calvin, Kay, Adrian, Helen, and me.
The idea of a tournament of shame is that no player will dominate the tournament: it's hard to be so bad that you lose to everyone else consistently. Or maybe the point is just to be silly by cheering players when they score on themselves.
Correction: It's called a "tournament of shame", not a "tournament of losers".
The correct answer to this question is an:
(Stolen from a Slashdot post by "j3110".)
Aurora Burd, Dave Gaebler, and I all have escheresque posters involving stairs behind our doors. I have Peacock's "The Courtyard", Aurora has Peacock's "Castle of Illusion", and Dave has Escher's "House of Stairs".
I want a shirt that says "Because it's there" under a large photo of Mars.
I've been addicted to the shareware version of Debris 32 for over a year. Debris 32 is like Asteroids: you pilot a ship and go around shooting large asteroids to break them apart and small asteroids to destroy them. Debris 32 adds mines, aggressive enemy ships, and power-ups.
It took me a month before I was able to beat the game on the hardest difficultly level, and I can still only beat it half of the time. The hardest levels are 4, which has a hard-to-destroy enemy base, and 6, which has crystals. Small crystals grow into large crystals if you don't destroy them quickly, and shooting a large crystal results in several small crystals.
The shareware version is addictive despite only having 10 levels. I don't know how to get the full version. The publisher (MVPsoft) no longer sells it and I don't know how to contact the author (David Bollinger).
Download Debris 32 shareware for Windows (4 MB)
Bigger screenshot:
Read the rest of this entry »There was a fire alarm in South Dorm last night. Unlike the first time I heard a fire alarm in South, I managed to leave my room quickly despite the deafening noise and strobe lights in the hall.
As I got to the parking lot where we gather after fire alarms, several South Dorm residents noticed 3 stacked boxes of donuts. We wondered what the donuts were doing unattended in a parking lot. Then we saw Dean Guy Gerbick carrying additional bags of donuts from his car. He told us the donuts were for us to eat during the drill.
