Flashes of Panic

I have, in the margins of my notebooks, the beginnings of the sort of collection I once made for one of my Russian professors, and I could easily whip up a post about the verbal quirks of the characters who are my professors here.

However, it’s a bit too easy to figure out who I’m talking about, I think, and even easier for the sort of fond amusement which goes with such things (often the “quotable” instructors are the ones students have the most respect for) to be misinterpreted as derision at the instructor’s expense. So I won’t. (Or, as one of today’s quotes went, “Just because you’re not paranoid, doesn’t mean there isn’t someone out to get you.”)

It’s true that we have one or two real characters in the department, and I don’t think I’d have it any other way. The studied eccentricity of the humanities professor can be entertaining, but the out-and-out oddness of a computer geek who either isn’t aware of his own strangeness or, more likely, simply doesn’t care, is somehow more honest.

Meanwhile, we’ve been assigned to write a system monitor which notifies on anomalous events. Consider that in order to test such a program, one needs to create some anomalous events—out-and-out anti-social behavior on the shared machine. Oh, what glee. Infinite loops with large calls to malloc(), anyone? Fortunately, there’s a box dedicated to this class alone. Meanwhile, since I’ll probably be doing initial development here on my Mac, I expect my uptime is going to dive. I should probably not have other apps open if I make it to the testing phase.

Now Playing: No Beauty from The Greatest Gift by Liberty 37