Tomorrow back to philadelphia! Hope the train ride is less annoying.

and having recently played through Dragon Age: Origins, several times, I've been under the impression that a certain Golem would definatly be an appropriate model.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbppwR9wE8k

http://twitter.com/Othar/statuses/6120430016

Othar: Oh right. 'Jack A'Horned'. I heard about him. Lunatic who went around eating farmers in Southern Hungary. He says he's really sorry. Uh-huh.

Walked by the Slanty Shanty (a small apartment/retail building on the western border of current CMU campus, which CMU bought up to build more stuff on its land, from what I understand) just as it was being demolished. I would have stuck around longer, because (no offense to those who might have sentimental attachments to it as a house) watching shit get knocked down is kind of cool, but it was kicking up clouds of foul-smelling dust and I was downwind.

Yesterday had thanksgiving dinner at Ross's place (delicious) and watched "The Last Unicorn" (inexplicably bizarre). Had a dream about a dude making Rubik's Cube Art.

I think I worked how how to translate the more general Pfenning-Davies multimodal logic setup down into linear logic token-passing, but it's weirding me out how hard it seems to get the lax and possibility modalities to work right in the same translation.

<3 Happy Thanksgiving, all you USA-types out there! --Kaja <3

...for the Sneaky Gate.

[biting tongue on further comments for now]

me: when life gives you lions...
gwillen: protect them from effects with a lionad?

http://twitter.com/Othar/statuses/6090440658

Othar: Finally. I see a human. I think. It appears to have horns or something, but it acts like a human. His name is Jack and he's a prisoner here.

Thanksmas is catching on: http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/2009/11/because-we-need-more-holidays.html (though she did misspell it as Thankmas, but close enough).

We do need a better cake for Thanksmas, though...

C++ is a language full of quirks. Sometimes these quirks are/were necessary to support the performance characteristics desired by the language designers. Sometimes these quirks are historic artifacts of a language whose design was started 30 years ago. Either way, these quirks often make it so that the language fails to follow bread-and-butter principles like "fail early" or "behave consistently".

Consider the following program:

#include <stdio.h>

class Foo {
 public:
  void bar() { printf("%li\n", (long)this); }
};

int main(void) {
  Foo* foo = NULL;
  foo->bar();
  return 0;
}

After compiling with GCC 4.3.1, the output of this program was 0. Despite the fact that foo is NULL, we are able to call a method on foo, and, since that method does not access any members, it executes successfully.

Change bar() to be virtual and the program will seg fault when run.

From an implementation point of view, this makes sense. In the first case, the call site can be replaced with a call to a method known at compile time. this is passed to that method, and an error occurs when this is dereferenced, not at the call site.

In the second case, the compiler does not know at compile time what method it will need to call. As such, at run time it needs to look up the vtable for the object. Since foo is NULL this call fails at the call site.

But things that make sense from an implementation point of view but not a language design point of view still make me sad.

It seems that toddlers who have a cold and are teething don't always sleep well, and sometimes need to have their mamas close by. I'm a bit tired this morning.

Nonetheless, I'm thankful for my kids, sleepy toddler included, as well as for my husband, who will take responsibility for the turkey (as usual here), and the forethought and planning that allow this to be a really lazy day for me. And for old friends who will show up later today, and a chance to catch up on life.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! May you all have a wonderful, thankful day.

Newt

Happy Birthday kegom!!!! ♥

I hope you're not too stressed out, but I'm sure you're quite busy. So I hope school is going smoothly for you, and you had a good day with your family and got to eat good food and all. ♥ Here's to another Arashi year~

http://twitter.com/Othar/statuses/6058931115

Othar: As I thought. Every oubliette has the same easily exploited flaw...Okay, I have really caught something's attention now. Is it the Castle?

The world deserves a collective boot to the head. Except for kitties. And well-behaved babies and children. And people doing good things. Okay, fine. Maybe the world doesn't need a boot to the head. I do need some sleep, however...

(Everything's fine, nothing's broken. Maybe just some mild sprains. ;-) )

Counter to the spirit of this post, happy Thanksgiving/long weekend/whatever, everyone!

The mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and cranberry sauce are all done and in the fridge, the first two in casserole dishes that can be popped in the oven the moment the turkey comes out. The veggies for the stuffing are chopped; the Italian sausage is thawed; the cornbread is made and getting thoroughly stale. (One day is not enough for cornbread to get stale enough to remain chunks of cornbread in stuffing instead of cornbread mush. It's been getting stale since Sunday.) The previous turkey's carcass has been made into rich, thick stock, which is sitting in the fridge, ready to baste this year's turkey.

Today's goals include:
- Brown sausage and saute veggies for stuffing.
- Saute veggies and walnuts for vegetarian stuffing/dressing. (Our guests this year are vegetarian.)
- Buy two cans of cream of mushroom soup.
- Mix up the green bean casserole. (I intend to delegate this one to D, which may actually make it take more of my time, but she wants to help and I want her to learn.)
- Do reading lessons for both D and T.
- Do some math with D and T. (Maybe play store again, maybe do flashcards. Maybe just discuss numbers in the kitchen. We'll see how the day goes.)
- Read a library book about Thanksgiving.
- Maybe finish The Wanderings of Odysseus. (Penelope has issued her challenge regarding the bow and the ax rings; everyone is asleep, preparing for the big challenge the next day. It's a hard time to leave the story hanging.)
- Recover from yesterday's tumble down the stairs. (Nothing worse than a bit scraped up -- the impact was all to one side, so nothing wrong with the belly or baby or anything like that, and nothing sprained or broken -- but still, annoying.)
- Be on hand when the dishwasher and stove repairman shows up, sometime between 1:00 and 5:00 this afternoon. Hope that he will have parts on hand for the dishwasher, and that the tune-up on the stove will fix the temperature issues I've been having with the oven recently.
- Bake pies (apple and pumpkin) after he leaves, when the oven is hopefully working right again.
- Tidy up the dining room, so it looks more festive and less like it's had things dumped on all the horizontal surfaces and ignored for the past couple months.

Tomorrow, I can stuff the turkey and then relax for most of the day. Yay!

Newt

So is Tarvek suddenly getting good at fighting an indication that he's picked up Gil's skills from the Si Vales Valeo link?

Discuss amongst yourselves.

<3 ZzZzZzZzZz... --Kaja <3

http://twitter.com/Othar/statuses/6015432369

Othar: I turn back and there is nothing but blank walls. I am in an oubliette. It's about two meters square. Like this has never happened before.