Dav

Alternate Title – Why Castlevania and Fdisk Don’t Mix

Some of you may have noticed that I have not been on AIM for several days, which is unlike me. The reason for this is that a little while ago my filesystem got corrupted by either Windows Update or defrag or something and I had to reinstall Windows, but that didn’t fix my problem so I had to reformat and start clean. The nice thing about having a Windows drive and a Linux drive is that when one fucks up on me, I can back everything up to the other one, so I never lose anything important. So I copied all my important data to my Linux drive and carried on.

I struggled with DOS fdisk for a while to get it to do what I wanted, because some versions of fdisk (notably the one that came with my rescue cd) only support partitions of up to 2 gigs. Ugh. Eventually I got it to work or so I thought, and I started formatting my hard drive. I was very eager to just have the damn thing start formatting so I could get back to my game of Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow so I didn’t pay much attention to what was going on. About 40 minutes later it tells me drive C is formatted. That’s a lot of formatting, but whatever. Yay! I installed Win98 and booted up.

I go to check out my partitions and notice that I have three, which is weird because I only wanted two. Windows tells me I have about 240 gigs of free space among all of the partitions, yet my windows drive is only 120 gigs. Wow! Two hard drives’ worth of free space on one hard drive somehow, isn’t that great? Then it slowly dawned on me what had happened. Fuck. I must have accidentally just reformatted my Linux drive. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Fuck! You know what sucks? Losing about 6 years of stuff I’ve been working on. This feeling of impending doom slowly sank into me.

On a longshot I decided to boot up an Ubuntu cd and see if I could salvage anything from my now-empty Linux drive. By some miracle I was able to mount the partitions that used to be there, and recover all my stuff. Well, some of it. One of the partitions got pretty messed up, but luckily it was the partition where I keep my system files and not my personal data files. So I installed Ubuntu and now Linux is good to go again. Holy crap was I relieved.

Now things are pretty much back to normal. As it turns out, I spent the next 3 days struggling to install Windows 98 correctly only to remember that it can’t handle more than 512 megs of RAM by default (which I have).

=(

Sometime I want to play the game Nomic. The short version is that it’s a game where people modify the rules a lot. Kind of like a verbal version of Four Square that doesn’t tire you out or require a court to play.

My mother has been having an ongoing battle against the four or so squirrels that live in my backyard. This all started longer ago than I care to remember but has just been heating up again recently. The deal is that birds like birdseed, so we have a birdfeeder in our backyard to attract them, because apparently birds are nice to look at. Squirrels also like birdseed, and these squirrels are particularly clever, and are quite adept at getting it out of the feeder. Also apparently squirrels are not nice to look at, or so my parents decided.

Before the whole war started, we used to just sprinkle birdseed on the ground, but the squirrels ate a lot of it. So my parents bought a special squirrelproof feeder and hung it on a string between some trees. The squirrels figured out they could jump down from trees and knock into it really hard, which would spill delicious seeds out onto the ground below.

More recently, my parents did away with the string and brought the feeder much closer to the house where there are no nearby trees, and mounted it on a pole. Well, the squirrels learned how to climb the pole, so they covered the pole in vaseline to make it impossible to climb, but that was no deterrent.

The latest development was when my mother went out to gather briars to wrap around the pole. I told her, “You give those squirrels a week and they’ll be up there.” She was so confident that this would be the final strike that she placed 5 dollars on it. She came into my room with a fiver the very next morning.

Personally I think they should just stop trying to fight the squirrels and give them birdseed to eat. The squirrels get along just fine with the birds — I’ve seen it. They frolic together. But I hear rumors about a plan in the works to mount the bird feeder on the side of our house so there is no pole to climb. This isn’t over yet.

I was hanging out at Heather’s apartment this morning watching The Jerk, a fine film made in 1979. There are a few scenes where the main character works at a gas station, and one particular moment intrigued me, because if you pause the movie at just the right frame, you can see some numbers on the gas pump. For curiosity’s sake, I wanted to know how much gas went for back then. So I got up, grabbed a pen, grabbed a pad of paper, sat back down in front of the TV, and wrote down the gallons sold and total price on my pad, ready to do some divison.

Then Heather glanced at the TV from a conversation with her roommate and casually said “It’s about a dollar per gallon.” I looked down at my pad of paper, and found “$26.74″ and “26.2 gal” written on it.

I went through four years of college. Dammit.

As I see it, there are three distinct classes of holidays. There are religious holidays, state holidays, and cultural holidays. Let’s have a closer look.

• Religious Holidays:
  Christmas, Easter, Channukah, Good Friday, and all of that. The thing I don’t like about these holidays are that they get forced on us in a lot of ways. I am a hardcore atheist, so it bothers me when the whole country gets all uppity about Christmas spirit, which by itself is harmless but it’s an extension of a religion I don’t agree with nonetheless. These things would be tolerable if they didn’t work their way towards me so much. For example, at school you get Christmas break. Yeah they call it “winter break” now but you know what it really is. Separation of church and state my ass. Christmas sales I can handle, but waiting in huge lines at the mall is a pain in the ass. Families like mine that aren’t religious at all celebrate Christmas to keep up with the neighbors. It’s bunk.
• State Holidays:
  Not quite as bad as religious holidays, but still kind of irritating. Unlike religious holidays, these state holidays actually ARE forced on us, by state mandate. Yikes! Not that I mind time off from work or school, but it seems like when you celebrate a holiday, it should be because you want to, not because it’s the law. Memorial Day, Veterans’ Day, Labor Day, etc. Does anyone even know when these holidays are? I usually get told they’re coming up or find out from a teacher that we don’t have class on Monday or something. And to my knowledge, nobody actually celebrates them. Maybe veterans or families of veterans celebrate Veterans’ Day, but nobody I know does. It’s just a pointless day off. Again, days off are nice, but these ones are kind of bland.
• Cultural Holidays:
  These are my favorites. Holidays that started up just because some people started doing stuff and other people realized how awesome it was and started doing it too. Halloween, the 4th of July, Thanksgiving, New Year’s Eve. I love these holidays because they aren’t forced on me, and because they’re just plain fun. You get together with family. You eat lots of great food. You set off fireworks, or go to parties. You drink and be merry. There’s no dogma attached to it. There’s no cramming it down your throat. People celebrate these holidays because they like to. (One might argue that religious holidays are a subset of cultural holidays, but I distinguish between the two.)

Thus concludes my analysis of holidays. Feel free to comment or criticize.

This is a sign that was on all the tables at the dining hall here at UNH today. Now, I’m no marketing genius, but it seems to me like 185 is an insufficient number to start applying peer pressure. If the logic here is “185 people have done X, therefore so should you!”… well I’m pretty sure at least 185 people have had sex with goats. Perhaps a more logical view is that they’re only considering the UNH student body, since the advertisement is only aimed at students, in which case they’re saying 185 people out of 5000(?). Which is a bit of a more reasonable percentage, even though not all of those 185 people are students themselves. Still though, 185 people have joined frats. 185 people have failed a class.

I guess the point of this post is that the fact that a group of people does something is not justification for doing it.

So, I’m driving to Dover today, and I pass by a construction area. They’re repaving the road or something. This process takes up one of the lanes of the (two lane) road, meaning traffic from both directions has to travel along a single lane for a while. In order to warn oncoming drivers of this, they had a man standing there holding a wooden pole with an orange “SLOW” sign on it. As I passed him by, all I could think was “This guy must feel incredibly insecure in his job, knowing that at any moment he could be replaced by the ground.” Then, as I pass out of the construction area, I see another guy holding the same sign on the other side of the area to the traffic coming in the opposite direction. Holy crap, I hope I’m not paying for these guys with my taxes.

So, I had to teach a discussion section this morning at 8:10, and it made me realize that I go through information very quickly. Also, I don’t like talking. All in all, I’m not a very good lecturer. I think the class lasted about 5 minutes, and even though it was only supposed to go 5 to 10 minutes, the bare minimum is not great.

Anyway, the most awkward part of teaching, as I discovered, is wrapping up the class. I told the class up front at the beginning that it was only going to be about 5 minutes long, so there shouldn’t have been any surprises there. When I was done talking, I didn’t really know how to express that they could go now, so I said something like “Okay. That’s it.” and shrugged. They kind of stared at me blankly, not knowing what to do. So I reiterated a few seconds later. “I’m done for today.” They still just sat there. Then one guy piped up and asked a question. Aha, questions! Question time is a traditional way of marking the end of the lecture. So I answered his question, then asked “Any other questions?”. When nobody had any, I just kind of turned around and started erasing the board, and I think that gave them the hint because then they left.

Normally, in a game like Monopoly, Settlers of Catan, or even Chinese Checkers, the game’s rules explicitly state that there can be only one winner. In many games, this is usually not a problem. However, in many games that we play, this can lead to very large multiplayer stalemates. Nobody wants to make the first move because doing so would use up one’s own resources to attack another, leaving the board position heavily in favor of everyone else. In my circle of friends, there is a de facto system in place in order to help end board games quickly when they are dragging on too long: the Glory system. Board games don’t have any money or anything else riding on them; but there is a certain amount of glory to be had by winning. To us, this glory can be split up and distributed as we wish.

Example, as taken from last night. Erik, Daniel, Mikix and I were playing a game of Blood Feud in New York. Somehow we all amassed all of our most powerful armies right in the middle of the board such that any one of us could strike any other person. Clearly, nobody wants to attack, leaving his own army vulnerable to retaliation from the others. So Mikix suggests to me that he and I split up the glory, 50/50. I know that if I refuse, I probably have as much chance as anyone else of winning, i.e. 25% (since there were four of us). Having an almost guaranteed 50% maximized my expected value, so I accepted the offer. I ended up winning the game due to Mikix’s first assault, allowing me to be the player that sweeped in and cashed in on the first big attack. So, according to the rules, I technically won alone. However, the rules don’t say I won anything. What I did win is glory, as agreed implicitly by the players when they start playing the game. I yielded half of this glory to Mikix. (I think I got ripped off. I should have held out for at least 60%.)

Historically, whenever glory is split up, it always seems to be between Mikix and myself, and sometimes a third person. This usually pisses off whomever else is playing the game. But they can suck it, because I have more glory than them.

Some other notable examples:
a game of Attack!.
Participants: Swifty, Max, Mikix and me.
Winner: Mikix, I think.
Glory: Mikix and me.
Very pissed off: Max.

a game of A Game of Thrones. Participants: Ben, Evil Matt, Mikix and me.
Winner: Nobody. We decided that given the board position, there was no clear winner. We had been playing for like 10 hours and did not feel like playing any further. However, what was clear was that Evil Matt was the loser.
Glory: Ben, Mikix and me.
Filled with shame: Evil Matt

I am also told just now that as I blog this, a game of Monopoly Party has just been concluded by Mikix’s brother Daniel splitting up the glory with Erik to crush Mikix. Possibly out of spite for last night. But more power to them! They just won some glory.