Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

Mental note: reading[1] about superstar hackers[2] who flunked classes[3] and couldn’t care less[4] during a break in class[5] does NOT contribute to one’s productivity in said class.

[1] Steven Levy’s Hackers, which I have both in book form and electronic form and read over and over the way some people read the bible.
[2] Ricky Greenblatt.
[3] At MIT, no less.
[4] “He was placed on academic probation, and his mother came to Massachusetts to confer with the dean. There was some explaining to do. “His mom was concerned,” his roommate Beeler would later say. “Her idea was that he was here to get a degree. But the things he was doing on the computer were completely state-of-the-art no one was doing them yet. He saw additional things to be done. It was very difficult to get excited about classes.” To Greenblatt, it wasn’t really important that he was in danger of flunking out of college. Hacking was paramount: it was what he did best and what made him happiest. His worst moment came when he was so “out of phase” that he slept past a final exam[6]. It only hastened his exit from the student body of MIT.”
[5] Algorithms. Today’s lesson – Dynamic Algorithms and Minimal Spanning Trees.
[6] Been there, done that.

adb of Scary Devil Monastery fame has his notes from OLS 2003 up. In the entire conference, we only attended the same talk once.

Although reading selected documentation from 2.6’s Documentation/* is not exactly the best thing for one’s digestion. Also, there were chocolate thingies I crave for desert. I had a banana instead.

The program I was going to use to debug the hardware uses the exact same mechanism that’s broken and needs debugging. Royal suckage.

I’m sick and miserable. You may leave appropriately sympathizing comments, if you insist.

On the plus side, I lost almost three kilograms since Saturday evening, and am getting used to the constant hunger. Yay for diets (not!), yay for getting fit (this one for real).

Also on the plus side, I’m reading King’s reissued edition of The Gunslinger, in preperation for volumes 5, 6 and 7 of The Dark Tower. Much better than the first edition.