Cluster Bomb

Dear Diary:

I feel like I should be angrier than I am, but all I feel is mute resignation.

Fractured back window of my car with 3 hailstone holes

The major hailstorm tonight found my car in good condition.

It is no longer in good condition.

Judging from the three holes in the tempered glass, and the four dents on the trunk lid, the hailstone broke up during the fall and became a cluster bomb. It impacted with so much energy, there were fragments of glass and tint all the way up on the front dashboard and floorboard. I am in awe.

At least it wasn’t my front window. Fuck.

I was outside (under shelter) watching the hailstorm during the worst of it, and I think I heard the stone that did my car in. There’s a certain POK! sound when tempered glass is shattered. I heard that sound. I had hoped it wasn’t my own.

There will be a lot of claims filed in Austin this week, so I have no idea how far out until I’ll have this repaired. I filed a claim shortly after cleaning up the car and showering off the shards of glass. Until then, I have a blue tarp covering the window (at least I had the foresight to buy a set years ago). I’ll have no choice but to drive like an old man until I no longer need the tarp taped to my car and pinned in the doors.

And the kicker is that I have an appointment at the tire shop tomorrow morning for new tires, and I need to buy a new battery. I’ve also been wanting to have my tint redone, but was worried about the techs damaging the painted rear window defroster lines. Now I don’t have that concern. They’ll have fresh glass to work with. Upsides, I guess.

Civic of Theseus.

Snoop de Whoop

In a recent blog post I bemoaned how Duolingo’s streak gaming system has become something of a death march, how it’s an unavoidable slog, and how eventually I’ll be jumping off that treadmill so I can enjoy life and enjoy learning German instead of breathlessly trying to rip out a 3 minute lesson before midnight so I can keep my streak up.

No sooner did I post that, do you know what Google recommended to me in my Youtube feed? A video from some linguist polyglot who gave tips on how to get the most out of Duolingo despite its flaws and, to sum it all up, the secret is to KEEP AT IT.

This is not the future I asked for.

I joke that my only readers here are robots. I sometimes forget that they are big robots, the kind that are bent on convincing me of anything if someone will pay them a buck to try it.

Ephesus

In school, the prof teaching my “Intro to the C Language” course, Dr. H, really took the “Baptist” part of OBU to heart. The final project was that he would hand us a text file, a book from the New Testament, and we were to write a C program to generate a concordance (an index) to list the chapter and verse of every useful word. Bonus points if we could “stem” the words to collect variants together.

Mine was the book of Ephesians.

I was so behind in C, so out of step with the syllabus, and so overwhelmed and understudied, that I couldn’t even grok how to go about doing it. Obviously, the task is trivially easy now with modern languages. I could hack up something fairly quickly in Python. But the class was C. Low level stuff.

It was one of the lowest points in my academic path.

What really got to me was something about this prof. He was patient, approachable, almost father-knows-best-ish, but boy howdy did he push the scripture. This is the same doc who’d give us 10 bonus points on our tests if we quoted the scripture reference of the week verbatim. He did this to every class he taught. I flatly refused.

The fact that the final was related to the bible stuck in my craw. So obviously I failed that project. I failed that class with an Incomplete. I am not proud.

So why did I go to a baptist university and yet have so much disdain for the bible? Inertia. I started as this bright-eyed freshman on fire for Jesus, but by the time I took this class years later, I had grown a bit and left the church. Yet I still needed to continue with school. Rather than transfer and lose credits, I remained. My hardest lessons were learned outside of class.

I credit my ability to come as far as I have in tech to those who pained to help me when I stumbled, balked, and turned in half-efforts. I eventually got it. But damn it was a rough start.

I still have that text file somewhere. I wonder if I’ll ever finish it, just out of spite.

EDIT: Yes, I finished it on the 30th anniversary!