i had two classes today and was so exhausted by the second that i
just played chess on my stupid laptop. i figured out that the
graphical display for gnuchess is way harder to use than just the
text-based display. i'm really bad at it either way. i'm not used
to looking for how a letter n can move and if the letter b is
blocked or not. it also didn't help that i keep sitting in the back
of the room for my cell systems class and i can only see the top
1/8 of the board. but even if i did pay attention, it wouldn't feel
super worth it because all the information was being read off of a
pdf that was sent to us. well, not sent to me yet because the half
of the program that *isn't* my home university still hasn't given
me a university id. so... i can't access any of the course
materials and one of the ta's has to email it to me and all of the
other students in my half of the program. whatever, though. it
gives me an excuse not to look at it for longer. i still need to
finish up the homework for that class. i'm making good progress and
know what the next thing i need to do is. i just haven't made
myself do it. i got too distracted today doing stupid internet
stuff. i didn't know bitreich was a suckless derivative and got
sidetracked looking at that for a bit. the main thing i wasted time
on today, though, was trying to figure out a way to bypass
sciencedirect's stupid blockage on pdf downloading. i think there's
no way i'll be able to do it unless i use their API. and lord knows
i don't want to do that. i can scrape the secret pdf link for all
of the other scientific paper sites and wget them with special user
agent whatever, but sciencedirect is so annoying about it and their
pdf link isn't a pdf, it goes through a captcha which i can't pass
with wget, no matter how many flags i add. so that was maybe 3-4
hours wasted. i also got distracted by irc stuff. does anyone ever
talk there? every time i try it seems not worth it for the silence.
no one responded to my messages in #chat either. i know they
weren't that entertaining but i just want the thrill of my first
irc interaction to be reciprocated. i also don't understand how
anyone can read anything on there unless they leave their computer
running irssi for days and days without interruption. is that what
they do? disturbing. maybe irc isn't for me. if it was more active
i believe i would love it. but also, if it was more active, maybe
the kind of stuff in there would make me not love it on account of
the kind of people who would be making it more active. but yeah. i
got pretty much nothing done today which is awesome. i don't really
regret it, except for the fact that i have to do more stuff
tomorrow to make up for it. and so it goes. my friend daniel told
me about firewire interfaces and now i want to buy one. those
things have so many quarter inch inputs. if i get that though i'd
want to buy a rack or whatever it's called and then i'd want to buy
more stupid unreasonable stuff to put on it. oh yeah, and i'd also
want to just mount a computer in there for stupid audio stuff. it
would be really fun but also so unnecessary. maybe i'll do it some
day.