tag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:143504Matthew DalyMatthew DalyMatthew Daly2010-04-29T04:51:23Ztag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:143504:22177A person to whom things do not happen2010-04-27T14:45:44Z2010-04-29T04:51:23Zthoughtfulpublic0It's snowing. Quite a bit, actually. It's what I call "snowglobe snow" (in my personal effort to prove that we've got SO many more terms for snow than the Inuit) with big puffy flakes that are just as willing to move to the side as to drop, and while the sky seems quite full of action it doesn't amount to much on the ground. If it keeps up, it will be more than a trace of snow and we'll be able to move our last measurable snowfall up from February, which would be helpful for our Arctic cred.<br /><br />In other news, my week of vacation from Census work is at serious risk of growing longer, since they never called to let me know when training for the next phase would begin and it might be that it's happening now. At the same time, they could be really busy figuring out how to assign teams and plan training locations and so they decided to push the training back a few days and they're so darned busy that they don't have time to respond to phone calls from enumerators wondering what's going on. I'm not bugged one way or the other, I just wish I knew which way it was so that I could look for another job if that's necessary and know that I can now schedule things for my evenings and weekends.<br /><br />In my offtime, my brother pointed me toward the <a href="http://www.spoj.pl/">Sphere Online Judge</a>, which seems to have all of the good things about online programming judges that I've seen in the past without quite so much of the annoyingness. As you can see, <a href="http://www.spoj.pl/myaccount/">I</a> have been busy at it. The thing that is quite pleasing to me is that I've gotten this far just in Python, although I think that there is getting to be a backlog of programs that I'm going to have to recode in C to get the speed boost I suspect.<br /><br />That wasn't precisely a true statement, because a few of the programs have finally pushed me into learning <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck">brainfuck</a>. I had been gunshy of it for a while because I had be given to believe that it was an actively hostile language, when in truth it's just very very minimal. But it's been great fun to tackle thorny problems and then wake up in the middle of the night saying "Aha! THAT'S how you write 'if x==58'!" I don't even particularly know if my solution is elegant, but I don't care because it's mine, and it looks like the first rule of coding in brainfuck is that you don't talk about coding in brainfuck.<br /><br />And now it's stopped snowing.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=matthewdaly&ditemid=22177" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments