hello. well i was in a rather bad mood earlier, but i worked on a new song and it kind of made me feel better. i already had the chords for hte most part, but tonite i wrote some words to go w/ it. i am hoping my throat will clear up enough that i'll be able to record some demos of my songs.

anywyas, i guess i'll just mention the theme of the new song. basically, i've been thinking lately about stuff, and i have decided that if i really care about somebody, then there can't be any in-between. what i mean is, either you're my friend or my enemy. i'm sick to death of people who think they can pretend to be someone's friend but not actually BE a friend. tha'ts total bull. i do'nt buy into that program. i'd rather have an enemy than a friend who i can't count on. i can't pretend. it has to be all or nothing.

ok, i don't know if this entry will make sense to most people who read it. but, if anyone does read it, i am sure there's somebody out there who knows exactly what i'm talking about.

ok, so i feel like i'm finally rising to the surface after having been underwater for the past month or so. Hm... it so happens it's been exactly one month since my last blogger entry... interesting. Unfortunately, i'm sick. It's because of EECS 470. I feel like i should go to the Fox 2 Problem Solvers and get them to do an expose on this class. I was SO healthy until i took this class. Now i'm probably going to end up w/ pneumonia or something. i suspect it all stems from being too busy working on 470 to do things i used to think were important, you know, like eating and sleeping. my mind is forever scarred from staring at waveforms. i'm not even sure i can UNDERSTAND anything like a trend or idea without being able to see it expressed as a waveform.

i'd like to do an anthropological study on the students of EECS 470 from this past term. we've practically developed a whole new lingo. during the last few weeks, the difference between a "fix" and a "hack" has become firmly crystallized in our minds. we've learned that before you can "fix" something, you first have to "unbreak" it. we've learned that "verilog" is synonymous with "voodoo." we're no longer fully a part of the society in which we used to live, but we've actually created an entire new subculture. think about the things that make up a society or culture. you've got (1) language- we've covered that- it's a subset of English and jibberish including phrases and expressions specialized for talking about the hell that is verilog programming. i cna't even legitimately call it programming. it really is more like voodoo. particularly whne you use these mysterious objects known as a "#1", or more popularly as a "tick SD" or " 'SD ". If you take them all out, oftentimes your code will start working, as if by magic. Then later when it breaks again, putting them back in will magically cause it to work, yet AGAIN. but i digress.... i was talking about the culture of 470.

so, what else do you have? (2) food- well, that one's easy- you've got your vending machine fair, bagels and sandwiches from the cafes, and the occasional TV dinner brought from home. clearly not the type of food eaten by members of american mainstream culture. i think one of my group members subsisted on McD's french fries for the entire term. Peanut M&M's are one of our staples, as well as any beverage containing caffiene. No, actually, i think caffiene itself is probably a staple.

Let's see... how about (3) products & objects created by the society. Well, we don't produce much other than mostly non-functioning Verilog code, and I have to admit that's kind of ethereal. But we do have art- bizarre doodles of ourselves wearing sunglasses, drawings of numerous boxes with lines connecting different symbolic elements... usually these latter images are eventually destroyed or covered in additional lines that cross out everything that was on the drawing. I'm sure some artifacts have survived and are available for study. Also printouts of Alpha-assembly programs with numbers written next to each line. that reminds me, we also have (4) mathematics. the students of 470 have developed our own number system, in which we only count by 4s in Hex. it's actually really easy, just 0, 4, 8, c, 20, 24, 28, 2c... you get the idea. I was confused when i saw on teh calendar that the date today is Dec 12, and not Dec 0xC. what's going on here?

We also have (5) styles of dress and fashion. mainly consisting of Yesterday's Clothes, by which i mean not clothing from "yesteryear," in the sense of being out of style. i mean "the clothes you wore yesterday" because you've been at the Media Union all night and haven't had time to go home and do anything like sleep, shower and put on new clothes. We also have our own (6) customs and norms. Like being polite by offering to get something for others when you make the trek downstairs to Pierpont or to the vending machines. Or the practice of locking a Sun machine about 15 minutes in advance of when you expect one of your group members to arrive at the crowded lab. There is also a strong taboo against making changes to a stable version of the a project without first saving off a backup-copy of the unmodified version. These are just a few examples of our many customs and standards for acceptable behavior. Some things that are not considered acceptable or "normal" behavior in mainstream society are actually considered quite normal among 470 students- things like muttering profanities at the verilog compiler, raising your arms toward the ceiling and yelling "aaaaaagggghhhhhhh" while shaking said arms, getting up to go the bathroom every 20 minutes because you've been sucking down one bottle of Mountain Dew after another for the last 12 hours.

While I'm sure i could go on and on, I think i've presented enough evidence here to merit some type of anthropoligical study. If i were smart enough at this point to change my major to something EASY like Sociology, Psychology or Cultural Anthropology (incidentally, i make no apologies for calling these majors "easy") i woudl seriously consider doing research on this topic and publishing a paper about it. I'd do it anyways, but the more i think about it, returning to such sites as mu3ne or 2nd-floor eecs before the memory of 470 has faded a little more would probably scar me permanently, so i think i'll just let it lie.