inauspicio.us

can’t believe its wednesday already. i’m working …

can’t believe its wednesday already. i’m working on a sweet project right now, more to come in a day or two but right now it is on the super, super down-low. the basic gist of it is a decentralized weather forecaster: adaptive, accessible, accurate, cheap, and best of all really really cool.

in the meantime, perhaps, a dynamic menu will suffice. there is a reat deal of other news today though:

the shit hit the fan hard at CU today when the power went off all across campus at 4:30 pm. i was in the basement computer lab of the engineering building, the tall one that looks like gumby in black and white. i was surrounded by the legions of stressed-out students, frantically debugging and putting the finishing touches on faux-disk drive firmware, or some subtly enhanced form of linked list, and talking was kept to a relative minimum. when the lights died, the entire room went silent for a second, and it was the silence that was the most telling. no humming of fans in little gray boxes, none of those beeping noises. the dead silence lasted for just a second before the chorus of anguished cries rose up, but there was no computer noise at all: it wasn’t just the lights, ALL the power was gone. work gone. program, gone. anything you didn’t save and probably some parts of what you did, gone. and it wasn’t oh-the-lights-are-out dark either. the undergrad lab is in the basement, without even those little jobs that look out into a ditch or a cement ventilation shaft. dark as the inside of an elephant. but a strange and wonderful thing happened when the screams died down. we gathered up our books, all of us, and wandered outside and up the stairs. there we were met with hundreds of other blinking, squinting kids whose only means of getting work done had just been taken away. not one of them was stressing out over it, and more and more people streamed out of the adjoining buildings. classes were dismissed and they filtered outside. a half-dozen people produced frisbees and games were organized. people napped in the sun, smoked cigarettes, and pulled out their cellphones as an impromptu school-wide study break materialized on lawns, courtyards, and quadrangles across campus. no one could curse thier miserable luck at having much-needed work time taken away from them, because the day was just too beautiful. and the collective realiztion that there was no immediate slution to be had, nor any immediate progress to be made, made it that much more perfect.

it was also a great time to ask for that extension.