Looks like some of these 30 day trials I'm on have to get restarted. Several of them died horrible deaths. The ones still going to strong are the vegetarian trial and the blogging every day.
The others, may they never rest in peace but get revived until they are completed are:
1. Pushups / planks. Sadly around a week ago, when I got sick, my arm also started hurting and not at all in that nice way like when you're getting scratched or a pretty girl is lightly biting you while you're trying to work and you give her dirty looks but don't punish her just yet because maybe if you don't, she'll keep going. But then of course you have to punish her so that she wants to keep doing it. Anyway, where was I? My arm hurt, and it wasn't from the sin of Onan, although if God were to pick one arm to go to Hell for that sin, it would be the same arm. Which reminds me, I read a great joke today about the apotheosis of Russian childhood mischief - Vovochka.
In case you don't know, Vovochka is a cornerstone of Russian joke culture. He is an irreverent reprobate, whether he happens to be age 5 or 30 in the joke, and he thrives on tearing down teachers, parents, and other grown-ups that stereotypically demand respect. Vovochka is also extremely sexual, which renders all innocent classroom questions dangerous territory:
"What does your daddy do?"
"How many watermelons could you carry and how?"
"Any questions?"
(Note: If you can't think of a filthy answer to all of those questions, you've probably never heard a Vovochka joke, or graduated from elementary school.)
The teachers typically know this and only call on Vovochka when completely exasperated with the other children's demented answers. Then Vovochka of course makes them regret it for the millionth time.
In this joke, probably one of the cleanest Vovochka jokes, Vovochka is inexplicably attending Catholic school:
Teacher: Remember, those children who get A's and B's are going to Heaven, and those who gets C's D's and F's are going straight to hell! Yes Vovochka, you have a question?
Vovochka: does anyone leave this school alive?
Here's one more:
Vovochka brings home an F in math.
Dad: why??
Vovochka: she asked me, how much is 2x3? I said 6!
Dad: but that's right!
Vovochka: then she asked me, how much is 3x2?
Dad: what the f*** is the difference?
Vovochka: exactly! I mean, that's exactly what I said!
Classic. Next time I'll tell you my favorite Vovochka joke of all time. Sadly I have to translate all of these from Russian into English by way of Chinese, so they lose some of their juice. Just don't tell Vovochka I said that.
So the pushups / planks trial is getting restarted officially tomorrow. I've been warming up for it during the last two days and the looks like my arm is back to full health.
2. The no eating sweets trial. This trial was actually going really well. Then I got sick. Usually when I get sick, I try to up my vitamin C dosage, even if just as a placebo. So I drank this just-add-water vitamin C orange mix for a few days. No worries, the craving is mostly gone, so this trial got restarted 3 days ago.
3. Reading with Yuan Yuan in English for 30 minutes every day. This one just didn't work out, Yuan Yuan went to Korea, and then when she came back she went on a tour around Beijing for a few days, coming home and crashing immediately every day. But we'll try to get it going again...though she's off to Korea in a couple days again.
4. Stretching. Restarting? Fine, I had to beg myself to restart it, but I agreed. Restarting this one today.
Showing posts with label sick. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sick. Show all posts
Friday, July 26, 2013
Saturday, July 20, 2013
Getting shaved by visitors
Yesterday's cold kept me delightfully bed-ridden all day. I lay there most of the day, sometimes draped over a chair like a wet towel, sometimes prostrate on the bed like a dead hooker, but always impossibly listless. I ended up reading all day, and I feel a little bit sorry for the book I demolished - Prodigy by Marie Lu - I would have probably enjoyed it more if I'd read it in a non-zombified state. Still, it was enjoyable if not quite enjoyed. It was as expected, not quite as interesting as Legend (the first book in the series). This is pretty typical of dystopian trilogies; the first book is about starting a revolution, earth-shattering realizations, the death of ignorance, and the next N sequels are about war and hypocrisy and all kinds of nonsense dealt with better in books that deal solely with war and hypocrisy. Prodigy did better in that respect than Hunger Games, Divergent, and the Matrix sequels, but it still suffered from the same side-effects.
I learned a new object oriented programming pattern today that provides a cool way to follow the open / closed principle.
In case you don't know, the open / closed principle says that you should design things to be extensible but not modifiable. Meaning you don't want people modifying your diaper design, but you do want people building plugins for it. The original design, once complete, should only modified if something is broken. And this seems to apply on many levels, from objects to systems. Now onto the pattern, called The Visitor.
The Visitor pattern basically has you build in an uber-simple but multi-purpose socket, that you can later build things to plug into. The socket doesn't need to know beforehand exactly what will be plugging into it, a vibrator or the Omega 13 device, it's the job of the Visitor implementor to build plugs for those devices. The result is that once you have the socket set up, you're virtually unlimited in what you can plug into it, without ever modifying the diaper.
Neat, though it seems a bit hacky to me. It appears mostly to be used when you want to take a function that might apply to many different objects, and encapsulate all the variants into an object. This object, which is called a Visitor but should really be called a DirtyDirtySlut, then plugs into those objects and provides a single service, albeit adapted per their needs. So you might have a ShaveVisitor object, that defines 10 different variants of the function visit(): bear.visit(), chicken.visit(), patrickRothfuss.visit(), etc, and when the bear or the chicken decide they need a shave, they call in the ShaveVisitor to visit (shave) them. And of course everyone who shaves, lives in perpetual fear because they have no way of knowing who the ShaveVisitor shaved before them, and because there are rumors going around that there's a new Butthole object which likes to get shaved all the freakin' time. And who wants to be the next one shaved after that?
I learned a new object oriented programming pattern today that provides a cool way to follow the open / closed principle.
In case you don't know, the open / closed principle says that you should design things to be extensible but not modifiable. Meaning you don't want people modifying your diaper design, but you do want people building plugins for it. The original design, once complete, should only modified if something is broken. And this seems to apply on many levels, from objects to systems. Now onto the pattern, called The Visitor.
The Visitor pattern basically has you build in an uber-simple but multi-purpose socket, that you can later build things to plug into. The socket doesn't need to know beforehand exactly what will be plugging into it, a vibrator or the Omega 13 device, it's the job of the Visitor implementor to build plugs for those devices. The result is that once you have the socket set up, you're virtually unlimited in what you can plug into it, without ever modifying the diaper.
Neat, though it seems a bit hacky to me. It appears mostly to be used when you want to take a function that might apply to many different objects, and encapsulate all the variants into an object. This object, which is called a Visitor but should really be called a DirtyDirtySlut, then plugs into those objects and provides a single service, albeit adapted per their needs. So you might have a ShaveVisitor object, that defines 10 different variants of the function visit(): bear.visit(), chicken.visit(), patrickRothfuss.visit(), etc, and when the bear or the chicken decide they need a shave, they call in the ShaveVisitor to visit (shave) them. And of course everyone who shaves, lives in perpetual fear because they have no way of knowing who the ShaveVisitor shaved before them, and because there are rumors going around that there's a new Butthole object which likes to get shaved all the freakin' time. And who wants to be the next one shaved after that?
Friday, July 19, 2013
Sick again
I caught another cold yesterday night. I've had colds on and off for the last month. It's hard to tell if it's one long cold or if I've wandered into some kind of buffet and can't find the exit.
I went down to the pharmacy a few minutes ago and slammed right into the barrier between Chinese and Western medicine. In America, they usually ask you about the symptoms you're experiencing and then pronounce a diagnosis - you have a cold. No shit. Sometimes it's cancer. Then it's "oh shit." But things aren't so simple here. In Chinese medicine, there are several different types of colds, depending on the season and how you acquired them.
Me: I have a cold, can I have some cold medicine?
Pharmacist (a nice elderly lady): What kind of cold?
Me: Excuse me?
Pharmacist: is it from running the air conditioner, or were you in a cold place, or did you catch fire? (上火 - Catching fire - the most common ailment Chinese people complain about, symptoms ranging from diarrhea to constipation to scratchy throats to pimples and many more. In general, it means something is inflamed, and you need to fight that fire with something intrinsically cool, like cucumbers and water. Foreigners are generally mystified by the concept.)
Me: I...have no freaking clue
Pharmacist: shame on you, you don't even know your own body!
Me: could someone have sent the cold to me in an email?
Pharmacist: don't be a smart ass, you need at least realtime audio to catch a cold over the network. Here are three types of cold medicine, pick one yourself.
I ended up picking the "wind-heat cold" (风热感冒) medicine. The other prominent choice was "wind-cold cold" (风寒感冒) medicine. We'll see what happens. Or maybe we won't. Chinese medicine is very much a slow cure, you never know whether it helped or you managed to recover on your own.
One of the things Mario was always better at than me is urination. Not only could his stream cut metal (you could hear it from the local KFC), while my stream couldn't cut the line at the KFC, but he could empty out 0.75L at a time. I averaged 0.25L with a rare max around 0.4L. How do I know this? Occasionally the bathroom is taken, and there's a bladder emergency among the leftover roomizens. If the bathroom is occupied by a girl, everyone knows that there's imminent danger of permanent bladder damage, so they usually grab a bottle and pee in it. Then everyone else grabs a bottle and pees in theirs. Don't worry, we do this privately, we don't compare equipment or anything.
Anyway, I've never managed to fill a 0.4L bottle in one go, and no amount of practice or holding it in seemed to help. But this morning, that looked like any old morning, with no hint of the epic feats about to transpire, I woke up to a bladder emergency. The bathroom was taken by one of my new roommies, the one with breasts. I found an empty bottle, 0.45L, and filled it up with pee to spare. This is momentous day, make no mistake about it.
I went down to the pharmacy a few minutes ago and slammed right into the barrier between Chinese and Western medicine. In America, they usually ask you about the symptoms you're experiencing and then pronounce a diagnosis - you have a cold. No shit. Sometimes it's cancer. Then it's "oh shit." But things aren't so simple here. In Chinese medicine, there are several different types of colds, depending on the season and how you acquired them.
Me: I have a cold, can I have some cold medicine?
Pharmacist (a nice elderly lady): What kind of cold?
Me: Excuse me?
Pharmacist: is it from running the air conditioner, or were you in a cold place, or did you catch fire? (上火 - Catching fire - the most common ailment Chinese people complain about, symptoms ranging from diarrhea to constipation to scratchy throats to pimples and many more. In general, it means something is inflamed, and you need to fight that fire with something intrinsically cool, like cucumbers and water. Foreigners are generally mystified by the concept.)
Me: I...have no freaking clue
Pharmacist: shame on you, you don't even know your own body!
Me: could someone have sent the cold to me in an email?
Pharmacist: don't be a smart ass, you need at least realtime audio to catch a cold over the network. Here are three types of cold medicine, pick one yourself.
I ended up picking the "wind-heat cold" (风热感冒) medicine. The other prominent choice was "wind-cold cold" (风寒感冒) medicine. We'll see what happens. Or maybe we won't. Chinese medicine is very much a slow cure, you never know whether it helped or you managed to recover on your own.
One of the things Mario was always better at than me is urination. Not only could his stream cut metal (you could hear it from the local KFC), while my stream couldn't cut the line at the KFC, but he could empty out 0.75L at a time. I averaged 0.25L with a rare max around 0.4L. How do I know this? Occasionally the bathroom is taken, and there's a bladder emergency among the leftover roomizens. If the bathroom is occupied by a girl, everyone knows that there's imminent danger of permanent bladder damage, so they usually grab a bottle and pee in it. Then everyone else grabs a bottle and pees in theirs. Don't worry, we do this privately, we don't compare equipment or anything.
Anyway, I've never managed to fill a 0.4L bottle in one go, and no amount of practice or holding it in seemed to help. But this morning, that looked like any old morning, with no hint of the epic feats about to transpire, I woke up to a bladder emergency. The bathroom was taken by one of my new roommies, the one with breasts. I found an empty bottle, 0.45L, and filled it up with pee to spare. This is momentous day, make no mistake about it.
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