I found a lovely angry birds video called "seasons greedings". I would put the link up but I'm on my iPhone and therefore am lazy.

It's the most adorable thing ever. There are birds in cute hats dragging eggs with cute hats on a sled across the snow. The family love is just perfection. And of course the pigs, who give the birds a present and they all sit together and watch the north star.

I showed this to my mum, and then told her about some physics discovery that says we live on forever in the form of light. It was all very mystic and profound and beautiful. And then I remembered the egg wearing a hat and said "I think the egg with a hat is cute." I think the juxtaposition (hah 50 point annoying lit essay word) of something so profound and something so... Not was enough to make her sigh heavily.

Anyway go YouTube it. The egg with a hat really is cute.

Started on a new page of Moonlight, and I am therefore one page closer to finishing the end of the 3rd movement.

And I just found 3 slices of pecan pie in the fridge, and promptly demolished one. Yum, pecans.

Everyone in the family is happy with their gifts, and right now I can't tell whether the screaming and funny noises are coming from the Angry Birds that my mum's playing on my iPad (I discovered she bought me the iPad because she had ulterior motives: mainly to use Facebook and play Angry Birds on a wider screen) or the Mickey Mouse show that my dad is watching.

xkcd today is funny! "He's copied on /var/spool/mail/root, so be good for goodness' sake!" Maybe this year's present crop is due in a large part from my not having sudoed when I wasn't allowed to.

Since today is a day of peace making and whatnot, I decided to be marginally nice to the two tiny ones, who have admittedly become slightly more riveting since they have learnt to speak in coherent sentences. Granted they shut up whenever they realise I'm eyeing them, but still. Coherent sentences ARE coherent sentences.

And I had a pretty good haul on Christmas presents too; a bag, two planners (LOL), a Korean drama, awesome smelling soap, an owl keychain (squeeee!), a vest, and AN IPAD.

I LOVE YOU TO BITS MUMMY FOR MY AWESOME IPAD, which is charging right now! I can't actually use it yet cos I have to download iTunes, and I am paying for the times I never bothered to use Software Update eeps

Ooh iTunes is done. Time to restart com!

Interestingly enough there was a first aid kit in a glass cupboard near the entrance. When I pointed that out to him, he agreed that a first aid kit in a lab filled with computers is kinda redundant. The worse that could happen is that you spend too long staring at the com and end up with a sore neck-- and first aid kits don't help with that, massages do. Sadly DSO's awesomeness stops at paying for massages.

He showed me the server room, which is really cool-- literally. Because of all the black boxes with tiny little flashing LED lights that hum and overheat easily, the room is kept at a temperature lower than that of the intern room, which I am convinced is subzero. Plus they have like, thousands of CPUs which no one uses, except to hook up together to make a mega computer that could program a robot to eat you or something.

And then there was the meeting room: a collection of motley leather couches and folding chairs, with four PS controllers in the corner. Apparently they're waiting to get the new Xbox 360. It's what they do after lunch: sit around and play games. I was quite surprised that they didn't have a Wii though; Band Hero is super awesome and about a billion people can play. The drums can fit about 2 or 3 noobs if every one of them controls like 1 or 2 drum pads each. But of course that point is moot because there are no noobs in CSL.

One interesting thing about the meeting room is that there are power points ALL over the place, as well as LAN ports. There were maybe about 10 or 20? Trust CSL to have the only room ever that could actually cater to a roomful of people with laptops and dying batteries. The back story, of course, is that it used to be the server room before CSL expanded and took over the next door to be the server room, leaving the old server room as laptop heaven. That of course isn't to say that they don't take full advantage of the laptop heaven-- in fact, once every now and then they all bundle their laptops in, grab a chair or sofa or something, set up a small network server and have a huge hackfest. It's like, geek bonding.

...I have never wanted to be able to hack so much.

Of course there are loads of other interesting things to be seen, like whiteboards (or green glass boards, as the case is) and snarky jokes printed out and research paper posters and tons of iterations of Tux, but by far the most amusing thing is their pantry.

Every year, says my mentor, they receive some, ah, "funding" with which they restock their pantry. And then he brought me over to see the pantry, which consists of a couple of shelves, stuffed to the brim with packets and packets and packets of instant coffee. Next to it there was a fridge (a donation from a pHd pursuing colleague) which was filled to the brim with bottles of coke. I have never seen so much caffeine in one place. It was absolutely wondrous.

I am going to stop this post here cos I want to go talk to Rachel and guilt her for heartlessly destroying my childhood self's confidence and imprinting that event onto my psyche forever, but I just want to say that DSO is probably the most awesome place ever that I've seen (must check out Google someday) and I TOTALLY WANT TO WORK THERE.

For the uninitiated, DP refers to Dynamic Programming, a very confusing branch of programming (at least to me) which is not very dynamic at all. It has no relation WHATSOEVER to gross sexual innuendos that disgusting foul-minded people might think up, and I shall admit rather grudgingly, rather elegant.

Now shoo. Go away and make out or something.

In case, like Crystal, you are wondering whether an injection really exists for food poisoning, it's not really food poisoning per se, but merely to suppress the vomiting that often comes as a package deal with it. To add insult to injury they have to inject it through your, uh, gluteus maximus. But I guess when you're puking up everything you ingest, these kinds of things don't really matter.

So anyway I never really posted a round up of the programming course, but it was quite fun and suffice to say, extremely, ah, educational. I shall not go on another tirade about how everyone there is a genius and super good at coding and lightyears ahead of me- uh, yeah, you get the idea. But they are all super nice, and don't mind explaining stuff to me even though I get kind of bug-eyed everytime they start overloading me with information, which is usually anytime from 2 seconds or 5 minutes into the lesson.

But my dumbness notwithstanding, they are very very Very Nice people. I think niceness is probably proportional to smartness in their case.

It was also quite entertaining listening to them talk. On the way back from lunch on the first day two of them got totally engrossed in a discussion about, um, the structure of proteins, I think, and that resulted in the whole group of us getting weird looks from passers-by.

And then they started fantasizing about intimidating the HC team for NOI next year, by getting all the genius IOI participants to sit in front of them and tut condescendingly, while going "oh, what a trivial problem." Or getting the even more super genius seniors back from Stanford (stares pointedly) to fly back and sit in front of them too. Quite amusing really, until the genius IOI participants, being as geniusy as they are, pointed out that HC had their fair share of geniuses, and if they were sent to sit in front of the RI team, we would be equally messed up, heh.

Tracing the progression of problem statements was also interesting. In the beginning, there was JJ Jackalope (in my day, it was Jackalope Junior, but same initials and all), and then Little Chen, followed by Barr the Bear, Kang the Penguin, and Chuan the... um, Suan. Or Qi Shen or Shen Qi depending on which problem you're reading. Apparently the next batch seems to be trending towards Pokemon, and a certain mudkip evolved into a marshtomp upon successfully pwning the head of mrjudge minions sufficient times. At the end of the course, the online judge turned into some pokemon-dota mashup.

Hmm. As I mentioned in the beginning of my post, I have just suffered from a pretty bad form of food poisoning, and therefore need rest. So again I shall end abruptly here, because my medicine is kicking in and I feel drowsy, and besides, MSN is screwing up and won't let me sign in. How tiresome.

It was an entirely exhilarating experience! Watching the lines of codes and everything scroll on the screen showing us EXACTLY what the virus was doing-- it was such an adrenaline rush.

Oh god, I think I am becoming a nerd. Loading viruses can give me a high equivalent to that which people experience from extreme sports. Perhaps I ought to take that up too, like, bungeek jumping or something.

Anyway, it turns out that Kevin (of We Need to Talk about Kevin fame) is not the only person who collects viruses; my mentor does too! He was complaining about the strict restrictions of my intern com "What the hell? It detects netcat as a virus? It's NETCAT! HOW DARE THEY!" and telling me at the same time how awesome the CS lab is, because they have separate servers and everything. So everything moves a lot faster (apparently intern coms are so slow that the "my code is compiling" excuse actually applies) and they get to collect viruses.

"But every year, we have to declare stuff about our coms, like 'Have you got a virus?'- no, 'Have you got any malicious code on your computer?'- uh, yeah, duh. No way I'm letting take away my artefacts though."

Artefacts.

One day, I aspire to have a virus collection which I too can label "artefacts".

I will only ever confess this to you because you do not reply, and all my readers do not tag anyway.

I do not actually understand DP.

I have never understood DP, not really-- I think I kind of get it, but once I sit down and try to code it, everything goes out of my head.

It is a really horrible feeling, not being able to get stuff. It makes me feel so very useless, because DP is supposedly one of the most basic things that every decent programmer has to know. I am obviously far from being a decent programmer, but still. It sucks not being able to get it, and by extension not being able to understand most of the other based-on-DP problems is very very limiting to my ability.

Sigh and in this tiny class everyone knows when I don't get stuff. At least in the Dec course I could hide in the back with Keyun and we would draw otters on our chocolate packets and bug PW to help us with our problems.

Ugh nostalgia is a dangerous thing.