Today was an elite day to top all elite days. Two events of great awesomeness defined it. I'm on a very strong endorphine high atm so I might not be completely lucid, but here's my best account:
I got up this morning and started trolling a blog where I was picking fights with people earlier. One of the regular readers told me to "grow up", another one called me "creepy" and the site administrator himself called me "self-absorbed".
It so happens that I was looking at the page in lynx earlier and since lynx isn't an extremely advanced web browser by any means, I stumbled on a whole crapload of
spam injected into every page, which was hidden by tricks that lynx doesn't understand. 72 friggen kilobytes of it.
I told the admin about this and I expected a sheepish "gee thanks" but instead he said "f— you". He would pay for his negligence, because I had already told their provider's abuse specialist that the page was spamming and when I went to troll some more, I suddenly found that the page was suspended. I gots proof. (The blog name is immaterial and I don't want you getting involved in my nasty slugfests)
http://i29.tinypic.com/2ecordg.png PWND IN THE FACE. I knew I would find legal ways of taking vengeance on people who have wronged me in my life, but I never knew the opportunity would present itself so soon. If the site comes back online again, cool: I can troll some more, and if it doesn't, cool:
you lost and I won.
The other awesome thing that happened was when I checked the status of an interlibrary loan at the Allentown Public Library. I asked for
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (co-written by the great Peter Norvig, who is a Google engineer and has very similar taste in software as me) and they said "uhhhh we don't usually loan textbooks" and "uhhhh there are so few libraries around here that have it".
BULLS—. Lehigh University and Muhlenberg College—which are each within about ten miles of the Allentown Public Library—both have it. I knew it was only $25 to get a patron card at Muhlenberg, so I headed over that way and instead I ended up checking out
The Elements of Artificial Intelligence Using Common Lisp and
Neural Network Architectures: An Introduction, which is a weird twist of fate. The first one should be very readable because it uses a programming language to illustrate points—which is just as clear as using diagrams—and the other one might be conceptually harder, but most of the mathematical content is surprisingly pretty easy. Chapter 4 has, uhh, derivatives.
I got lost on the way back, but now the route is clear in my head. All told, I think I walked somewhere between 13 and 15 miles today. I've got a blister, I have salty grit all over my skin, my right knee and ankle both feel like s— and I'm still parched, but it was a pretty cool day.
I probably should have just lied about needing the Norvig book for a class, but oh well. Autism for the lose, sometimes. I really like Muhlenberg's library a lot more and, in fact, I am probably going to buy a new copy of one of my favorite graph theory texts and donate it to them, because they don't have that one. In general, Muhlenberg is pretty cool because I hang out in the theater when my dad is in plays there and the actors are nice. That is to say, they understand me, which is a lot more than I can say for most of the students at the place I currently attend. Lehigh is on the same tier as Muhlenberg, although it is an engineering rather than a liberal arts school, so I hope I can continue my education there and look forward to it doubly. I realized that I can cope with the world much better as an adult than as a child and I have to say I am genuinely pleased with this fact.
Oh yeah and I saw the Spanish weekday 'Viernes' on a sign when I was walking around today—downtown Allentown is very ethnic—and correctly guessed that it stood for 'Friday' because 'Viernes' sounds like 'Venus' and the Saxon/Norse equivalent for that goddess is 'Frigga', after whom 'Friday' is named. I rule.
