Taken from here.  I couldn’t stop laughing when I read it.

I figured context might help, so I re-reread the text: “Acquire the locks in any convenient order using bounded spinning to avoid indefinite deadlock.” Upon readnig this, I thought to myself “Inifinte Deadlock” would be a pretty good name for a rock band.” I then remembered exactly what GNFARB stood for.

For the overly curious, my friend was thinking of this game. I was thinking of another, but I’ve got not idea what the heck it was. There was some sort of house, maybe, which was all dark? I’m not even sure if there was a mouse involved.  It came bundled with the PowerSpec PC I bought at the start of high school, and that’s about all I can remember. I’ll know it if I ever see it … this is going to drive me nuts.

I frequently make ‘discoveries’ and then forget that I’ve made these discoveries. The nice thing about keeping a journal or writing a lot in general is that you can recall ideas that you had long forgotten. I was reading some stuff I wrote here about two years ago, and I was surprised to see I had ‘discovered’ things back then. The nice thing is that I come up with some weird ideas sometimes, and I often forget them. This blog has given me a convient way to remember little gems like this post here. I would do well to include this example in my theory of knowledge. It’s bizzare and clever at the same time; those are the kinds of ideas I love!

Update: I called my Mom. She said that the word probably comes from the latin conare, which means ‘to try’, implying that a conundrum literally means a ‘thing which must be tried,’ and the plural is ‘conundra.’

<3 Mom

At work, there’s a guy named Greg C. Dietrich.

That means i know an LCM and a GCD.

you guys wanna give me a full ride ? i’m pretty good at stuff.

Their response:

Mark -
I can’t imagine any Department not wanting to give you a full-ride!
In all seriousness, however, teaching assistantships/research
assistantships are competitive at Mines, but everything is looked at on
a student by student basis.
If you have a particular area of research interest I can get you in
contact with that Department Chair and you’d be able to get a better
sense of direct funding options.
Let me know if I can be of assistance.
[Name Removed]

If I don’t hear back from any grad schools soon, I swear I’m gonna go nuts.

Fast forward to just a few days ago, when some guy finds this problem and links to it on his blog. He says he thinks it’s a neat problem, but is puzzled because i say the answer is “obviously” something incorrect. I put the “obvious” line in there as a joke, because it was a hard problem. The day after this guy linked to my post, I switched servers, which invalidated the link he put up to my blog. I finally got this all figured out, and replaced the entry with a note that I did the problem wrong and posted a link to a correct solution.

The neat part of all this is that my blog is apparently the first result google comes up with when you search for “cool physics problem.”

I tried working out the problem just now, and realized I’ve forgotten a lot of the stuff I learned in E&M. I thought the class was kind of neat, but it really wasn’t my bag. It reminds me, yet again, why I love comptuer science so much more than physics. I can jump right in to work I left off several years ago when it comes to computer science theory, but I’ll be damned if I can do a physics problem I would have known how to solve just over a year ago. It seems to me that comptuer science is just so much easier than physics, and that’s why I like it more.

Also, I’ve really been digging on this band DragonForce lately. There’s a ‘metal militia’ group on XU’s facebook, and these dudes have been giving me all kinds of sweet music to listen to. Everyone I have played DragonForce for (at this time, only Rebecca and Anneliese) has loved it – and girls usually don’t like metal. So these dudes must be on to something…

Before some arithmetic:

//this fixes that stupid buisness of chars being negative instead of > 127
//that makes me so mad


Before a really ugly function:

//display the board in ASCII format
// i'm sure this function appears gargantuan and incomprehensible - just trust me that it works
//dont' even look any further


Before a bit of code that appears a few times in various forms:

//i suppose i could have written an inline function
//but i really dislike inline functions
//they seem like a waste of time to me


At the end of a compression program:

// MAKE SURE YOU CLOSE THE FILE or else all manner of nastiness shall ensue
//because the last few bits won't get written
//so the decompressor won't hit an EOF


And, my favorite, before calling function I write for a Heap data structure. I gave it a name different from the ‘canonical name’:


/this function below is equivalent to MaxHeapify
//but i think that's a dumb name