Things are better now. I’m finishing up the semester, walking around again, researching, climbing, and playing with cameras. My last physical therapy session will be on December first and I’m looking forward to putting this chapter of my life behind me. Life is returning to normalcy, at least to some degree. This whole semester has been weird and fragmented, just like this post. I’ll try harder to not let this blog go under.

I am very excited about my upcoming trip to Panama with Leo, Mark and Parisa. It will be a much needed vacation.

I just need to regain my focus and I will be right as rain; whatever that means.

Goodbye for now.

This will probably be my last post for a while. Not that my accident has affected my blogging ability, it just doesn’t feel the same anymore. I think the best thing for me right now is to just sit here in silence for a while.

bart, originally uploaded by justonlysteve.

I can’t help but feel a little left behind.

Working with a large code base, it’s easy to just make the required modifications and keep moving.

So you probably have some code like this:

//imagine a situation when you actually need dynamic cast,
//it’s difficult. if you use it all the time, you need to reevaluate
//your class hierarchy and coding style!

B b;
A* b_a = dynamic_cast<A*>(&b);
if (b_a) { /* yep, it worked */ }

I find this behavior to be quite unbelievable, especially because if you disable exceptions (-fno-exceptions), GCC will not compile the code and complain about the flag being enabled; why isn’t this the behavior for RTTI?

“I wonder how long it will take before I pass out, drunk off night skies.” –Saves The Day

…The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) is the first and only federal legislation that will provide protections against discrimination based on an individual’s genetic information in health insurance coverage and employment settings.

Hopefully we’ll also be launching shuttles 12 times a day, too!

I found the article really illuminating. This professor talks about the struggles of teaching students at the absolute bottom rung of the academic ladder and the internal struggle he faces when failing them. Additionally, he discusses the current idyllic vision people have that everyone should go to college and how this mentality degrades the quality of education. I promise this is a worthwhile read.

They’ve all seen The Wizard of Oz. Some have caught it multiple times. So we work with the old warhorse of a quest narrative. The farmhands’ early conversation illustrates foreshadowing. The witch melts at the climax. Theme? Hands fly up. Everybody knows that one—perhaps all too well. Dorothy learns that she can do anything she puts her mind to and that all the tools she needs to succeed are already within her. I skip the denouement: the intellectually ambitious scarecrow proudly mangles the Pythagorean theorem and is awarded a questionable diploma in a dreamland far removed from reality. That’s art holding up a mirror all too closely to our own poignant scholarly endeavors.

Even the title of the article is clever.