acho que não

People who threaten to call their lawyers do not actually have lawyers.

Stealing from the gang over on Livejournal, I present a Pointless University Story (college is a whole other thing up here):

I studied computer science in University, and while we were all computer geeks, we weren't all particularly talented computer geeks. One day in first year, as we were working on an assignment on collision detection, one of my friends called me over to her dorm to help her figure out why her code wasn't working properly.

It was supposed to read starting positions and velocities from a file for two objects and detect whether they collided or not. No matter what she put in the file, or what file she provided as input, she was getting exactly the same result, and it was frustrating her madly.

We did about 90 million different things to the data sets and file names and code and stood around pensively discussing the ever increasing possibility that the computer was just frigging haunted. We tried turning the computer on and off in case there was something nutty in the memory that was screwing us up (that she was probably dialed into the university unix servers made that step especially pitiful, but man, at that point, we'd been at it for like two hours, and we were getting punchy and stupid).

Eventually, we sat down for about the 9th time to pour over the code searching for the problem. And finally, I noticed one rather innocuous little line. That was hardcoding the name of the input file--rendering all of the files that we were creating and passing from the command line completely pointless. Also rendered pointless were the times we'd tried hardcoding a different filename, since we did that in the main program, and the one we didn't know about it was in the file reading function where we weren't looking.

D'oh!

Almost but not quite as annoying was the program I wrote that would segmentation fault if the first line wasn't a printf statement, but was fine as long as it was.

I lived in Calumet residence, which was an apartment style residence (we had suites and kitchens rather than singles/doubles on a floor with central washrooms) built in four stories around a central courtyard. It was traditional during quiet weeks (the weeks before and during winter midterms and spring finals) that at 10 o'clock each night, everyone would hang out the windows of their suites and yell as loudly as they could to burn off stress.

One particular midterm year, a fire alarm went off just as the 10o'clock yell started. (Fire alarms were a weekly occurrence in Calumet, because our heat based fire detectors were inconveniently located directly above our toasters.) People were forced out into the courtyard to wait for the fire department to clear the building as being uninflamed. Given the freezing rain at the time, this was a particularly miserable experience, and we all huddled miserably together and under whatever shelter we could find that didn't involve trying to get up the incredibly slippery 26 steps that would have taken us over to one of the other dorms.

Once we got the all clear, we made our way back into our suites, where we discovered that we should have left the building a little more slowly--and maybe closed our windows on the way out. Almost every suite had at least one window that was now frozen open by the rain. It was a damned cold night in Cal that night.

As mentioned previously, I lived in a suite-based dorm. We had four single rooms and a double room, two bathrooms and a kitchen/living room area in an enclosed unit. They were stacked four high in a low-rise building, with stairwells on both ends of each unit. In second year, we were living in one of the end units, on the top floor. The bottom floor of the same stack was the guest suite (you could rent it for cheap to put up out of town friends or visiting parents), and one of the suites on it was the one they reserved for moving in people who ended up hating their suitemates, so only one person, the RA for our stacks, lived in it at the time. Our second stairwell was rarely used since it wasn't between two stacks, and two of the suites on it were empty, and you could only go out the door on the ground floor, not get back in it. A couple of the guys in my suite used the landing of that back stairwell as sort of extra storage for their bikes and such, since it was so rarely used, and they often didn't even bother locking that back door. All of this is relevant to the story, I promise.

One morning, I got out of bed to go to my 8:30 lecture (getting stuck with 8:30 lectures was a specialty of mine, sadly) and there was some guy sleeping on the couch in our living room. He had a blanket. That was it. No sheets. No pillows. No clothes. And the blanket wasn't acting as a particularly good substitute for the latter.

I wasn't exactly offended--nothing I hadn't seen before, but nothing I wanted to see at 8:15AM on my way to NATS1010, either. But I was late for class, so I threw Naked Guy's blanket over him a little more judiciously, started mentally composing the screaming match I was going to have with Pete and/or Red later when I figured out which one of them Naked Guy belonged to and went to class.

When I got home 4 hours later, one of the froshies from our double, Wendy was in the kitchen and Naked Guy was not in the living room. She was kind of a quiet, shy kid, super nice and smart, but definitely not an extrovert. She tentatively asked me if I had seen anyone in the living room when I left. 'Oh, yeah, Naked Guy,' I said. 'I saw him, I figure he belongs to Pete or Red.'

'I don't know,' she said. 'I was surprised to see him, and I sorta screamed and ran back into my room. When I came back out he was gone, but I haven't seen Pete or Red.' Apparently it was something Wendy hadn't seen before. Oops.

So we called our RA, Rob, and had him come up to the suite. He woke up Pete and Red, who disclaimed any knowledge of Naked Guy. We checked with Cindy and Karen, too, but never really imagined that they would have anything to do with Naked Guy, and indeed we were right. So now we had a bit of a mystery on our hands. A missing Naked Guy with no discernible connection to our suite.

Security was called, plus the Senior RA, etc, etc. Descriptions of Naked Guy were given again and again. Nobody had any idea who Naked Guy was. Until, at one point, Wendy looked out the window and saw a bunch of people loading out of the guest suite. 'That's him! Naked Guy!' she yelled, and everyone ran to the window expecting to see, well, a Naked Guy.

Naked Guy was dressed at that point, but Wendy had apparently managed to remember some of his less delicate features well enough to spot him. It turns out, he was a member of one of the bands that had played the college pub the night before and he'd been staying in the Guest Suite. But the suite was so crowded that there wasn't really room for everyone, so he'd just wandered off looking for somewhere else to sleep, assuming Cal was like a normal dorm with common rooms and whatever. He'd eventually made his way up the back stairs to our suite, where the door wasn't locked because those stairs were so seldom used, and found our living room and our couch and decided it was a great place to sleep. The fact that he was naked all the while apparently didn't both him much.

After that, they put automatically locking doors on all the suites.

It would certainly make my job a lot easier if we could have the shills arrested.

At one point in University, I think while I was working at IBM and going to school part time, Lorilee, Jenn and I decided to go to Montreal for the weekend. We decided to take the train since we didn't have cars, and flying would be more expensive and annoying, plus trains are amusing. VIA Rail offered a student fare to university students, rather than just high school students, which was an added bonus, so we booked our tickets and off we went.

While sitting on the train, the conductor came around to check our tickets, and we all handed them over. He asked me for my student ID, since I was traveling on a student ticket so I dug it out. "Oh, do you need to see our student cards?" Lorilee said, reaching into her bag.

"No," the conductor replied. And then, pointing at each of us in turn, he added.

"I believe she's under 18." Pointing at 24 year old Jenn.

"And I believe you're under 18." His finger turned back to 22 year old Lorilee.

"But I don't believe she's under 18." He waved his thumb in my 21 year old face.

It was a running joke for the rest of weekend, especially when Jenn, who was the oldest amongst us, got carded again at the entrance to the Casino du Montreal by a security guard who read her ID and said, and I quote, "Oh my god, you're older than me."

So, I'm having my house professionally organized. It's forcing me to come to grips with my love of stuff, and just how much of it exists in my house at any given time. While I have yet to sacrifice a single CD, and the only books I've given up are trashy novels by the likes of Maeve Binchy, I am caving on the yarn front.

I'm eventually going to freecycle all of this, but if anyone wants some of it, now's the time to speak up. I'd be happy to pass it on for the cost of postage (keep in mind that some of this stuff probably isn't *worth* the cost of postage). I probably know you, so you can paypal me money, or buy me an iTunes gift certificate or something once I figure out how much it cost me to send it, I'm not too fussy on that front. I can sorta kinda estimate postage, but they're likely to change once I take it to an actual post office, anyway. Comment if you want something (on my actual blog, por favor, LiveJournal feed readers). Leave anything you want kept private, like email or mailing address in a separate comment, since I've got them all on screen anyway, and I'll not approve those for public viewing.

So, here are the available items. (On a separate page, because inserting a table into my blog is proving painful.)

What am I keeping, you might ask?
Some blue wool blend aran weight that I'm in the middle of knitting a very geeky sweater out of my mother.
Some blue worsted weight worsted wool that I'm in the middle of knitting a Cabin Fever sweater out of for my Dad.
Some forest green Cottonella that will eventually be either a Diamond Patch or San Francisco shirt tail for me.
Some really pretty greeny mossy cotton that will eventually be a tank top for me.
Two skeins of mohair blend, one pink, one lime, that will be something piratey.
Half a ball each of pink and lime kitchen cotton, because I need to do some work on my piratey corset.
6 balls of natural coloured hemp in lace weight, I'm not sure what they'll be, but they were expensive, so I'm clinging.
98 zillion pounds of grey silk/wool blend that I made a jacket (which I hate) out of, but which I still love anyway.