For whatever reason, I spent a solid six hours doing digital design homework yesterday. And for whatever other reason, I was not horribly pissed off about it. Call me crazy (it’s reasonably common knowledge) but I sort of enjoy designing circuits, although I understand the futility of it. I mean, listen. I can understand them wanting to teach me assembly, it’s like returning to your roots, you know? Getting connected with the past. But I’m computer science here, not electronics engineering. Hardware is so complex now that teaching me the basics of it is an exercise in wasting time – I’ll never get to the level where I can understand enough of it to be any good, that’s what EE is for, that’s why I’m not EE. For me, it’s enough to know that the computer runs on magic smoke, I don’t care to know any more. The point of this paragraph, obviously, is that I wanted to throw out that link but needed to find some way to lend credence to it so that it didn’t seem random. It is.
We, by which I mean I, decorated for Christmas. Here’s our hallway door: 
It’s all very festive. I love Christmas lights. There’s something really special about the glow they cast, which you can’t see in the picture since the hallway lights are on. The hallway lights are always on. We’ve considered several solutions to the problem, but most of them, when played out on sophisticated thinking machinery, end up with us getting in trouble. The people in charge here are really ungrateful for how much we’ve spruced up the place. Why, just earlier today I was sitting in my easy chair in the hallway, calmly working on a paper, and the maintenance guy walked by and complained loudly about the chair turning into a flaming ball of death if ever the building were to catch on fire. Of course my sane reply was that we might not exactly be worried about that if we hit the point where the chair was catching on fire, you know, we’ve probably already passed the part where it matters. I don’t know how many of you knew about the refrigerator door that we had in the hall for about three months, it was the trophy for our art contest and really made the place a lot more fun. Quarterly inspections rolled around and we were sufficiently inept as to forget to remove the article from the premises, and management sent word through our RA that it had to go. We complied, of course, not wanting to risk their furious anger, but the point is that our dorm is pretty shamefully boring, and whereas before I thought it was purely the resident’s fault, I understand now that it’s management’s fault. The lesson, then, is to blame management.
Look, I don’t mean to leave you right when we were just starting to have a good conversation, but I’m really sort of tired. It’s two in the morning, my usual bedtime, and I’ve got class at ten tomorrow, which may or may not be useful but they count attendance and yell at you if you sleep, and then I have a group meeting for some sort of term project that apparently we were supposed to be working on all semester but have failed to begin.