Friday, September 26, 2008

Hindsight

Inspired by the word "recuse":
When he looked back on it, Alan knew exactly what he should have said. He knew exactly what would have avoided all the strife, all the awkwardness, and all the sideways glances whenever Anna walked into the room. Just because they knew the story, people thought they were in on some great big secret – when really, Alan and Anna seemed to be the only ones who had moved on. And one sentence could have spared him all of this. One simple, straightforward sentence that summed up his feelings exactly:

“I’d rather not say.”

Hindsight is twenty-twenty, and all that rot.
Wrote my first functional, useful PERL script today. w00t! Which means, basically, that I have a free weekend, since my weekend's worth of work took all of three and a half hours. Also, I learned regular expressions in order to write said script. And yes, yes I was wearing my tee shirt that said "STAND BACK! I'm going to try Science!" while I programmed regular expressions in PERL.

$elizabethGeek++;

And yes, I did explain the comic and the relevance of my teeshirt to the rest of the people in my program and year.

$elizabethGeek += 10;

All in all, it was a nice way to start grad school. Loads of geeked-out-ed-ness, and a free weekend afterwards!

Although I do have a biostats problem set to force myself to look at. Which is made exciting only by the fact that the book is somewhere en route. Time to go to the library.

Perhaps there will be a trip to Big Sur on Sunday? That would be awesome. And perhaps gardening tomorrow, which would be good, but less awesome than hiking around Big Sur. If there isn't a hiking trip, I'll lounge about in Palo Alto and work on Statistics. Perhaps it's time to put PERL on hold and teach myself some R.

So as not to get too out-of-balance, you know.

1 comment:

John said...

It would seem you are now prepared for several new items of clothing, including the regexp reference skirt, the regexp/perl t-shirt and, if you move from an interpreted to a compiled language, perhaps even I'm not slacking off, my code's compiling. Apparently you are collecting the credentials to wear them all. Which begs the question, how many pairs of sweatpants can you wear at once :-P