"Every living creature dies alone". Not me. When I die, I'm taking you all down with me. Oh yeah.

I could never bring myself to kill myself. Why? I just can't. Someone once said that. But who was it? Whoever it was, I agree whole-heartedly. I am tired of life, but I can't kill myself. Just talking about it is morbid. Ahh teen angst. Perhaps in 6 months I will magically lose such thoughts and become a mature adult. Who am I kidding, I'm gonna be like this for a looong time.

"I am a loser and a failure". Am I right or am I wrong (in which case I am right)? The loser paradox.

Are rapid mood swings a sign of the times? Actually that didn't make a lick of sense. How I've longed to use that phrase. Lick of sense. Sick of lens. Perhaps I do have a terminal illness after all. That's the right spirit. The spirit of the matter. An odd phrase, or rather a phrase which can be interpreted oddly. Free forming, free flowing Jazz like.

If you remember Maniac Mansion, this should provide a little bit of nostalgia. Works nicely on Windows, except that I don't know if I can readjust to the olde interface.

Sorry, I just can't resist. It's just too good:

In A.D. 2101
War was beginning.

Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's you !!
Cats: How are you gentlemen !!
Cats: All your base are belong to us.
Cats: You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say !!
Cats: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Cats: Ha Ha Ha Ha ....
Operator: Captain !!*
Captain: Take off every 'Zig'!!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Move 'Zig'.
Captain: For great justice.

Who needs Shakespeare when you've got this?

If you're anything like me, you'd better kill yourself. But before you do that, that would mean that you've come across the problem of creating a PDF from a Word DOC file. Sounds easy, but unfortunately, it isn't as easy as it should be. As I understand it, you have a few options:

• Get the full version of Adobe Acrobat and you're all set. Easiest solution of all, of course. Problem is, Acrobat costs money, and we all know that people like me are totally self-absorbed and so want large complicated programs that perform specific tasks at no cost whatsoever. That's just the way it was meant to be, ya know?



• The open source Open Office can read in Word files, and what's more, it can export them to PDFs. So you get an intended replacement for Word that can produce PDFs too. Sounds good? It is - except that the filesizes it produces are a bit on the large size. If size is a concern, Open Office has a ways to go before it becomes your program of choice



• The free CutePDF writer installs itself as a pseudo-printer which lets you "print" stuff as PDF file. Definitely very nice, and better file-sizes than Open Office too. Do we have a winner? Looks like it.



• But what's this? Another free way that's just as good? Yes, it's true. You can in fact use the freely available GhostView and GhostScript to create PDF files. The idea is very simple - GhostView allows you to convert PostScript files to PDF files using its pdfwrite device. All you have to do then is make your Word file into a PostScript file. "How do I do this", you ask? Patience, young padwan. If you're lucky, your printer is PostScript compatible, and you've got it made. If you're not so lucky, then there's hope - Adobe has a generic PostScript printer driver for Windows, which does just the trick. Installing this will let you simulate a PostScript-compatible printer. In Word, you must convert the file to a PostScript file. Sounds even harder than making it to a PDF! But luckily, it isn't - because, you see, you can print a file's contents into a file in a format that a printer can recognize. So you just need to make this format PostScript. The way to do that is to go File->Print and check the "Print to file" box, which, if you're like me, you've neglected all your life. If you do this with your PostScript printer (or your Adobe PostScript driver printer), then you'll make a PRN file which is really a PostScript file. Open this in GhostView, click File->Convert, make sure pdfwrite is selected and off you go! Free PDF, fresh off the presses.

Once you're done reading my ramble, head off over to this site and hear someone who knows what they're talking about give it to you straight on how to make PDFs. Don't worry about me, I'm quite happy lurking in the shadows.

As if Python weren't enough, now I've gone mad and printed Common Lisp: A Gentle Guide To Symbolic Computation. As the title states, it's a book on Lisp. Now, you might well wonder, "Lisp?! Of all the languages in the world, why Lisp?!". Hype, mainly. To be more specific, glowing praise from certain members of the friendly GameDev community. There is also the fact that I am getting tired with C based languages - not tired, that implies that I'm getting bored altogether of it, but I just feel like learning something entirely new. After all, broadening one's horizons is a good thing, or at least that's what they say. Is functional programming all that? Can't wait to find out. As usual, I'm too easily impressed. I don't really know what I'm expecting. A sudden revelation that will change the way I think about programming? Ehh it's possible I suppose. Unlikely, but possible.

As for the book itself, I've heard only good things. I hope it ain't too gentle though, at least not to the point where it gets boring. Perhaps I ought to actually glance through books before I go around printing them (but where's the fun in that?). Another book of high repute (out of print) is Lisp-guru Paul Graham's On Lisp, yet another (!) book available for free online as a PDF. Apparently a bit advanced, so I skipped it for now, but if I really take a shine to the language or the paradigm, I might give it a serious look. Graham has impressed me with the articles on his site, especially the famous one about Bayesian spam filtering. However, some of the articles seem a bit elitist according to my fast fading memory. But what do I know, I'm just a imperative-worshipping infidel.

Incidentally, I love PDFs, they're so nice. I know quite a few people who hate them, but they're obviously crazy. In future, everything I do is going to be in PDF. Won't you join my tea party?

PBS interviewed David Crosby and asked him why he thought the music industry today is utter nonsense. An interesting read, although I can't really judge the validity of some of Crosby's comments. Darn hippies.

Actually, I was wrong as usual, there are PDFs on The Structure And Interpretation Of Computer Programs, you just have to take the trouble to find it. The most frequently linked one is this, which is a straight PDF off the HTML pages. Nice, but it has the hyperlinks at the bottom of each page, which is a minor irritation. Google for the filename, "sicp.pdf", and you get the wonderful TeXed version here. This one is a lot smaller too. My guess is that it's the PDF version that used to be on the MIT site, but I could be wrong. I doubt anyone else would be bothered to write the whole thing up!

What's with the whole functional language craze now? I guess I just wanna become a smug Lisp user. After all, it's been so long since I've felt elitist. A whole day, as a matter of fact. Simply unacceptable. Scheme or Lisp, though? Anything non-procedural or non-OO it would seem like.

I am ready to dive into Python (witty, witty), thanks to my shameless abuse of the university's print quota. Actually, it's hardly an abuse since they offer us a 1000 pages to print out whatever we want. But nonetheless, the act of printing out a whole book seems a bit excessive, and hence wasteful. Yet of course a book is worth far more than a tutorial sheet (let's see what I say to this come exam time - oh wait, it is exam time). Now I have no excuse not to read it - it's printed and just waiting to be read. Chances are of course that it will stay that way till the end of the year. Such is life.

But anyway, I wish I could print out The Structure And Interpretation Of Computer Programs. Also known as the bible of Scheme, and the greatest computer science textbook of the last 20 years. I can't quite explain my fascination with these sorts of books that are revered as being brilliant texts in the way of programming itself - the book, from what I've read, tries to use Scheme to push the reader onto the path of becoming a good computer scientist, not just a good Scheme programmer. Which is of course what we need today, texts that teach you more than syntax, that go beyond the details of a language and look at the high level issues that are arguably much more important.

A digression - are all Scheme programmers good? Or more generally, are all functional programmers good? Probably not, but they seem to be such an exclusive group that I'll wager that most of those who do program in such languages are really good. Just read some of the newsgroups on Lisp, those guys are crazy! After all, one must be reasonably motivated to choose such an obscure language paradigm - obscure in the modern day business sense. How many job offerings for Lisp programmers have you seen lately, hmm?

So is this all an attempt to apply the flawed logic of "If I were a Scheme programmer, I would be a good programmer"? Quite possibly, but I would like to think that I am trying to elevate my knowledge and understanding and become one, without the naive assumption that by merely learning Scheme I will magically transform. That ain't so bad, now is it?

On a related note, three volumes of The Art Of Computer Programming lie in a bookshelf in my house, never read once. Glanced at, yes, but never read. I wonder if I will ever be able to comprehend a whole chapter of this intriguing bible of computer science (everything seems to be a bible today). Knuth reminds me how little I truly know, both in mathematics and computer science. Is that a good thing?

Oh, why can't I print the book out, you ask? Because the chapters (and pages?) are individual HTML files, and the book is not available as a convenient PDF. It is available in printed form for US $75. A bit expensive, wouldn't you say?

The end of the world? Oh I sure hope so. I've had enough. Let's pull the plug, boys.

What you say? We get signal. Main screen turn on.

I miss deep sleeps, so much so that I forgot it was possible to have one. It is probably symptomatic of a mind too busy worrying about every little detail in life, that it loses the ability to shut down, even if only for 8 hours or so. The wonderful thing about a deep sleep is that you're able to wake up not thinking about what you were thinking about yesterday. A clean slate - that's the only way to go. Alas, I should probably cherish this while I can, for tomorrow will surely see a regression to the vicious cycle.