T w e n t y S i d e d

I have a lot of time on my hands these days. I’m still teaching myself C. It’s hard because I don’t have anything but the reference books. This would be a lot easier if I had some way of looking at some example programs. The library doesn’t have any books to help me. I don’t know if the book store has any books that might help, because I don’t think to check.

Still, I’m making progress on my own and figuring out this 3D rendering business. I’ve written a program that is pretty much identical to the “3D Flower Box” screensaver that Microsoft will give away with Windows 98, six years from now. The only real difference is that my program draws the stuff in wireframe, because otherwise it would be too slow on this 7Mhz machine.

It’s Sunday, and I’m enjoying a rare weekend off. Patrick and I are really into this game called Starflight 2. The game is simply gigantic. It fills up two 360k floppy disks. I’ve encountered two-disk games before, but most of those were titles that were just a little too big for one disk. Starflight 2 completely fills both disks. To start a new game, you make a complete copy of both disks. This copy is your entire save game. Amazing. If this trend continues, then someday we’ll end up with videogames that take up a whole megabyte.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Autoblography Part 32: Flipping Burgers”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

My alarm goes off and I sit up in bed. The opening shouts of the song No Sleep till Brooklyn storm through my brain. This happens every morning. I don’t know why. I’m not even particularly fond of the song. I guess I have it in my head because the lyrics are talking about not getting enough sleep, which is my big problem these days.

It’s six in the morning. I’ve been asleep for five hours. I can’t hit the snooze button because I’ll miss the bus.

I pull my McDonald’s uniform out of the washer, toss it in the dryer, grab some breakfast, and get dressed in the business casual outfit we’re required to wear at school. (Which is basically, “business formal, but ties are optional”.) I grab the now-dry McDonald’s uniform as I dash out of the house and drive to the other side of town, where I park my car. Next I catch a bus to Pittsburgh. The ride takes about an hour. I try to sleep, but I can never get comfortable and I’m always worried that other passengers might mess with me. The bus drops me off at the David L. Lawrence convention center, and I walk a mile from there to ICM School of Business. I attend classes there all day, then retrace my steps: Walk a mile, ride a bus for an hour. As soon as the bus drops me off I go to work a seven-hour shift at McDonald’s. Finally I stagger into the house a little after midnight, put my McDonald’s uniform in the wash, and collapse into bed. I do this five days a week.

It’s 1991, and I have somehow screwed things up. Other college kids have these heroic stories of sleep deprivation and all-nighters. They seem to keep up with studying, dating, early classes, and late parties. I don’t know how they do it. I don’t party, I don’t have a girlfriend, and my schooling requires very little extra study, but this lifestyle is killing me.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Autoblography Part 31: ICM”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I’ve maintained my habit of minimizing work in boring subjects, skateboarding along the rim of the failure chasm. This has always worked out for me in the past, but I was sick several times this year. On top of that, I was away several times due to the various competitions. I’ve missed a lot of school, and so managed fail a couple of classes. One of them was a harmless elective. Unfortunately, the other was not, and so I’m going to be one credit short.

I don’t attend the cap & gown ceremony. When the school year ends, I still have a couple more months of schooling to complete. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Autoblography Part 30: Summer School”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

This is a really bad headache. The pain was unbelievable in CAD class at the start of the day, and it’s only gotten worse since then. Sometimes I try to tough it out and endure the day when I get these things, but this one is overwhelming. The school is too loud and too bright. I have to get out of here.

This means going to the nurse’s office. I do the math: She will make me lay around for twenty minutes to see if my migraine will magically go away for no reason. She will also take my temperature for no reason, because that’s what she always does. After that she’ll cave and call somebody to come get me. This might take some time, depending on how many of my relatives she needs to call. They probably won’t dash out of the house the moment they hang up the phone. It will probably take them forty-five minutes to get here. Then half an hour to get home. That part of the process will be rough. I’ll be in a moving car in stop-and-go traffic, with the sun beating me in the face. That will bring me to one of those moments where I wish I could just throw up instead of enduring the nausea. Once I get home, it will take me a couple of minutes to down some ineffectual painkillers, get an ice pack, and tumble into my bed with the lights off and the ice on my face.

So, if I go to the nurse right now, it will be two more hours of noise and pain before I can escape the unwanted sensory input and simply enjoy the headache at the baseline level of agony. Dark, quiet, ice on face, excruciating pain. That’s the goal.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Autoblography Part 29: The Headache”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.