Rosio Pavoris

I got my grades yesterday, so now the year is finally officially over as well. Due to MASSIVE INCOMPETENCE I hadn’t received my grades for last semester yet, so I just found out those as well.
All of it is roughly as expected, with a few exceptions.

Due to shuffling with classes at first and regular indifference later on, I never ended up going to Taalbeheersing (“language control”; basically Dutch grammar and spelling), and 6 out of the 20 points were supposed to be from tests during the semester. I didn’t expect to pass, but I went to the exam anyway because I had nothing better to do.
My final grade was 13/20.

I knew my Technieken voor Datamodelering (Techniques for Data Modelling; SQL plus some theory about ERMs) grade would be high, since I’m reasonably good at SQL (or, compared to most other people in my class, absurdly good) and I actually put some effort into the assignment thing, but my final grade was 19/20, which is probably the highest grade I’ve gotten on anything since 6th grade.
This was also a first-year class (though it was called Systeemanalyse (Systems Analysis) last year, and had a lot more irrelevant wank and no SQL), so it’s particularly funny.

Then there was Netwerken, which was last semester. I went to all the classes and the labs (and even handed in most of my lab reports), and the exam went great, and much of this stuff is things I really enjoy doing (this was also the class with the cryptography things), so I expected to get maybe 16/20, if not more. Turns out I got 11/20.
It’s more than enough to pass and it’s not like I’m shooting for a magna cum laude or anything, but it’s still absurdly and incomprehensibly low.

I didn’t pass my COBOL class. That’s not unexpected (or unintentional), I just thought it bore mentioning.

Interestingly, though, I also didn’t pass my Java class last semester. I got 6/20.
This semester, despite not putting in more effort or actually being any better at Java, I got 15/20, which is the top of my class.
They’re different teachers, obviously, and the one I had this semester was much better, both as a teacher and as a dude to have a conversation with, but it’s still pretty entertaining.

I don’t mind taking another exam to make up for it; it’s trivial to do, and before the exam last semester started he told us the make-up one in early September would include actually writing code on a computer before-hand as opposed to just writing it on paper using his brain-damaged wrapper classes he wrote around part of AWT and Swing because he doesn’t understand how they actually work¹.
So I had a look at those questions, since they’ve been only since December, and honestly, they just remind me of why I hated that class. For example (translated from Dutch):

A person has a name, an address (street, number, city) and a phone number. Write a class Agenda that allows you to quickly find the address of a person given their name or phone number. There are thousands of people. In your solution you obviously won’t use arrays, Vectors, or ArrayLists.

Now, we obviously aren’t expected to write our own data structure (that would be too educational much like a real college advanced), and we also can’t use a database, so basically this exercise comes down to guessing which class from the Java standard library he has in mind and then writing ten lines of code using it.
Since this is Java and this guy embodies the clueless enterprise stereotype (IIRC the only languages he sort of knows are Java and C#, and he sucks at Java), there isn’t even a real way to guess what he considers to be a reasonable use of resources (specifically, memory) or time (is five seconds long? I’d say obviously yes, but you never know).

I’m guessing he’s expecting two TreeMaps with different Comparators, but there’s no way to be sure, and it sure as fuck isn’t something I (or anyone else) would consider to be a reasonable solution to this problem.

(To compare, the guy we had this semester gave us some general principles to use every week and let us make up our own problem entirely, on the condition that our solution was a good one for it. This one just makes up crap toy problems and ham-fistedly tries to force library classes and “design patterns” where they don’t belong. And naturally, he requires UML diagrams (syntactically correct, though AFAICT he uses his own private little dialect which isn’t documented anywhere) for everything.)

Tim Minchin interlude.

And now for something completely different.

Wooh vacation.
My parents are going to my grandfather’s sea-side apartment one last time before my uncle buys it to simplify the inheritance (estimated value 525,000 € for just that one apartment, which I’d guess is about twice as much as he originally intended to pay; he already got a ridiculously good deal on the house in Tienen, though), and I think they’re taking my sister with them, so I should have a week or two of peace and quiet (and pantslessness) at least.

My mom also wants to buy a dog before one of us goes out to buy a cat, which should be interesting. I voted for a cocker spaniel (English or American, either one; it’s interesting how much their differences resemble the differences between European and American badgers, if you squint and are drunk), my dad wants a labrador (Spike was half-labrador), and my mom wants a Cavalier King Charles spaniel. Even if it doesn’t end up being a cocker spaniel, I’ll still make an effort to have it named Haskell, though.
It’ll probably be another month before we get it either way. I’d promise pictures, but I keep promising pictures of things and then not delivering. I apologise.

¹ There are a lot of legitimate criticisms of AWT and Swing, and I’ve yelled most of them at this semester’s teacher at one point or another, but “it’s too hard for students in their third semester of Java to understand” isn’t one of them.

It’s probably a bad idea to answer a COBOL exam entirely in C, but if a page of C can accomplish the same thing as four pages of COBOL, I’m not going to spend a June afternoon wearing out my pen and/or fingers.
I #defined a lot of things, though, so maybe he’ll be fooled by the abundance of upper case.

That was the last of my exams, so summer vacation has officially begun.

I say Scandinavian rather than Swedish because it’s not actually from Ikea, but from some Norwegian company.
And I guess it’s not actually this chair but a chair very like it, only I couldn’t find a picture of this one, presumably because it’s fifteen or so years old. It’s made of wood rather than steel, and the seat is actually not curved to hold a butt, but rigid and full of hate.

It’s completely impossible to adjust the tilt of the seat or the leg rests, or the distance to the leg rests, and apparently their reference human was a three-legged midget.
The end result is that five minutes in this chair will make your back explode with discomfort and physically force your buttocks into your spine, and because the seat is tilted you can’t even just consign it to a corner of the room and stack junk on it, because it will slide off.

The company that made the chair still exists, but apparently doesn’t make them anymore. Even so, most of the products they do still make have at one point or another in their lifetime been recalled for health reasons, so they don’t appear to have mended their ways.
It’s actually more comfortable to just sit on the leg rests.

I should probably get rid of it, but it’s one of the things I inherited from my grandfather.

Anyway.
In completely unrelated news, I deleted Quhan’s blog because it was full of exploit. This makes it the third of our blogs to be compromised.
WordPress is absolute crap when it comes to security, but unless you’re Maia, it’s your own responsibility to keep your installs up to date, people. You have FTP accounts for a reason.

In further unrelated news, I’m never going to finish this Monopoly game. It’s due this Friday.

This is a Livejournal meme, but I don’t use Livejournal, so I’m posting this here.
Premise:

1. Leave me a comment saying anything random, like your favorite lyric to your current favorite song. Or your favorite kind of sandwich. Something random. Whatever you like.
2. I respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
3. You WILL update your LJ blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be asked, you will ask them five questions. Yeah, no.

Anyway. Questions by Taz, who I’m not convinced likes people linking to her Livejournal, so I won’t.

1. Do you have a favourite fruit?

Not particularly. I enjoy bananas and lychees, but I’m generally fine with any fruit except raspberries.
And figs are interesting because of fig wasps, but not so much as food.

2. Why Rosio Pavoris?

Because it sounds clever and I needed a name for my blog. It’s archaic Latin, so the words wouldn’t even be in most school dictionaries, so it’s nice and mysterious. The meaning is completely irrelevant, really, and I’ve forgotten it.
I think “pavoris” means “of fear”.

3. Have you ever read any Shakespeare?

I bought the collected works of Shakespeare four or five years ago but I’ve read less of it than I intended, mostly because most of it is seriously unreadable.
I’ve read Macbeth, Hamlet, and Much Ado About Nothing, but I think that’s it. I couldn’t even read Hamlet until after I’d seen it and had enough of a notion of the story to skip over the boring bits.

Plays aren’t meant to be read, anyway; I do enjoy seeing Shakespeare performed, though all I’ve ever seen live was a crap post-modern molestation of Romeo and Juliet.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is awesome. We watched the 1999 movie adaptation during Latin class when we were translating Ovid’s Pyramus et Thisbe, and that was probably the first time I really paid any attention to Shakespeare. Pity it was considered “too advanced” for our English classes.

4. How many languages do you have some ability in, and what are they?

“Some ability” is pretty relative. I speak English and Dutch fluently, French and Latin adequately, German and Japanese more-or-lessly, and I can generally understand, but not speak, Spanish and Italian. Given some time, I can probably make sense of most texts written in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish.
But really, four or five. I hesitate to even count Japanese.

I’ve been meaning to learn Yiddish, because I think it’s adorable. Well, what I actually want to do is learn Hebrew, because I don’t know any Semitic languages and Hebrew squiggles are pretty, but Yiddish is probably the most realistic way of building a basic vocabulary which I could then use to slowly edge my way into Hebrew, since Yiddish is a Germanic language and very similar to German anyway.
However, local bookstores suck at carrying Yiddish grammars and dictionaries, and after days of looking all I could find was a modern Hebrew dictionary and a Mishnaic Hebrew grammar, which is less than optimal. So yeah, probably not going to happen.

(In terms of programming languages, I’m fluent in PHP and Java, and know enough C/C++, Scheme, Common Lisp, COBOL, Perl, x86 Assembly, and Bash (which doesn’t count) to write a working application that does more than just print “Hello World”. And SQL, but that’s different.)

5. Do you want to always live in Belgium?

I was planning on moving to Canada at some point, but then that stopped happening.
I’ve considered moving to somewhere in Scandinavia if the political situation in Belgium keeps retardening (specifically, if Flanders secedes, but really also just if Vlaams Belang keeps growing), but I don’t think I have the energy anymore.

Today was the last day of classes. There’s another month or so of final exams, but since I don’t study, all that means is that I only have to get out of bed once or twice a week instead of every day.

Next year is probably going to be year 2 again due to my habit of just not showing up to exams I feel are a waste of my time (I’ll have classes from both year 2 and year 3, but I’m officially in the year I have the most classes from), but they’re letting us take an Artificial Intelligence class at the university by way of experiment, so I should at least have one interesting class.

Flash games are interfering with my plans to finish this Java game.
Right now, I have a fully functional, moderately clever, highly configurable Monopoly bot, which is really the most interesting part of the assignment. The rest (that is, the actual game of Monopoly) is just boring details, so it’s not likely I’m going to finish it in time for the Wednesday deadline ever.

Note that this is the same assignment I was originally going to write a tower defense game for, and then a 3D Rubik’s cube, both of which were abandoned after the interesting bits were done (in the former case, the path-finding algorithm for the bots, and an OMG OPTIMISED collision detection algorithm; in the latter, the data structure describing the cube), which counts for 70% of my final grade for my Java class.
Clearly I have attention span issues.

(Exhibit B: the net of a tesseract, constructed out of my grandfather’s business cards. I was going to make a Menger sponge, but I ran out of cards. Procrastination++)

Edit: The deadline isn’t this week. I wrote 2,023 lines of Java and about 300 lines of XML in three days and the deadline isn’t even this week. It’s a month from now. Fuck.

(For comparison, all of Muffins is only about 20,000 lines of PHP, and The Mansion, which I worked on for over a month, is 3,962 lines of C++.)

You have to love the significant overlap between people who talk too much and outright bigots. I finally got three people who have been getting on my nerves for months (the sort of people who also think I’m kidding when I call them worthless bottom feeders) to stop talking to me entirely, just by pointing out I am, in fact, bisexual.
I didn’t think that even worked in Belgium.

Random meme to fill space. I forgot where I found this. Output of history | awk '{a[$2]++} END {for (i in a) { print a[i] ” ” i } }’ | sort -rn | head:

104 vi
93 ls
76 cd
33 javac
27 apt-get
21 java
15 su
11 less
10 rm
8 tar

(This is essentially a list of the ten commands I use the most in bash. Only from the last two weeks or so, since that’s when I reinstalled Debian, but it wouldn’t be that different if it were a year’s worth.)

Judging from this network traffic, it took my dad seventeen days to make his new computer part of a botnet. Unless Windows has this new feature where it saturates the network with encrypted SMTP traffic when it’s idle.

Good thing it’s only a virtual machine.

A while ago I got tired of messing with ndiswrapper to get my wireless internets to work, so I switched from Debian back to Ubanto Ubuntu, because despite everything else, the restricted drivers manager is pretty nice. Today a new edition of Ubuntu came out (8.04, Hardy Heron), and while these new editions tend to add needed features (for instance, in 7.04, the restricted drivers manager couldn’t deal with my video card; 7.10 fixed that), each new edition also seems to go out of its way to break things in creative ways, and packs on tons of bloat, so I was rather wary of upgrading.
And rightly so, it turns out.

For one thing, my wireless stopped working again. No idea why. My video card driver (also non-free) still worked, though.
Then I noticed Firefox was much slower, and the standard buttons were more Web 2.0, and the address bar was completely useless for entering URLs, and all of my buttons in the status bar were missing: for some reason, Hardy Heron comes with Firefox 3.0b5, which broke all of my installed extensions (to wit: Flashblock, Live HTTP Headers, Long Titles, NoScript, QuickJava, TorButton, Web Developer; AdBlock Plus claimed to still work, but didn’t).
And suddenly half the websites I frequent looked like ass, either because of Firefox 30b5’s default settings or because Hardy Heron decided to randomly drop some fonts.
And it seems my screen’s brightness was stuck on maximum, with no way to adjust it. I’ve never been able to adjust it under Ubuntu (though Debian deals with it just fine), but it used to be stuck on a much lower brightness, which was suitable for both dark bedrooms and dusty classrooms. Maximum brightness just gives me a headache and drains my battery.

So I reinstalled Debian. The wireless doesn’t work there either, but at least it doesn’t take three minutes to boot (seriously, three minutes; 7.04 went from power-on to fully running in fifteen seconds flat).
Hardy Heron might be marginally alright for desktops, but for laptops it’s once again worthless. Which sucks, because now I have to find a different distro to advise newbies to use, and PCLinuxOS is a stupid, stupid name.

People need to stop fucking with my cats.

A while ago I mentioned we had cats now. What actually happened was that my neighbors had cats (two of them), but their kids abused them and they couldn’t be bothered to house-train them so they spent most of their time in our backyard and, eventually, inside our house. Eventually my neighbors noticed and the guy just gave us the paperwork and told us we could have them.
Then, a few months ago, the wife moved out and took the kids, and the kids took our fucking cats. The neighbor wouldn’t tell us where they went (and possibly didn’t know himself), and it didn’t seem worth the hassle of a lawsuit, so we eventually let it go.

We thought that was the end of it, until my sister noticed this.
“Belleke” (we called her Walter, which is a rather more dignified name, I think) was left at the animal shelter because she “didn’t get along with the other cat of the house” (whom we called Evarist; I think they called her Mousti), which is obviously bullshit.
That’s just rude. It’s not like they don’t have our phone number.

We’re seeing about getting her back tomorrow. And after that people seriously need to stop fucking with my cat.

Update: It’s a different cat, people. My sister is blind.

In case you’re one of the three remaining peope who doesn’t know what Tor is, it’s basically an anonymising proxy on steroids.
Any request you make over a network (say, to retrieve a web page to display in your browser) is sent to a random node in the network, which then passes it on to the next node, which passes it on to the next node, and so on, until it finally reaches its destination. Each node only knows about the previous and the next node in the chain, so it becomes impossible to trace who made the original request.

Everything’s encrypted except for the final step between the last node and the webserver (for example), so some care should be taken when entering passwords and things, as a malicious exit node can intercept those if you don’t use things like TLS or other end-to-end encryption.
This is, of course, just as much of a risk on the internet in general (and one too many people aren’t aware of, too).

It’s pretty slow, since far more people are running clients than nodes (I’ll be setting up a node myself as soon as my ISP stops sucking; I’m giving it another week), but it’s not meant for general browsing (and certainly not filesharing) anyway; there’s a plug-in for Firefox that lets you turn it on briefly when you need it, and disable it when you don’t.

As with all privacy-preserving tools, genuinely undesirable activity is an issue (see picture), but the potential for good is considerable. While it may seem paranoid in (much of) the West (though maybe not even), much of China, for instance, depends on tools like these.
And you never know, you may need it yourself one day, and it’s better to become acquainted with it now than when it’s too late.

Get it here, if you don’t have it already. You don’t have to run a node (you can just set up the client (complete instructions for configuring Firefox to use it are there)), but if you can, please do. People depend on it.

So my dad had dinner with his cousin on Tuesday, and they talked about computers at one point. It turns out said cousin’s father (my great-uncle Joseph, the brother of my late grandmother) had similar issues, and so they brought over their machine, with the message that if I could just retrieve (some of) their data, I could have it.
Who says having to play tech support to your entire family is necessarily a bad thing?

Turns out the HD was fine, but the motherboard is fried, and as it turns out, the motherboard is the only remaining usable part left in my dad’s computer after I scavenged it for parts.
The machine’s exactly ten years old (333 MHz CPU, 32 MB RAM, 56 kbps modem, &c.) and running Windows 95, but with some extra RAM (and maybe an ethernet card) it should be a neat toy. And unlike my grandfather’s iMac, it’s an x86 processor, so I should be able to install Plan 9, which I’ve been meaning to play around with forever (I know there’s a PowerPC port, but it has some issues).
Now I just need to find a blank CD-ROM, because obviously it doesn’t have a DVD drive.

Not bad for half an hour of work, at least (fully twenty-five minutes of which were spent just trying to get the case open; Packard Bell is twattery).

My grandfather (not the dead one) came over for lunch for Easter, which was fun. He complained about foreign people and the fact people treat the elderly as if they’re children, but not about homosecksuals or socialists this time.

My mom invited him because my dad had invited my uncle over for lunch on Monday. He usually lives in Roeselare, so we don’t see a lot of him, but with the inheritance and everything he needed to go through some stuff with us.
We spent most of the afternoon looking through boxes upon boxes of ancient pictures.

There were a lot of pictures of the grandchildren, but most were actually from the ’50s and earlier. It turns out my grandmother was actually really hot when she was my age, which is something no grandchild should ever be confronted with.
And there was a batch of even older pictures, which is interesting. Most of those are over a century old and maybe some of the earliest examples of film photography (cities were prettier before overpopulation and the invention of the car), and there are a few odd framed ones I suspect of actually being daguerreotypes.
We went to order my dad’s new computer today, and we ordered a scanner while we were at it, so I’ll probably share a few of them soon. I hope I’ll be able to scan them without damaging them; they’ll probably be donated to some museum afterwards.

The rest of the afternoon was spent looking at the furniture in my grandparents’ apartment (the measuring of which my dad gave me 100 € for, which I spent on an external 120 GB HD today), guesstimating the values of various paintings (including a particularly ugly one by Pierre Paulus, who also designed the Walloon flag), and talking about family scandals.
Good times were had by all.

My uncle also invited me along to Montreal for a few weeks in the near future (we have family there which needs to be visited, apparently). I declined for obvious reasons.

Apparently my mom managed to hose my parents’ computer’s hard drive on Wednesday, and apparently passing all of my computer-related classes finally convinced them I know something about them, so I was charged with recovering their data, if possible.
The problem was that it would boot, but then halfway into loading Windows it would make a grinding noise and error out.

The first thing I tried was just to boot the Lunix from a live CD, but apparently the DVD drive had been broken for five or six years, and the CD-ROM drive they added below it (rather than replace the DVD drive, for whatever reason) wasn’t recognised by the BIOS at all.
So I tried a bootable USB stick, as the BIOS purported to support booting from USB devices, but apparently it was full of lies.
Since there was a separate option for booting from “USB CD-ROM”, I even brought down my eleven-year-old external CD-R drive, but no dice.

By then my dad managed to find a Windows 95 rescue floppy, which got me into DOS, but then I realised I don’t actually know a whole lot about DOS, and if there’s a way to manually mount drives it fails to, I couldn’t figure it out in under five minutes.
It did, however, confirm the floppy drive worked, so I proceeded to make a Damn Small Linux boot floppy (after spending twenty minutes looking for a floppy that wasn’t either full of what my dad considered to be important data or degraded beyond usability), which also failed in interesting ways.
By then it was midnight and I had a headache, so I gave up.

The next day, my dad decided he was going to buy a new computer regardless of what happened to the old one, so I just took out the hard drive and mounted it in my own deskop. I didn’t originally want to do that because I’d never fucked around with hardware before, but it was actually pretty straightforward (though I had to guess at the jumper settings; the drive was old enough that the company that made it had been bought out by a company which was subsequently bought out by Maxtor, which, as you know, was bought out by Seagate in early 2006; documentation was rather hard to find).
Nearly all of their data was still intact, so I made back-ups and proceeded to scavenge the rest of the computer for usable parts.

Slim pickings, though. It was seven or eight years old, though other than the HD and the DVD drive, it was in remarkably good condition.

I did get a new PSU out of it; my old one had been moderately broken for ages, and profoundly broken since last August (it refused to boot without considerable prodding for five to ten minutes, making noises like crap cars starting on cold mornings, which was actually rather funny; this is also why I got a laptop). It’s only 300 Watt compared to my old one’s 350, but that’s still rather more than my desktop actually uses.
I also added their RAM to my own, bringing the total to 768 MB (from 512; I’m not sure who decided that would be a proportionate amount of RAM for a 3.2 GHz CPU). The HD is legitimately shot, or I’d have kept that as well. Too noisy anyway.

What I really needed, though, is a new video card, but interestingly, there was none in my parents’ computer, even though they did pay for one, and they were given a box and manuals and everything.
My dad went to the store we got it today to see about prices for a new one and confronted them about this, and they told him the motherboard didn’t support video cards, and anyway the on-board graphics controller was more powerful than the dedicated €500 card they were supposed to get. When asked why they still charged for the card and gave us the box and manuals, they changed the subject.

Forgetting to plug in a card I can sort of understand. Lying about it when you’re confronted with it, though, just smells like fraud, especially considering the exact same thing apparently happened to my sister’s boyfriend (who did notice fairly quickly; as for why my parents didn’t notice until eight years later: presumably you have parents who own a computer; they could forget the monitor and it’d still be weeks before they’d complain).

As such, I am now also charged with finding a new computer-selling place. Since the options are fairly limited in Tienen itself, I’ll probably just ask around in Leuven.
Which will have to happen tomorrow, since Easter vacation starts next week. Wooh.

In unrelated news, there’s something considerably entertaining about randomly finding pictures of people you used to sort of know on websites dedicated to archiving pictures of camwhores. Themightytango is prettier with no clothes on.

In equally unrelated news, I am not a meme.

So apparently I own an iMac now.
I didn’t spend any money on it, obviously; I inherited it from my grandfather, who was given it by my uncle for his fiftieth wedding anniversary six or seven years ago. I think if you’re going to get a Mac, it should involve death in some capacity.

It’s a G3, but a relatively late model, so it’s still almost usable; 450 MHz CPU, 128 MB RAM, 20 GB HD, DVD drive.
It also came with Mac OS 9.1, which is painful. I was initially going to dualboot with a real OS, but Mac OS turned out to be too impossible to use to keep, so I just wiped the whole thing and installed Debian.

I just realised this was actually the first time I installed Debian; I’d used it before, and I’ve installed other Linux distributions (Ubuntu on my laptop, Fedora and Gentoo on my desktop), but never Debian itself.
The installer is straightforward to use, though obviously it lacks Ubuntu’s shiny buttons, so it’s “too difficult for the average user”. What surprised me, though, is that it supports encrypted partitions at install-time (it has for a while now, I just haven’t used it in so long I didn’t know).

I doubt my mom, who wants to use that computer for random typings, is going to appreciate having to blindly enter a 40ish-letter passphrase (in English) every time it boots, but whatever. Encryption is shiny.

(Incidentally, my low opinion of Apple products has only been reinforced by this iMac. The G3 form factor makes it impossible to cool adequately, so it smells vaguely like burning plastic most of the time (though it hasn’t started smoking yet), and the input devices it came with are fucktarded.
The keyboard I can deal with, though I question the placement of the ⌘ keys, the labelling of the Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys (which just have cryptic arrows on them), and the replacement of those three keys at the top by F13 through F15 (because we really need more F keys; not that the ones that were there originally saw much use, though (except Print-Screen)).
The mouse, though, is actively user-hostile: no right-click (Ctrl + click isn’t a valid alternative), no scrollwheel (and the fact that it’s seven years old is no excuse), literally painful to use for any length of time because of its shape, and it cost $59 new. Oh, but you can adjust the intensity of the light!
Jesus fucking Christ. Good thing I have plenty of USB back-up mice.)

I’ve complained about my “college” before (though not nearly as much as they deserve), but this time they’ve outdone themselves.
Our department is moving to a new building this semester, for reasons I’m not entirely clear on (I’d think it’s because the old building is falling apart, but apparently the KUL (that is, the parent university) is kicking them out because they want to use it themselves; or so I’ve been told), so they’ve been building said building for forever now.
Today, the first day of the semester, we were expected to gather at the old building for one last time, and then we’d all walk to the new building (despite the fact that it’s quite literally on the other side of the city). The direct route would’ve taken us about twenty minutes, but we took a ridiculously circuitous one so as not to interfere with bus traffic, so it ended up taking well over an hour.

The new building itself, though. Holy fuck, it should be legal to shoot architects that crap.

It very obviously isn’t finished, first of all. By what I’ve seen, it needs at least another two months of work, though I admit I haven’t seen a lot, since the ventilation was out (and natural ventilation or windows that fucking open were apparently beyond them), and there wasn’t nearly enough oxygen to sustain all of us. I think some of the girls actually fainted.
None of the toilets work, many of the doors still need to be installed (though a lot of places that really need doors won’t get any, because heaven forbid students could have a quiet place to study that’s more modern), there’s concrete dust everywhere (though a lot of the walls are painted to give an indication of what floor you’re on (the bottom three are blood red (which is very conducive to avoiding school shootings, really), another one’s orange, and the top one is green, IIRC), which I’m pretty sure will have to be redone soon), and it would surprise me very much if any of the computer labs had actual computers in them.
We were all crammed into one of the “polyvalent” rooms for a welcoming speech, and when the person giving it (I still don’t know what it is she actually does) mentioned she was so relieved it was finally finished, the students (which I’m sure I’ve mentioned aren’t exactly known for their perceptiveness) burst into laughter and applauded. It’s that obviously unfinished.

But even if it were finished, the building is just complete and utter crap.
One of the reasons they gave us for the move is that the new building is much bigger (which is also why they’re cramming another department in there as well). As it turns out, they didn’t mean it has more rooms; in fact, it has fewer computer labs than the old one (which certainly didn’t have an excess of them).
It does, however, have much higher ceilings, which ruin the acoustics to the point where they had to install microphones in each room (though they don’t, obviously, work yet). It also has a lot more corridors and dead space, including a rather large (but inaccessible, and godawfully ugly) courtyard. Well, not so much courtyard as courtsteelgrid.

The adequate if not excessive parking space available behind the old building has been replaced with an underground bicycle dungeon (which requires student ID to enter, much like the building itself; they should have spent the money they wasted on that on a better architect). Cars and motorbikes are expected to rent parking space from the nearby hospital.
You can’t fucking make this stuff up.

And then there are the entertaining little details.
The various stairs, which consist of fuck-off big slabs of concrete stacked roughly on top of each other, vibrate visibly when people walk on them. The concrete slabs that are trying to pass as walls and floors are already cracked in places. The bike dungeon is very obviously going to flood at the first sign of rain, and the path down to it is slippery as fuck even when it’s dry.
And of course, the whole building is a giant fucking Faraday cage, so cell phone reception is non-existent. Which means that if you forget your student ID, you can’t even call someone inside to let you in.
And going back home to retrieve it is non-trivial, since it’s in the middle of fucking nowhere, unlike the old building, which was within walking distance of everything.

I was planning to move to Leuven next semester so it wouldn’t take a fucking hour to get to class every day, but that appears to be pointless, as the closest residential area is still way too far away to bother. It looks like I’m going to have to take the train to Leuven every day (which I already did), and then the bus from the train station to aforementioned hospital.

Expert fucking planning, KHL.
Maybe the next building could be designed by four-year-olds, and built on the fucking moon.

The Catholic Church is an organisation of worthless vultures and thieves.
Remembering the dead is important, of course, and it’s important for people to be with their family when they’re at their emotionally most vulnerable. That makes it all the more disgusting when these ghouls pervert these occasions to make them all about themselves and their little cult, pushing the deceased—and the family—entirely to one side, and hiding them behind stock one-size-fits-all prayers (they had grandchildren read prayers calling him “opa”; not a single one of us ever called him anything but “bonpapa”) and bullshit stories (because obviously glorified accounts of God raining death down on the Israelites are very relevant to my grandfather).

Anyway, that was the wake. Funeral’s tomorrow.

My last three exams were two days ago (three exams on a single day, because as usual, the KHL administration is made of incompetence), so now I suppose I has spring break.
We’re only supposed to get one week, like everyone else, but for some reason we get two this year (though our exams also started a week earlier than usual, cutting into our Christmas break). So I have nearly three, which is interesting.

I guess I’ll be moving to Leuven next semester. Our department is moving to a new building, which is in Heverlee (which is a deelgemeente of Leuven).
The old building was within walking distance of Leuven’s main train station, and Tienen’s train station is within walking distance of my house (or nearly so), and the train trip itself is like ten minutes, so I’ve been going back and forth between Tienen and Leuven every day for the past four years.
Heverlee, though, is in the middle of nowhere, and pretty much unreachable except by bus, and buses make me angry.
But apparently my mom knows someone whose daughter has a student room in Heverlee who won’t be needing it next semester, so I should be getting that.

I’m not looking forward to having to use KotNet.