March 03, 2004
Visitation
Front porch of a house
East Grace and North 22nd Streets
I got my pthreads program working correctly, despite all my best efforts to screw it up. This was "pthread survivors" in which the program created a number of pthreads specified on the command line and then the pthreads tried to kill each other. I was putting in the final touches (documentation, comments), but I noticed that when I ran it, the same pthread, always the last one created, won every time. Since I wasn't doing this from within the context of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, I was fairly sure that this was not a random result. With some unusual attack of common sense, I looked at how I was using the random number generator, and sure enough, though I had done all the proper seeding and everything, I must have had some kind of brain fart and typed in rand()%(n-1) instead of rand()%n, which is what you need to get a random number between 0 and n-1. And that was easily fixed, giving me my pseudorandom results and alleviating the creepy sense that Hamlet might wander into my office at any moment.
As my reward for finishing up, I paid two bills, one of which was for the plumber (Ouch!), and went for a walk to the post office. Also, I needed the exercise. After three days of hunching before the computer, I am stiff and my Achilles tendons seem to have shrunk by about an inch in length. Yes, it's "programmer's calves" and now I'm just like Oz (if the man wants to post comments as "Oz" then I'll go ahead and call him Oz from now on), who is all the time stopping to stretch out his calves every time he steps up on a curb.
I wandered around the neighborhood and got some nice shadow pictures. Over on East Grace Street are some townhouses with a southwestern exposure and French-style ironwork. On a sunny afternoon, once the sun has dropped low, but not too low, it throws perfect shadows of the ironwork on the bricks. Also over on East Grace is Richmond Hill, which was once a convent. I've never been on the grounds or in any of the buildings, but today someone left open the door to one of the buildings that front on the street. Open door? No "No Trespassing" sign? Looks like an invitation to me!
The building was/is a chapel and it looks like it's being restored. The floor is mostly up, with all the joists exposed and scraps of plywood to allow people (not me, I stayed in the doorway because I'm not quite that much of a trespasser) to walk across. From the street I could see a narrow row of gilt shapes, with bat silhouettes in the middle, at about waist level on the chapel walls. Upon closer inspection I found that it was nothing more outréhan a floral border, painted or papered on. The room was completely dark, so the stained glass windows, which you can't see from the street, glowed blue and purple. High above was an oval domed ceiling covered with dark wood, gleaming like the hull of a ship. Plaster walls, stained and cracked, unoccupied niches. Cool air and a sawdust smell.
551 words | March 3, 2004 10:32 PM | Real true story