Morningside Party Night & Incomplete Linux Shell Demonstration

I first met Johnny when we were in the Chung Chi English Table a couple weeks ago. We broke the ice after I had made a stupid bet, so stupid that I don't wanna talk about it here (and I still owe him and Stepan a dinner). A couple days later, we ran into each other outside the WMY building. We chatted a bit and thought we really should hang out some time. So another couple days later, he invited me to a party he was gonna host in Morningside tonight. Besides, he said he would be glad to help me pick up chicks! Automatically I said yes!

Therefore I finished all the stuff yesterday so today I could be all set for party! Knowing the party would probably have 2 kinds of food only: Beers and Snacks, I planned to go eat something first after my lesson was over at around 5:20 pm. Indy also wanted to have some snacks and so we decided to try those lemon pies in the "Glass House". And guess what? We ran into my high school English teacher, Miss Lo, on our way! She was walking beside the boards outside the Coffee Corner before I snapped my fingers in front of her. After over a year, she hadn't changed much, but was not as tall as I remembered she was (I'm still a growing boy!) After a bit of greetings, she said she was going to buy tickets for some drama-ish thingy. Without doubt I was not a person as sophisticated as she was, I shown no interests in knowing more... so Ms Lo changed her attention to Indy (probably she was surprised I could finally find a girl to talk to) and praised me as an outstanding student (ha!). However, I was pretty sure Indy had a different picture of me in her mind: a guy with outstanding record of scoffing down chocolate, days without sleep and number of video-gaming hours. Anywho, I was still happy and grateful that Ms Lo still remembered me and I could still get some compliment in college (technically)! After saying goodbye, we finally arrived at the "Glass House" and damn, lemon pies were all out. So we went to the snack shop nearby. I ordered a dish of noodle as usual and Indy had a custard bun. The food was so good!

We split after taking the school bus back to S.H.Ho College, Juno picked me up and we spent the next 2 hours working on our laptops on the second floor of the Morningside building. Juno suddenly sang George Lam's Diary of Numbers and we started to sing along! I also sent the youtube link to Indy to "prepare her for her Cantonese exam"  (30624700 30624770~~ oh yeah). Starting to get into party mode, I switched to Benny Chan's Pokemon Theme Song and hit the repeat button like 4 times before I changed to other childhood songs! Juno finally couldn't stand me and went downstairs to have communal dinner (with Vincent) before going back to his assignment (looked like it was the hardest assignment I'd ever seen, he'd been working on that for 3 nights already, I didn't enroll the course, lucky me!

George Lam- Diary of Numbers

Benny Chan- Pokemon (Theme Song)

At around 8:40 pm, Vincent finally shown up again. So we ditched Juno (hope you rot with your assignment dude) and hit the party! There were already a lot of people there before we got in the venue, and they already started drinking before the party started! I saw Jacob (a US guy I knew from the at Database class) and we started to chit chat. We talked a bit about that Database group assignment (talking about homework in a party really sucked...) and then something about the people we saw there. Vincent casually joined in the discussion, he was a Electronic Engineering student before he changed to study Computer Science, so we could kill some time talking about that.

 

The party's "DJ set"

When the first song started to play (Gorillaz's Feel Good Inc., good choice, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha...), the party officially started! People kept on mingling and we turned to Vincent's fellow Morningsiders to have some small talks, another US guy Andrew joined us too. We more or less didn't know each other so it was kinda awkward at first, but then Novel (Juno's roommate) handed us beers, the situation was eased up all of sudden! Vincent and I didn't drink, although we felt a bit helpless to our cans of beers somehow, we still opened them and poured the beer into our mouths. Ah...that was bitter! Andrew was studying International Politics in DC (for the name of the college, just ask him yourself!) So we discussed quite a lot about politics and social issues. He was a really fun guy to talk to! And his interesting stories (about the US, dormitory life...) were hysterical! When the alcohol was soaking in, we started to discuss anything we could think of. Vincent's friend (I forgot your name, sorry) and Andrew loved playing that game League of Legends too, but no offense, I liked Starcraft 2 more and League of Legends was just like its name, L-O-L! I gave them a minute to convince me into playing LOL, but they failed. Then we asked Andrew to talk more about Hong Kong, that was good to know he loved Hong Kong and was still very satisfied with his choice. He also loved Mongkok, and he said he literally liked everything about Hong Kong, we were so happy! Then of course, we brought the focus back to his expertise a little bit, he mentioned Hong Kong people should really be grateful for what a special place they were living in. (Well I concur with Andrew mostly, but I'm not a political person, so I don't wanna elaborate more here) And then we started to discuss something more related to ourselves, for instance, our reputation as "Asians", difference between the states and HK, self-identity (like national pride) and our own identity crisis (why more and more people started to have a hard time recognizing their Chinese identities), some weird stuff mainland Chinese did, and so much more.

We also shared a bit about why many of us didn't talk to exchange students. Well in our defense, we were shy and didn't have the nerve to talk to them using English, and we thought many exchange students were trying to play it cool. But Andrew told us the feelings were mutual. Come on, exchange students could be shy too, and they didn't understand what we were talking about (we were probably talking bad about you, ha ha) and didn't have a way to blend in or act normal. To me, talking to exchange students was fun and awesome, especially this year Computer Science had got more exchange students than ever. It could really broaden you horizon and help you develop a global mind, and the most important of all, you could make new friends! For instance, I was one of the few people who got the nerve to talk to Indy at the beginning of our CS classes. And it turned out I had made a really great friend. I didn't know if she noticed, but she had just made a difference on someone's life. She was the one who introduced me LaTeX, and helped me learn how to enhance and expand my knowledge in algorithms and data structures, so thank you very much Indy, and thank you for bringing me back to Mika too! Besides Indy, I also had Johnny, who kindly invited me to this party. And of course there were more, like Dimitar and Stepan and other people, I was really happy we could be friends.

With half a can of beer in my stomach, I felt my mind starting to get a bit numb, and that can of beer was also starting to get heavier and heavier. I tried to maintain my consciousness by squeezing the can over and over, and finally beer leaked out and it looked really like I just peed on the floor (maybe I actually did!)... I didn't remember how many times I had asked Andrew for his name, maybe 2, or maybe 4 times. And when I swiped the screen on my cellphone, I found it was so hard to focus. As a result, I only got clusters of memories of the party at its last 30 minutes, I remembered Andrew saying he loved Jackie Chan but all I could think of was Chan's big fat nose, I started to get interested into playing Beer Pong (although I already stated I didn't want to before the party started), and Andrew promised to take the shots for me, so we shared a hug. Thanked god Beer Pong was over before I really took action.

Finally, it was 11:00 pm, I "survived"! The four of us ended up talking for 2 hours non-stop. The party ended and thus commenced the after-party party- next station, LKF! But I felt like I was half-bombed and I got lessons at 8:30 am tomorrow, so Vincent and I said goodbye to Andrew and hung back upstairs. Juno was still working on the assignment, he looked more and more frustated. I was too tired to make fun of him so I just lied on the chair and took a rest, besides, I was starving. And after finishing a cup noodle, I hurried back home and started to write this thing. Tonight was freakin' awesome, but Johnny, I still hadn't talked to any chicks yet!

Vincent, Andrew and Retarded Me 

Novel (Juno's roommate) and Juno were so close!

Not so "Morning" side now.

Kev (That's right, I'm drunk-blogging!)

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I woke up this morning at 7 am, and I felt like my body just got beaten up and my head hurt. After 3 straight lessons of German, the Chung Chi Assembly, I finally caved in at the Database tutorial and napped. I was really sick of using my eyelids to do heavy-lifting.

It's 4:30 pm, and I guess I'm quite sober now, after what happened a while earlier, who wouldn't?

So AC and I were supposed to get our individual and group assignments tested in SHB 904 at 3 pm. Thank god we arrived early, otherwise, I really didn't know if I could do my shift at the NA Library on time.

Long story short, in the course, we were supposed to do write a program to categorize different Linux command lines alone and then wrote a simplified version of the Linux Shell together. When the tutor tested my program on 30 test cases, I got over half of them wrong, I started to cold- sweat. It was outrageous, cause I was pretty sure my program worked perfectly. After a while, it seemed like when the program tried to dissect the inputs into tokens (e.g. if the command line is "ls a b c" the program has to tokenize it into "ls", "a", "b" and "c", and stored them into an array one by one.), it always reset the first data into a NULL string (i.e. it is supposed to be tokens[0]="ls", tokens[1]="a", tokens[2]="b" and tokens="c", but now I got tokens[0]="", tokens[1]="ls", tokens[2]="a", tokens[3]="b", tokens[4]="c"). However, I really didn't remember I had met this problem before (don't tell anyone, my program only crashes when the whole input is merely a NULL string, I've checked my programs a thousand times before I submitted it but I couldn't find a way to fix that NULL string thing back then), therefore automatically I pulled out my laptop and checked the whole thing again in my Netbeans (a programming platform). The exact same code worked perfectly (and it was also compiled under g++)! So the tutor and I had tried different ways to sort things out, we tried compiling the code I use instead of the one I submitted, we skimmed through my code and tried to track the "bug" but to no avail! Shit, it was getting serious, and I started to get anxious that I would be failed.

And then things took a twist! The professor in-charge, Professor Mole Wong dropped by in the lab. He was really a sight for sore eyes (After all, he's the one who's gonna grade me). His first approach was compiling my code under another 64-bit machine (cause my laptop was a 64-bit one) and it didn't work. But "Mole God" was't called "Mole God" for nothing, he spent the next 30 minutes studying my code and found out the source of problem seemed to be coming out from my tokenizer function (which was responsible for dissecting the input into tokens and saving them one by one).

And after another 10 minutes of testing, he figured out which line of code was wrong! He told me my code was kinda sneaky, and at the end of that function, I freed a pointer and although it seemed legit and normal, that sucker could almost sentence you to death cause Linux and Windows worked differently in freeing pointers. So, after we had deleted that line and compiled the code again, it worked again! Eventually, I only failed 3 outta 30 test cases, cause I did something extra on the commands "cd", "exit" and "fg" which the project manual didn't specify (I heard quite a lot of people also had done the same thing, so that's fine). Mole God was really a life saver and he didn't deduct my marks since this bug was too hard to trace, yay! I really owed him big time! And for the group project, we failed only 2 or 3 test cases, I don't remember, whichever was still a really great score, as told by the tutor. Thank you so much, AC!

Today is really a roller coaster, phew~~ seems like I still got a lot more to learn in CS! I feel like I should hit the books as soon as possible, but Andrew's words suddenly popped into my mind: Taking a nap of 20 minutes every 4 hours could boost one's work efficiency. Vincent also said it worked. So now motherfucker is feeling kinda sleepy, time to take a nap-py.

Kev