All finished up today, and packing, and trying to decide what reading (and grading) material should accompany me homeward in my carry-on, and what should be checked. This has led me several times to imagine the consequences of a catastrophic plane crash involving a professor who’s carrying final exams: does everyone pass? Are there students somewhere offering ambivalent prayers about my safety?
My dad is in a regular hospital room. It’s not clear whether he’ll be home by the time we visit next weekend, but my sister says his voice is getting stronger (I’ll call him in a little while). Margaret’s iBook is still hosed; time for me to come home and find out whether my techno-macho enables me to retrieve her personal files from the hard drive before we send it off for a new motherboard.
Life goes on.
Posted by AKMA at December 16, 2003 11:19 AM | TrackBackYou have my prayers. Will you pray that I finish your paper by 11pm tonight?
Posted by: Tripp at December 16, 2003 11:31 AM"Are there students somewhere offering ambivalent prayers about my safety?" LOL!
I'd be more worried about what happens when the professor's luggage is accidentally redirected to Seattle and it takes a week for them to track it down.
The only time I've had luggage (temporarily) lost was when we were coming back from Scotland, which was actually kind of nice, since we didn't have to bother with customs!
As none of those papers are mine (at least, not this quarter), I am free to be entirely unambivalent in my prayers for you (not that I wouldn't be anyway-- but then, you knew that).
Posted by: Jane Ellen at December 16, 2003 12:56 PMI don't know about the plane crash scenario, but I had a prof lose a final (tragic circumstances, death of a child in a car crash) while I was an undergrad, and the university refused to convert the I, which kept me from graduating.
Prayers go with you, and for your dad.
Posted by: Melanie at December 16, 2003 03:29 PMI keep my piles of grading in my carryon luggage out of just this mild paranoia -- but I admit that in the event of a crash landing, I'm leaving them to burn. :)
Posted by: Naomi Chana at December 18, 2003 10:30 AMNote the new asterisks whenever we reference favoriteNumber, except for that new line right before the return.
Posted by: Anchor at January 13, 2004 02:36 AMThis back and forth is an important concept to understand in C programming, especially on the Mac's RISC architecture. Almost every variable you work with can be represented in 32 bits of memory: thirty-two 1s and 0s define the data that a simple variable can hold. There are exceptions, like on the new 64-bit G5s and in the 128-bit world of AltiVec
Posted by: Ciriacus at January 13, 2004 02:36 AMThis code should compile and run just fine, and you should see no changes in how the program works. So why did we do all of that?
Posted by: Beatrice at January 13, 2004 02:36 AMBeing able to understand that basic idea opens up a vast amount of power that can be used and abused, and we're going to look at a few of the better ways to deal with it in this article.
Posted by: Wombell at January 13, 2004 10:28 AMWhen the machine compiles your code, however, it does a little bit of translation. At run time, the computer sees nothing but 1s and 0s, which is all the computer ever sees: a continuous string of binary numbers that it can interpret in various ways.
Posted by: Ebotte at January 13, 2004 10:28 AMThis back and forth is an important concept to understand in C programming, especially on the Mac's RISC architecture. Almost every variable you work with can be represented in 32 bits of memory: thirty-two 1s and 0s define the data that a simple variable can hold. There are exceptions, like on the new 64-bit G5s and in the 128-bit world of AltiVec
Posted by: Mark at January 13, 2004 10:29 AM