If you know any Linux people, you’ll know that many of them seem to have this obsession with changing the distribution of their operating system every few months. I am one of these people. I guess that after so many months of use, Ubuntu just grew too ancient for me. Or something. So now I’m running Fedora 28. I have all kinds of rationalizations for choosing it: it has a better release cycle that lets me use new software sooner, it’s more FOSS than Ubuntu, yadda yadda yadda.

Last week, I started my first internship at Cboe Global Markets. Hooray! I’m getting paid to do what I do for fun anyway! I was expecting it to be difficult, and it is, but it’s certainly not as difficult as I was led to believe. Obviously I can’t talk about anything that I’m working on in detail (NDAs and all that), but I can say that I’m being much more productive than I expected.

This post was inspired very heavily by xkcd’s What If series.

I was re-reading Douglas Adams’s Restaraunt at the End of the Universe, and I came across one of Adams’s many flights of fancy: “Disaster Area was a plutonium rock band from the Gagrakacka Mind Zones and was generally regarded as not only the loudest rock band in the Galaxy, but also as being the loudest noise of any kind at all. Regular concert goers judged that the best sound balance was usually to be heard from within large concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles away from the stage, whilst the musicians themselves played their instruments by remote control from within a heavily insulated spaceship which stayed in orbit around the planet - or more frequently around a completely different planet.

I competed in Ludum Dare 41 last weekend, when I made a small video game in 48 hours. Was that ever a learning experience. First off, you can play my entry, Puzzle Prizon, here! LD 41 is still in its voting rounds, so if you also participated in Ludum Dare, I’d like to have your feedback. Preparation I’ve written about my other failed attempts at participating in game jams. Every time that I’ve gone to join one, life has gotten in the way, whether that be schoolwork or laziness.

This may come as a shock to you: I, Walter Mays, the ardent LaTeX fanatic, am not going to use LaTeX for every assignment anymore. What is this world coming to?! It’s not that I’m going to stop using LaTeX completely. I think that is a fantastic system for typesetting structured documents, and I’ve been having to put together several of those this semester. I wouldn’t trade the power of LaTex for the world.