The Not-So-Weird Dream Channel

I'm in a huge room, maybe it's a ballroom, maybe a school gym, something with a well-maintained, shiny wood floor. There are multiple lines of buffet tables, five or six continuous rows lengthwise from one end of the room to the other. There are the obligatory waitpersons in black slacks/white shirts at appropriate intervals and spotted around the room. The crowd is moderate, nobody needs to push to get to the food, and there's plenty of room for people to wander between tables, but it's a sizable crowd nevertheless.

Zoom in on me. I'm seated at a round table (this looks a lot like my Bar Mitzvah, except I'm my current age), and I'm the only one seated. And it's the only sit-down table in the room. Most of the other guests are milling around the buffet, but a dozen or so are standing behind and around me.

And they are taking turns feeding me. Well, not exactly feeding me, but putting food at my place. It's all very orderly, and we seem to be going through my favorite desserts, in order, starting with my least favorite. But even my least favorite is Good Stuff. Tiramisu. I eat in a normal fashion at a pace which lets me enjoy the food, but as soon as I swallow the last bite of one dessert, one hand takes the plate away and another hand comes from the opposite side to put the next treat there. I'm using the appropriate utensils, too. I go through cream puff, éclair, napoleon, boston cream pie, chocolate pudding pie, black bottom pie, and several I've forgotten. All this time the deliveries have been intuitive, I have not had to ask for anything. But then I ask for my Very Favorite, black forest cake, and that's where the dream ends. And I wake up with the impression that there is no black forest cake to be had. Nobody had thought to order any.

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This dream came to me a few nights ago, I just keep forgetting to write it down. It was after I had started my tradition of celebrating my weight losses with a weekly foray into the forbidden. I had gone to Bean Scene the first time, where they served a napoleon which tasted like it was made with cardboard instead of filo, and then a week later a piece of German chocolate cake from Coffee Society was stale.

Perl Before Swine

Went to Perl class at Mission College and it was a crock. Instead of a classroom layout with computers at each seat like they had at my Java classes at Foothill, this was a Unix lab, with a long row of tables going from the front of the room to the back, with Sun workstations back to back. CRT monitors on them. The instructor is a very short Indian woman, and she could not be seen over the terminals from the back of the room where I sat. Or from three seats back, for that matter.

She was almost totally unprepared.

First of all, she did not know the login/password for the class accounts, so none of us could use the workstations. She also did not know how to get her email or set up the class on the Mission College web site, so she gave us the URL for her Foothill/DeAnza site. She wants us to print out our assignments and staple the pages together, and hand them in during class. No floppies, no CDs, no email, no ftp. Pretty disgusting for a computer class. She said she never uses Windows, and has no clue how to use Perl on a Windows machine. The lab only has Unix boxes. OLD ones.

She said the class will be 1 hour of lecture, followed by as much time on the workstations as we want. I'm feeling ripped off, because the catalog says there is a 3.5-hour lecture, plus another 3.5 hours of lab time. On the other hand we're getting 3 credits for a 1-credit class. As if that mattered to me at my advanced age.

I'm also feeling ripped off because the book which was listed for the class, which I bought online 2 weeks ago, is not the one she is using. While she said we could use any book we wanted to, it turns out her "lecture" is simply reading the book to us. So after class I went to the bookstore and got a copy.

Some good news is she is not taking attendance, and as long as we show up for the final and hand in our assignments, we're good as far as grades go.

The class starts at 7 pm. At that time, only 6 people were there. Four of them had not registered for class. By 8 pm, there were 25 people in the room, and only 8 had pre-registered. She was happy to add everyone who wanted in, because it means the class won't be canceled, and she also knows at least half these people will drop. I'm guessing we'll have at least 4 fewer next week as the Windows specialists go bye-bye.

As she was processing the adds, one of the students figured out the login and password from hints which were on the board from the previous class. I had already tried those, I thought, but it turns out my cAPSlOCKwas on at the time....

I can telnet in to that account from home, so I won't need to build a Unix machine, or mess with installing Perl on my Windows laptop.