LEGAL DISCLAIMER: I like boys, mostly.
You know how most honors classes are so trivial, but supposed to be hard? Well, OS 202 actually is. We have to work with this fake operating system called Nacho, and every week we have to enhance it enough so that by the end of the semester it turns into Nacho XP. In addition to adding our own synchronization primitives, memory management, i/o, etc, we also have to design a bridge and an elevator.
First of all, jigga whaaaat?!?!? Second of all, on account of Nacho being so hard, my partner and I begin looking at the hw about 5 weeks before its due. Our strategy is to first email the mailing list with questions like:
So then we code most of it about 2 weeks in advance, except for some lil thing that we leave off until... the night before it's due of course. After that, we dont meet until like 11pm on Nachos Eve (then nigt before its due), and realize that everythign we've written up to this point is not even remotely correct. We stay up until like 4am, coding i dont even know wtf. After deciding that everything finally works, we go to our demo at like 10am the next day with a deep-seeded feeling of worthiness correctness.
So we confidently show our first program to the professor, and he's like.. "Um, can you explain what you're trying to do in the first line?" I have never seen that line before in my life, but luckily, he's asking about my partner's code and not mine, so i sigh with relief. Then, about a second later I realize, that actually, no, I was the one who wrote this stuff at 4am last night!!!!! I know none of this can be correct when I notice that 'condition variable' is spelled as 'conditon varibale' about 20 times on one page. Of course it also doesn't help that my partner write stuff like...
It helps even less that 'changer' appears in like every single function, and i'm seeing it for the first time during our demo.
Clearly, Nacho is the most stressful thing in the world, and seeing as this last weekend marked the start of spring break, I had no choice but to celebrate. Festivities started on Thursday night, were interrupted for about 2 hours of soberness friday morning, and eagerly continued by 3pm on Friday. After getting drunk with my boyfriend (note the word boyfriend is key here), we decided to stop by my friend's party for just one last drink.
But when I asked if I could have a beer, my friend whipped out something I've never seen before in my life: POTATO VODKA. Now, I am very educated about potatos- they are the staple of the Russian diet. In Russia, the peasants and the nobles eat them alike!!!!!!
Little did I know at the time, that Potato Vodka contains even more nutrition than the potato it is made from!! As the following exhibit clearly shows, Luksosowa Potato Vodka contains 37.59% more nutrition than the average potato:
Due to the overwhelming nutritious value of the potato vodka, I finally overcame my greatest fear: hooking up with people who are NOT members of the News staff. According to the Exhibit B below, I was not ashamed!!!
In conclusion, both Nacho and potato vodka have played a very key role in my life. I hope they continue to do so.