Pattern Recognition.
I’m starting to relish routine.
Each morning, as I stumble delirious toward the shower, my girl cat trots through my legs to beat me into the bathroom. She claims her spot on the heater. Her purs echo off of the wall. I love it.
My wife and I are so happy with ourselves for having a waking life, for being morning people. It’s as if we are finally real people. We’ve paid off all our debts. We own our home. It’s just so normal. And it’s so great.
I chuckle as I start to shave. It’s a pattern: I always start the same way, realize that I somehow, somewhere in the recesses of my brain programmed myself to never fall into patterns, and so I alter the way I shave. This time, I’ll do the right sideburn area first, next time, the chin will be deforested first thing!
But right now, patterns are power.
8 responses so far ↓
1 Elliott // Mar 4, 2002 at 4:32 pm
’s/BOM\/\(.\):.\(44000[^ ]*\).*/\2 \1/’
2 scotty // Mar 5, 2002 at 2:10 pm
Is this some sort of secret message in a regular expression or am I supposed to see the pattern?
3 Elliott // Mar 5, 2002 at 3:20 pm
It’s just a reqular expression I had at hand. It means little outside the set of data it was meant to process.
4 scotty the body // Mar 13, 2002 at 1:20 pm
Knowing you, I bet you work hard at coming up with perfect, efficient regular expressions. Stephen Janke would probably be very proud.
5 Elliott // Mar 14, 2002 at 3:36 pm
Actually, the first time I saw someone use a re in vi, my jaw dropped. All the crap on the screen dissapeared and just the data we wanted was left.I get baffled sometimes (‘how could it match that?’, ‘how could it not match?’, &c.), and, if the data set is short enough, do it by hand.Usually, when I am writing a re, I am in a hurry, so the first thing that works is what I use. I am getting better at writing them, though, and using sed with command files, so I can edit them instead of retyping.This gets me on another topic: does it hurt you to watch unconfigured users on a computer? The feeling I get is on the threshold of pain.
6 scotty the body // Mar 14, 2002 at 3:53 pm
Are you talking about people who don’t have their .profile file in place & c.? If so, you’d wince as you watched me work—having to regularly dash on and off of well over 500 individual systems, I rarely get a chance to set my environment up just so.
7 scotty the body // Mar 14, 2002 at 3:54 pm
ksh -o viGotta have that!
8 Elliott // Mar 15, 2002 at 3:02 pm
Sadly, I spend an enormous amount of time on Windows machines, so I’m talking about real simpletons.I was pretty pure about Unix until the last project I worked on, where our software sat on an Win2K machine that I could telne to. Ever since then, I have been on HP-UX boxes typing ‘dir’. I have this creepy suspicion that there are German sysadmins looking at logs of my sessions and laughing.In fact, if I were administering Unix machines, I might set up a script that searched for ‘dir’ in logs of user sessions. This would be in the parallel universe where I have time to do everything I think of.Anyway, what hurts me, really hurts, is watching Internet Explorer users, who shall remain nameless, stumble around looking for a page they viewed ten minutes ago, and watching Windows users, who clearly do not understand that there is a file system, groping for some document or other.
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