Day 1.
Well. Yeah. The excitement of the first day of a programming course. I swear you were once required to have done some before entering this course. Not really, I guess. My French seems to be up to the challenge, vaguely. I can usually figure out a word based on context and educated guessing. Hey, did you know that the word for spam in (Quebec) French is pourriel? Isn’t that a great word (courriel = email; poubelle = trash)? Pourriel. It’s fun to say.
I now know that:
- it’s called “une programme helloworld”;
- this can sound strangely like saying L O L out loud, if you have the right accent; and
- in a weird twist, you only print out “Bonjour”.
I didn’t write the program because they haven’t actually created a username for me (or lots of other people). They also have the world’s strangest temporary password creation rules. Your password is: nnffamdd, where nn is the first two letters of your last name, ff of your first name, a is the last number of your year of birth, m is the letter corresponding to the month of your birth, uppercase for men, lowercase for women, and dd is the date of your birth. I guarantee I will remember this method of password creation forever, because it’s so useless, and my brain only stores useless stuff.
Parking there sucks, but I was too tired to bike (all the way uphill) this morning. Oddly, despite there being big signs all over saying no parking Wednesday, 9-10, March 1 to Dec 1, there was parking. I parked there: yay! No ticket! And if you get there around 9, there are some spots. So this should be okay in the winter, when it’ll be way too dangerous to bike.
I managed to go to Duc de Lorraine for a croissanty lunch. Mmmm. Tomorrow is other required course, whatever it is, and my machine learning one, which should be interesting. Now I will go and lie down because listening to another language for hours is really tiring. Or I slept only maybe 7 hours last — oh, forget it, why should I bother to make excuses? I am always tired. But so far . . . not too much, yet.
September 2nd, 2004 at 5:05 am
Man, this just makes me remember how much I miss being in a French-speaking country. In France, though, in the programming world, it’s all franglais. As-tu checke ton email? Is it much different in Quebec?
September 2nd, 2004 at 8:27 am
It’s all *different* terms. Checke, yes, I think, but courriel (courrier electronique) won out over email. A good rule of thumb is to assume that if the term in France is an anglicism, in Quebec it won’t be, and vice versa. I don’t know how this works in the specific domain of programming, but it is quite accurate in general.
September 2nd, 2004 at 11:27 pm
I don’t have a good feel/understanding for how the first class went. Trying, exhausting, intimidating, worthy… ? I’m not sure that the conclusions I’d draw would be accurate so I don’t wanna say, “sounds like the class sucked” because you’ll come back and say, “No, and here’s why.”
Is the glass-blowing class over?