This past weekend was of course Christmas. I went up to my aunt’s house for the weekend, and I got to see all of my cousins. This stuff is relatively boring, so let’s talk about something else instead.

Where to start? I’ve got a bunch of random stuff, so let’s start out with some code!

For whatever reason, since I’ve started my co-op job again, I’ve been dreaming in code somewhat. I’ll be sleeping, and then out of nowhere a block of code will come out. That’s not particularly accurate, but bear with me! So the other night, I woke up early in the morning and really had to go to the bathroom. Now sometimes after I wake up, I can get a little confused, especially if I was just having a very vivid dream. So anyway, as I’m sitting in bed, halfway between awake and sleep, I was also dreaming a bit about code. So in my dream, because I really had to go to the bathroom, I actually had to really return a float very badly. A float, as in a data type in programming.

….Yeah, I’m not really sure where that came from.

For the holidays, I got a few books off of Amazon, some for myself and some for presents. I got two books for myself; Artemis Fowl: The Atlantis Complex and World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.

Now, the Artemis Fowl series is a series more meant for kids. However, I absolutely love it. I saw the first book in middle school. Some kid who was sitting in front of me on the bleachers was reading it, and had it next to him. I thought it looked interesting, and so I then read it. Turns out, it was really awesome. The Atlantis Complex is now the 7th book in the series, and it’s still rocking hardcore. Probably my favorite part was a pun on Wikipedia-instead of looking stuff up on Wikipedia, the fairies look stuff up on Wicca-pedia(*rimshot*). (Yeah, I like puns). Anyway, the book was quite good. I don’t think it was the best, but perhaps that’s because I read it in the car driving up. I’ll have to read it again sometime.

Now, World War Z is quite an awesome book. I mean, seriously, this rocks. I picked it up because it looked interesting, plus it’s a bestseller anyway. It’s written in the style of a group of interviews from different people in different perspectives, in the style of Studs Terkel. I had to read a bit of Studs Terkel for a class a few years ago, so I really found it quite cool. In fact, the author, Max Brooks, credits Studs with the format of the book. The style of the book actually makes it flow really well. Instead of having a story following a person or a group of people after the zombie apocalypse, the story instead asks people about their experiences during the war. I think that it gives you a much broader view of the war, instead of a “well here’s a group of people and here’s what they did” sort of thing. You also have to figure out what exactly is going on, as the way it is written uses slang that real people would have said, such as “Zack” or “G” for zombie, and the original name of the disease being “African rabies.” I read it all in just about a day, I found it so fascinating. I suppose part of the reason is that because there isn’t a real story to the book, you really can use your imagination more or something. It’s not a blow-by-blow account of the entire war and the events leading up to it. While it was quite fascinating, it was also a little bone-chilling, because it all seemed so real, except for the unkillable zombies of course. Some of the narratives describe how people would flee to Canada so that the zombies would be frozen, but they weren’t prepared for the winter. That just really stuck in my mind as being so plausible. Final rating: 5/5. If you like zombies, you should read this book. Actually, you should just read this book anyway.

My final thought tonight is on fake gift boxes. To that end, I got these Prank Pack Gift Boxes from ThinkGeek. I gave the PetPetter box to my mom. Her reaction was quite awesome; as she opened up the box, she went “but Ethan(our dog) loves to be petted!” with an expression not unlike this smiley: o.O

It was awesome. ^_^