So I've been quite on gopher lately as I've been preparing for the new
term. I've gotten my vaccines (covid and flu) this past week and you
might not know this about me but the covid vaccine wrecks me every
single time. Just super sick for days, brain-sick for days longer.
I'm finally out of the physically sick so I hiked up the nearest
dormant volcano (mt. tabor, it's not a hike-hike there's a really long
staircase that goes up it) and I'm typing this from my new pocket
reform that I got literally seconds after getting home from my
vaccination appointment
It's...really nice so far?
Funny enough but most of my complaints are actually about linux on
arm64 being finicky and not the pocket reform itself. I know some
people have had issues but I think the fact that I got mine at the
very end of the initial crowdsupply run means that a bunch of fixes
were a firmware update and a couple of apt commands away, so I've
actually had a completely fine time of it so far. No particular
weirdness in the hardware. Just some buggy support for software on
arm64.
The most frustrating of which was that I couldn't get a recent sbcl
built on this machine but honestly using sbcl 1.4 is still an
implementation of the common lisp language so it's not like trying to
use an old rust compiler or something where all bets on compatibility
are off.
Anyway I have a little over two weeks til the academic year
starts. Yikes!
I'm feeling pretty prepared except that I'm still really intimidated
by trying to make this systems programming class that I haven't taught
before. I really don't do a lot of x86-64 programming so I feel a
little worried I'll do a bad job of it.
On the other, I can't be any worse than most presentations of assembly
programming because dear god they're almost universally horrible. I'm
at least going to show them how to write whole programs and do system
calls and things like that which a lot of classroom treatments of
assembly seem to leave out.
Anyway, it's nice writing a gopher post outside with my partner at a
park bench while looking out over the city.
