Erwaman's Personal Journal - March 2009

There was a post-concert reception. Waiters walked around with glasses of wine. I passed because I do not like the taste of alcohol.

There was also a big dispenser-like jar. I found out it contained grape juice and vodka. I passed initially because of the mention of vodka content (again, I thought nasty alcoholic taste).

I ate lots of finger food and became thirsty, so I decided to give the grape juice with vodka a shot. You could BARELY taste the alcohol. If you didn't focus on detecting an alcoholic taste, you probably would've just thought you were drinking grape juice.

So as I was eating and drinking, I was also socializing with the other bandies. I ended up making a deal with Kelsey Sakimoto that if I got drunk, he would also get drunk. At the time of this writing, he has never drank in his life.

We shook on this deal. I didn't think much of it; I wasn't actually gonna try to get drunk. But I continued drinking more of the grape juice with vodka, remembering all the previous times in my life that I had consumed small quantities of alcohol. I had never felt drunk or even slightly buzzed.

So I continued eating, drinking, and chatting, and then I started to notice the slightest of dizzinesses. Mentally I didn't feel dizzy, but I detected the slightest blurring of my vision when shifting my gaze. I noticed my eyes seemed to focus a split second slower. There would be a split second of wavy vision. It could have just been because I was a bit sleepy. But I attributed it to the vodka in the grape juice. Never having ever experienced any effects of alcohol before in my life, I was very curious and wanted to intensify the effects slightly and test my mental awareness and control.

I drank a few more glasses of grape juice after that and started to feel slightly different mentally, like a very dull throbbing sensation.

As Justin Hudak put it, I was a bit extra bubbly in my dialogue when conversing with others. I was aware of this but I felt I was allowing myself to be this way. If I tried, I could control myself and do anything other people asked of me: act less bubbly, talk slower, touch my nose, walk in a straight line, recite the alphabet backwards, stand on one leg. Mentally, I still felt very in control. I had an extended discussion with Kelsey about my present experience of being buzzed and whether my drinking tonight was morally wrong.

I remember Alex Szajko once told me, "Anthony, before you graduate college, you will have a significant drinking experience." I wonder if this counts? I definitely was not fully drunk, only slightly buzzed. I did get a little Asian glow. I definitely don't think I'll vomit or even have a hangover tomorrow, but we'll see. I'm really curious about the aftereffects. I'm gonna go test my motor skills and mental focus by playing some StepMania followed by StarCraft. I'm feel a little sleepy though - dunno if I'm tired or if I'm drowsy due to the alcohol or a combination of both.

The previous night, I had also been catching up on reading my friends' LJs, and Lily had written several posts involving CS. So I was thinking about programming and cubing, and felt inspired to write a Rubik's Cube scramble generator. Last night, I played StarCraft in the bar with complimentary Wi-Fi, and afterward, I started on the scramble generator program. I got sleepy quickly, so I slept and finished the program this morning.

In the past, I've thought about scramble generators, and intuitively, it didn't seem that hard conceptually to generate random turns, and when I finally programmed my own scramble generator, indeed, it was very straightforward. This was a fun little program. If you're interested, here's the source code (in C) and the executable. I run the executable using command prompt. Once you get to the directory containing the executable, type "scramgen [turns per scramble] [# of scrambles] [seed for random #s]" to generate scrambles. The third parameter (the seed) is necessary because C by default sets the seed to 1, so unless you change the seed, you will get the same scrambles every time (assuming the other parameters are the same). I wish C would automatically generate a unique seed for each execution using the current time, but it's an old language, so I guess such a feature wasn't implemented.

By the way, Mexico is really beautiful and fun. We spent last night in this quaint mountainside town called Real de Catorce. Just to get to the town, we had to drive many miles on a gravel path off the highway, then we had to wind many more miles up the side of the mountain on a dirt path. To finally enter the town, we had to get off our buses, jump in trucks and vans and go through this mile-long tunnel (that the coach buses cannot fit through). The town seemed very old-fashioned, but the view was spectacular. I will be posting lots of pictures on Facebook when I get home. In the hotel, space was a little limited, but they really made the most out of the room they had. I loved the resourceful and homely feeling I got. Dinner and breakfast were delicious as well. On to Monterrey, our final destination!

Edit: I just found out about the time.h C library header file that provides functions for accessing the current date and time. So, actually using the time() function defined in time.h, I could generate random seeds based on the current time rather than having the user input a value.