decidedlyodd

So, last night a WXYC DJ almost got mugged on campus after his 12-3am show. I know exactly where this happened, because I sometimes park over there when I do my late night show. That area always sorta creeped me out. Earlier in the night, there are always sketchy people cruising or hanging out over in that parking (not sure they were students or not). I really need to stay away from that area and try to park as close as possible. Unfortunately, there’s nothing like the UC Berkeley Walk Service at UNC. There’s a point-to-point shuttle you can call, but it would be ridiculous for them to drive me the less than a quarter mile between the station and my car.

Which brings me to the larger point: do criminals think your average college student wandering around at 3am on campus is going to have anything so valuable on them? There have been some other robberies over the past few months where the perps drove students at gun point to an ATM and made them withdraw the maximum amount of cash. Pretty ballsy really. Maybe it’s time to invest in some mace for those late nights.

In other more positive news, I’ve spent most of the day not doing my RA (like I should be doing). Instead, I’ve been learning Objective C and how to use to write Cocoa applications. My plan is to do the next COMP 259 assignment using this API. Basically, it’s based on NeXTSTEP, an extinct operating system that was popular in certain circles back in the early 90s. After getting over the initial learning curve, it is surprisingly easy to get started coding up an application.

There’s even a parallel project, GNUstep, which is a free implementation that runs on Linux (among other OSs). Pretty nifty stuff. It would be nice if I could get this stuff working ok on Linux, because then I could get things running at school too.