programming, etc.

sometimes i really really wondered who programmed the elevators in my building and what they were thinking. there are 2. when i got to them and pushed the "up" button early today, one of them was sitting, not moving, on the third floor, and the other was coming down from floor 30-something. clearly the elevator just sitting on the third floor was closer. but it did not move. i had to wait for the one from the 30-something-th floor to come all the way down. (and then there was a lady on the elevator with bags on the stuff on the floor of the elevator, writing something in a notebook, and when the elevator doors opened on the first floor, she just stood there writing in her notebook not moving. i got on the elevator. she still stood there. about 30 seconds later she picked up her bags and stepped off the elevator set her bags right down and kept writing in the notebook. then i closed the doors and went up. but that is another story.) i keep thinking that if i watch how the elevators move enough when i push the button to go up or down and see which one comes and which one doesn't, that eventually i'll be able to write a list of rules for what my elevators were programmed to do in different situations. and then i'd be really tempted to write a suggestion of how the elevators *should* work to someone... if i could write in chinese... but i actually practiced for the first time in over 6 months (maybe more like a year...) writing chinese the other day. so maybe someday. i intend to do more of that. i realized that in my free time i have been free to read lots and lots of books but apparently not free to study chinese at all. so the way my free time is spent is a little skewed. slight adjustment needed. anyway.

i had something i wanted to do in excel the other day that it turned out needed some kind of recursive formula, but as far as i know, excel can't do that. at least not what i needed it to do with any of the functions i tried. it made me slightly sad that i couldn't write the very very small "program" that i wanted to write because i didn't know any other language or program to write it with. sad. sometimes i get a slight longing to study greek again and also to understand and listen to more japanese. now i can add some unknown programming language to that list too.