The Three Signs - Book 2 - LoriChapter 37: University, Third Year (Part 2) free porn video

My lecturers didn’t waste any time getting down to work for second semester; mind you, there were only two new subjects, as the rest of my workload was simply a continuation from the first semester. The two new subjects – 6.602C, Computer Applications and 6.612, Computer Systems Engineering – wouldn’t be as heavy a workload as the subjects they replaced; particularly Computer Systems Engineering. That was intended as a fourth year Electrical Engineering subject; most of the students would be heavily into their final year thesis; so the intention was to have a slightly lighter workload in the other subjects.

I knew both of the lecturers; they were also in the Computer Networking class that Dr Thomas was teaching; they had told me last semester what they subject would be covering. In the computer applications unit; we would be covering computer simulation, including the ‘SIMULA’ language, and an introduction to the COBOL language. In computer systems engineering, as well as building on what had been covered previously in Digital Logic and Systems, we would be covering hardware design and microprogramming. All in all, they both looked like they would be interesting subjects.

I still had the same overall timetable, all afternoons free after 2:00 pm (except for Thursdays, when Economics went until 3 pm). Having the afternoons off allowed me to continue my practice of getting into the campus early (before 8:00), doing an hour’s study before my first lecture, and putting in a solid two hours of study each afternoon before riding home. That way the two evenings a week that we had scheduled for concerts and gigs around Sydney; promoting the new album and single didn’t affect my studies all that much.

We played pretty much every Wednesday and Thursday nights all through August; Selina’s, Bondi Lifesaver, Millers at Brighton as well as Manly Vale, Chequers Night Club on Goulburn Street, even the Antler at Narrabeen. It must have worked, ‘Erskineville Road’ / ‘Alice’s Sister’ reached number one on August 21st, displacing ‘Rivers of Babylon’, again, for only a week when ‘You’re the One That I Want’ rebounded for its second spell as the number one hit. Still, two number one hits from the album was pretty good.

We worked on some new songs, too; we needed to get some to record a new album around the start of summer. Mandy and Lori came up with words for another song, they called it ‘Window Shades’, all about a guy who sees his girlfriend cheating on him; with the images in silhouette on her window shades. Phil, Paul and Megan came up with a decent tune to suit. Meanwhile, Lori and I (but mainly Lori) worked on a new set of lyrics for that Japanese ballad ‘Sukiyaki’; ones which fitted the rhythm and phrasing of the music better. Meanwhile, some of us worked on the music, giving it a more up-tempo arrangement. It found it much easier singing the new lyrics; it wasn’t such a battle to get them fitting in with the flow of the music. Even I had managed to write a song; well, at least the music. It was still pretty rough, but it was a start. I’m sure all of us could whip it into something that would be worthwhile recording on our next album.

On the Monday of the week before the mid-semester break, after the Computer Networking class, Doctor Thomas asked me to stay back for a few minutes.

“You didn’t have anything important to get to this lunchtime, did you?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Come back to my office, I’d like to talk with you about a few things. Or, as we would say in the South, y’all come and visit with me.”

I laughed at his expression, I don’ think I had ever heard ‘visit’ used in that context. When we go to his office, I said hello to Michelle, and he invited me into his office, and we sat down on the two easy chairs to one side of his desk.

“I was just wondering how things are going in your Computer Applications class, what do you think of ‘Simula’ as a programming language?”

“Well, it’s an interesting programming language; quite different from anything else I’ve used. The syntax isn’t all that different from C, but the concepts are strange to me,” I said. “I guess I’m having trouble getting the concept of all this object-oriented stuff; how a variable can actually have program logic associated with it, as well as actual data.” I didn’t want to say that I found Doctor McMahon difficult to follow, and he really was pretty hopeless at explaining the fundamental concepts.

“Well, it’s been a while since I’ve actually programmed with that, but let me try to explain how all that stuff works,” he said. “Let me illustrate with an example, say we want to set up a variable type that defines a guitar, and also an individual string on a guitar. We might use a ‘struct’ in C; and we would have the following members for the guitar string, struct.”

He started writing some code on the blackboard; for the ‘guitar string’ struct, there were members for string material, thickness, open tuning frequency, string position (0 if not strung on a guitar) and a pointer to a ‘guitar’ struct that the string was installed on.

“We want that last value, because if the string isn’t installed, or strung onto a guitar, then we can’t do all that much with it. Don’t take my code as syntactically correct C or whatever; I tend to write my pseudocode in an amalgam of C, Algol, and whatever else seems appropriate. Now, what do we want for our ‘guitar’ struct?”

He wrote some more code; this time defining another type; a ‘guitar’ had data members including neck length, number of strings, and an array of ‘guitar string’ structs.

“There’s a bunch more things we could include, but that will suffice for the moment,” he said. “Does all that make sense; we have a variable type that has a bunch of values; let’s call them ‘properties’; so each instance of a ‘guitar’ type, or object, can have different properties. When we instantiate a new ‘guitar’, we can specify the values of each property; the neck length, number of strings, and so forth. Follow me? So you have two Stratocaster guitars in your possession, the red one and the black one, both have the same neck length, the same number of strings, but the red one is tuned to standard tuning, while your black one is tuned to open G. Does that make sense?”

I nodded; what he was talking about structs was nothing new to me; and his explanation of how when you actually created an instance of an object, you could set the properties specifically for that instance.

“Now, when we extend a struct to something we can call an ‘object’, as well as these properties, we can also include some program logic to manipulate that object in certain ways. Let’s call those ‘methods’, and they are the canonical way to interact with an object’s properties. For example, if we want to put a ‘guitar string’ on a ‘guitar’, we can have a ‘string’ method. Don’t confuse that with a string data type, okay? Now, the ‘string’ method when called on a particular ‘guitar string’ object will perform some logic checking; you will tell it what ‘guitar’ object we are using, and what string position we will use. Now, that string position must exist on that guitar; you can’t install a string on position six on a bass guitar, obviously, and that position can’t already have a string on it. Follow?”

Again, I nodded.

“Now, we can have other methods on our ‘guitar string’ object, like ‘tune’, to set the string to a certain frequency. Again, we don’t want to just set the open tuning frequency property for a guitar string directly; you can’t tune a string unless it’s fitted to a guitar, and based on the string length, thickness and material, there’s a range of notes that it can be tuned to. So by building that business logic into the method, you ensure that you’re not entering crap data.”

The way he explained things was so much more understandable than how it had been explained in class. He continued on.

“The other thing we can do with a string is pluck it; so the ‘pluck’ method is called on a string; we pass one parameter, the fret that will be used, and it will return a note; which is the frequency that will be sounded. Again, there’s some business logic; you can’t pluck a string that is still in its packet; it must be strung on a guitar. There’s probably some formula that will return the frequency based on the fret used and the open tuning frequency, so that calculation will be in the method.

“Now, let’s look at our ‘guitar’ object; a method we could have on this object is ‘strum’, where we play all strings. What we do is have logic in our strum method is to call each string object’s ‘pluck’ method in turn, and that will give us a list of notes played. The important thing to remember is to use an object’s method where it exists; don’t muck about with an object’s properties directly.

“There’s a whole lot more; you can have an object inheriting from another object; we might have an ‘electric guitar’ object that inherits from our basic ‘guitar’ class; it will have extra properties like number and type of pickups, volume and control settings, and so on. But we don’t have to respecify the guitar strings on our electric guitar object, the electric guitar object inherits all of the properties, all of the methods from its parent class.”

“All that makes sense,” I said. “The terminology is a little confusing, though.”

“Yeah, the way I remember is that a ‘class’ is the logical definition, that’s where we define the properties and methods. When we want to use an instance of that class, we ‘instantiate’ a class into an object. The object is the physical item; well, ‘physical’ to the point that it now exists in our program code, and we can interact with that object. ‘Properties’ are just another name for ‘variables’, and ‘methods’ are functions. A ‘constructor’ is a special method to create a new instance of an object, generally setting properties to initial values, which are often passed as parameters to the constructor. Clear?”

“Yes, that all makes much more sense now,” I said.

“I first came into contact with Simula several years ago; you remember Paulie Bagadonuts – I mean, Paul Campanale? He had developed a simple program written in Simula that we used to look at data throughput on the initial Arpanet design. We could look at link speeds, see where we might get traffic congestion, stuff like that. Each link was defined as an object, from our ‘datalink’ class; we had methods defined in that class. Now, that brings me to what I really wanted to talk to you about; have you decided what you want to do next year?”

“Well, I’ll be back here for my honours year,” I said.

“I knew that, but have you spoken to anyone about possible thesis topics yet?”

“No, I guess that happens after the final exams.”

“That’s when you have to choose,” he said. “You know they have extended my contract for next year?”

I nodded; we had heard it from Ros just the other day.

“Murray has given me a list of potential honours thesis topics, and there’s one that I think will be perfect for you; it’s developing a simulation model to analyse the performance and throughput of TCP/IP networks. Paul’s original program was all based around the original NCP protocol, now that we are moving towards TCP/IP as the base protocols, we need methods to look at and predict overall network throughput. We want to be able to see what the impact of changing various operational parameters; link speed, packet size, buffering; all under various network conditions, traffic load, link error rates, and so on. Here’s the proposed outline, what do you think?”

I quickly read the one page summary, it looked really interesting; pretty cutting edge stuff.

“That looks great; how do I sign up for it?” I said.

“Don’t worry about that, we’ll sort out all the paperwork, that’s why I’ve got Michelle here. I’ll mention to Murray that you’re interested in the network simulation topic; he’ll be pleased with that.”

“Thanks for explaining all that stuff on object oriented programming,” I said. “And that thesis project looks like it will be pretty interesting, it should be quite challenging.”

When I got home that evening, Mary Beth had the details for our trip to Melbourne over the mid-semester break.

“We’ve got six nights sorted out; Monday to Saturday,” she said. “The first two are at Dorset Gardens, then two nights at the Manhattan Hotel; we played both of them earlier this year, and it was a pretty good place. Now, Friday and Saturday nights, we’re playing the Myer Music Bowl.”

“Bloody Hell! That’s huge!” Phil said. “Is it just us, or...”

“We’re playing with AC/DC,” she said. “Equal billing, and the talk is that we close out the show with all of us playing together. Wednesday and Thursday afternoons we will be having a joint rehearsal, here’s a suggested list of some stuff we can play together.”

She handed copies of a sheet of paper to all of us; the list of possible joint songs included ‘TNT’, ‘Long Way to the Top’, ‘Midnight Hour’ and ‘Cold Hearted Woman’. If we could get them playing with us on all of those, it would be a pretty hot performance. I was pretty excited about performing with the guys from AC/DC; not just me on stage singing with them, but our group and their group playing together.

Because the final gig of the week would be on the Saturday night; and we had to be back in Sydney by first thing Monday morning; we couldn’t work out a way for some of us to take the Southern Aurora back to Sydney; since that wouldn’t arrive in Sydney until too late in the morning to make classes. There was the option of the daytime “Spirit of Progress’ or ‘Intercapital Daylight’, but the thought of spending twelve hours (or more) in the normal coach seating didn’t appeal to us; so we would travel back on the tour bus once we had packed up everything after the final concert.

Concerts in Melbourne

August 26th – September 3rd, 1978

After the Saturday night gig at Crystal, we loaded everything in to the tour truck, and the others put their personal gear in the bus, and they headed down the highway to Melbourne. Lori, Megan and I crashed in bed together, exhausted, and slept until quite late in the morning. After having a combined breakfast / lunch, we still had over six hours to kill before we had to be at Central for our night train to Melbourne.

“You know, most of the songs we’ve written are all about the angst of failed teenage romance,” Lori said. “Will, you need to see if you can come up with something different.”

“Me? You know I can’t write lyrics for shit!” I exclaimed.

“Maybe you’ll get some inspiration on the trip down,” Megan said. “You should put your little cassette recorder in your bag, just in case you come up with anything that sounds okay; we can get it on tape and play around with it some more.”

I was not all that convinced that I could come up with something even worthy of the rest of us hearing, let alone as a starting point for anything, but I kept my thoughts to myself.

“Maybe the train trip will give you some inspiration,” Lori said.

“Or maybe we can fuck some inspiration into him!” Megan exclaimed.

“He might prefer to fuck a nun on the train, like he did with Tracy that time coming back from Melbourne,” Lori said.

Lori’s comments did give me an inkling of an idea; a woman prostitute working her clients on the train. A few more ideas floated through my head, I would work more on them once we were on the train. After spending most of the afternoon in bed together, we headed down to Central, found our compartments, and settled in for the journey to Melbourne. After a nice meal in the dining car, we returned to the compartment, and all sat on the bunk.

“That rhythmic sound of the wheels on the track is quite hypnotic,” Lori said.

That gave me an idea; I took my acoustic guitar from the case, checked the tuning, and played a simple strumming pattern, mimicking the sounds of the wheels made on the tracks. It was a simple pattern, just the one chord, with a simple ragtime progression in the last bar; since I started in E, the final bar was E7, A7, D7 and G7. I played through the chords several times; humming along with a melody as I did.

“That’s pretty cool,” Lori said. “All we need are some words...”

“And a change up for the middle twelve,” Megan added. “Now we need to get it down on tape, where’s your cassette recorder?”

I passed her my little recorder, she put a cassette in, and nodded to me as she pressed the ‘record’ button. I played through my new tune several times, scat singing an improvise melody. By the time I had gone through the progression four times, it was starting to sound pretty good; still a long, long way from even being ready for playing at a gig.

“Now for some words ... did you have anything in mind, Will as you were singing?” Lori said.

“I guess I was thinking about that scenario that you had Tracy act out, the one that you turned into that short story,” I said. “Someone picking up a hooker on a train, but her intentions aren’t as honourable as the one in your story. I even had a tag line; something like ‘Fast Woman on a Slow Train’.”

“That’s a good line,” Lori said. “I guess this will be a song that tells a story.”

The three of us put our heads together, and first came up with the plot line for the song; the protagonist (Lori and Megan kept insisting it was me) hooks up with this woman in the bar of an overnight passenger train, has far too much to drink, and goes back to her compartment. Then instead of the wild train sex that he (I) was hoping for, she robs him (me), and he ends up without possessions dumped on a train station at the back of beyond, with the lights of the train disappearing down the track. It was slightly disconcerting hearing the relish in their voces as they described his (my) predicament.

At least it was a change from the usual songs we had written; as Lori had said, ‘the angst of failed teenage romance’. Although this was certainly about ‘failed romance’; it was quite different from our previous songs. By the time we decided we should get some sleep; we had the beginnings of what I thought was a good song. The train had just stopped at Goulburn; not to let passengers on or off, but for the catering crew to change over. We decided that Megan would share my bunk until the train paused at Wagga, then she would swap places with Lori.

There was something particularly sensual about being in bed with a woman on a sleeping bunk in a train; maybe a combination of the cramped spaces, meaning you had to lie extremely close together; or the rocking of the carriage, or the rhythmic sounds of the ‘clickety-clack’ of the wheels on the tracks. Whatever it was, making love with either Megan or Lori was usually particularly enjoyable, and this time was no exception. Megan and I were a little on the ‘vocal’ side; at one stage Lori swung her pillow down, telling us to keep it quiet so she could get some sleep. After our love-making session, we snuggled up in the narrow bunk; and fell asleep.

Lori woke us up as we pulled into the station at Wagga, to swap places with Megan.

“Now you can try to sleep while being serenaded by the sounds us of fucking,” she joked to Megan. “There’s going to be lots and lots of fucking; I’m really horny after hearing you two at it!’

Lori wasn’t wrong when she said she was horny; she rode me until she had come twice; then had me fuck her up against the compartment window. Finally, we curled up in the bunk, spooning, and I slept until the train stopped briefly in Albury. We decided to get cleaned up and have breakfast; then it was back to the compartment. We sat there; much like all the other times, naked, looking out of the window as the sun rose; and we could see the passing scenery. Eventually, we reached the outskirts of Melbourne; we got dressed, packed our cases, and were ready to depart as soon as the train reached the station. Again, we were in one of the front-most carriages, so we wouldn’t have far to walk.

Tracy was there waiting for us; she ran up and hugged all three of us.

“It’s so great to see you,” she said, in between kisses. “The others arrived fairly late last night, most of them were still asleep when I left. I thought I’d drive over, I haven’t had a chance to get some weekly transport passes for you yet.”

We piled into her car; and it didn’t take all that long to drive out of the city, and down St. Kilda road to the apartments. As she swung into the car park, I saw the truck and the tour bus both parked behind the building. We carried our cases up to our apartment; the four of us would be sharing one with Jillian and Allison; while the others were spread out across a further two apartments. With us all there, Mary Beth called a meeting, and went over the plans for the week.

“Okay, everyone, listen up,” she said. “We’ve got a pretty full-on week; tonight and tomorrow night we’re playing Dorset Gardens; Wednesday and Thursday at the Manhattan Hotel. We played them both back in February, so we know what the stage and all the facilities there are like. Now, there are some extras, too; late Tuesday morning, just before lunchtime, we’ve got an interview and filming at the ABC studios for this weekend’s ‘Countdown’; Molly wants to have all of us there. Then Thursday morning, we have our first rehearsal for the Music Bowl gig with AC/DC; that will be at Manhattan. Of course Friday and Saturday nights is the big outdoor event; apparently both nights are sold out. Any questions?”

Everything that Mary Beth said was pretty clear; it was going to be a rather busy week, but I was looking forward to the outdoor gigs with AC/DC. We then went over the set lists for the next four nights; it was pretty much the same as what we would normally play. After a quick lunch, we boarded the tour bus, and headed out to the eastern suburbs, and started setting up for the night’s gig. Once things were set up, we did a check of the sound and lighting, and decided everything was ready for the evening’s performance.

While we were sitting around having our dinner, Lori asked Tracy how her new role was going in ‘Cop Shop’.

“It’s a fun character to play,” she said. “I’m this naïve country girl; who grew up on a farm in rural Victoria; in fact my character is the first person in her family to move away from the country to the ‘big smoke’ in many generations. So there’s lots of teasing in the script about my innocent country ways; but actually it’s a lot of fun playing a ‘real Aussie’ for a change.”

“So, does that mean someone not from the country is a ‘fake Aussie’? I said. “What does where you live in Australia have to do with being a fair dinkum Aussie or not?”

“No, I wasn’t meaning that; it’s just an expression about those who grow up and live in the country, rather than the city. Just like people whose families have been in Australia for many generations, they are the ‘real Aussies’.”

“That’s not right!” Megan said. “I mean, how long your family have been in Australia has nothing to do with how ‘Australian’ you are. Does that mean Murph isn’t a real Aussie, because his parents came from Ireland? What about Lori, and Mary Beth? Surely, they are both Aussies?”

“No ... now you’re getting me all confused,” Tracy said, looking upset. “I’m not saying any of those aren’t Aussies; I mean, they speak the language properly, they are citizens ... they have our cultural values, they are no different from those of us who were born here.”

“By that definition, Rachel should be the ‘most Australian’ of the lot of us,” Lori said.

“But the Federal government didn’t consider Aboriginal Australians part of the country until the referendum in 1967,” I said. “And it wasn’t until the early 1970’s that the Whitlam Government finally ended the White Australia policy. Anyone, regardless of country of origin, can become an Australian Citizen.”

“The last thing this country needs is some artificial division on who is or isn’t truly ‘Australian’,” Megan said. “I think that most of the people who go on about how certain groups of people – like the Indochinese refugees – aren’t ‘real Aussies’ are just prejudiced against someone from another country, with a different culture and religion. That stinks!”

“I wasn’t saying that!” Tracy said. “Fuck, I was just making a simple comment about my role, about being a sweet country girl, and you’ve turned it into a major scandal. I should never had said anything.”

She looked pretty upset; so I decided not to say any more. Megan was about to say something, but I poked her leg under the table, looked at her, and shook my head slightly. She looked at me, and rolled her eyes. I had seen another side of Megan; I had never heard her fired up like that before; something must have set her off. At least the contentious discussion had finished; the last thing we needed was major disagreements between various people.

The gig went fairly well; the place was packed, which surprised me considering it was a Monday night. On the bus ride home, Megan sat on the seat next to Lori; which seemed a little strange, normally she and Tracy would have sat together. I said nothing, but took the empty seat next to Tracy, and we talked about the upcoming gigs and the ‘Countdown’ interview on the ride back to the apartments.

Once back, we got ready for bed; Lori and I undressed and had just got into our bed when we heard arguing and shouting from another room, and all of a sudden Megan burst into our room.

“I can’t sleep with her, not with how she’s going on!” she exclaimed. “Move over, make room for me.”

“What’s the problem?” Lori asked.

“Oh, it’s Tracy, and her attitude,” Megan answered. “I just can’t handle her, not with her comments, not at the moment.”

Lori wrapped her arms around Megan, and held her tightly against her. Megan started crying; deep sobs into Lori’s shoulder.

“Go and check on Tracy,” Lori whispered to me. “I’ll look after things here.”

I had no idea what to do; I was usually pretty hopeless in these sort of situations. But I couldn’t just lie there in bed, and ignore things. Tracy was sitting up in her bed; her face in her hands, crying.

“Hey, are you okay?” I said. Talk about leading with a dumb question; it was obvious to blind Freddy that things were not okay.

As I sat on the bed next to her, Tracy wrapped her arms around me, and sobbed against my chest. All I could do was just gently stroke her hair, patting her as if she was a cat. Better for me to shut up and not say anything more; I just held her and let her cry. After a few minutes, she released me, and moved away, wiping her eyes on the back of her hand.

“God, I’ve been such an idiot,” she said, sniffing. “All because I repeated that stupid line one of the assistant directors told me at the start of the filming. I never thought how insensitive it was; never realized that others, particularly Megan would misinterpret what I said.”

“I started it, making that dumb remark about country people and real Aussies,” I said. “I’m so sorry, and had I known what trouble me being a smart-arse would cause, I would have kept my bloody mouth shut.”

“No, I started it,” Tracy said. “I was just trying to be clever, repeating a comment that I had heard from someone else. You were right to call me out on it; and I should have accepted what you said, and just let things slide. But, no, I had to argue with everyone, just for the sake of arguing. Then I couldn’t back down, couldn’t say I was wrong. Now I’ve really upset Megan, all because I was too proud and stubborn. You all must hate me!”

She started crying again, her head pressed into my shoulder. This was going to be a tough problem to solve. Then I realized; I didn’t have to ‘solve’ anything; this was only something that Tracy and Megan could work out between them. All I needed to do; and should do, was to be there comforting Tracy. That was why Lori had sent me in here; just to comfort Tracy, while she comforted Megan. I held her as she sobbed her heart out.

Something must have happened to set Megan off; she was normally so easy going. But before she burst into the room with Lori and me I heard the two of them arguing; no screaming at each other. It didn’t seem right, that wasn’t the Megan that I thought I knew.

“I said some terrible things to her,” Tracy said. “After Megan told me that I was being an ignorant racist, I said she really didn’t understand, that she had grown up in a little bubble up in Mona Vale, away from real Australians, isolated from what people really think and feel. Then we started screaming more insults and really hurtful, abusive stuff at each other.

“I don’t understand why I did it; I mean, I love Megan more than anyone else; even you and Lori. I love both of you, but not as much as I love Megan. So why did I hurt her so much, when I’m meant to love her?”

“And what makes you think I would understand anything like that?” I replied. “I think because we know the people we love so well, we know what they are concerned about, we know what’s important to them, when we want to hurt them, we know how.”

“So what do I do now?” she asked. “Should I go in and apologise to her, tell her how sorry I am for everything I said?”