Author: Gene

I saw two movies on Saturday. I saw Silent Hill, because it’s based off a video game and because 8 wanted to see it, and I saw Underworld Evolution because it was free and sci-fi. Silent Hill I didn’t like much. I gave it a 4 or something on IMDB. It’s horror, and horror isn’t my thing. I did enjoy some of the gore and death, but there wasn’t enough to make the movie pleasant.

Underworld Evolution was decent. I gave it a 7. Cool fighting, not completely retarded plot, vampires give you extra points. It had the obligatory sex scene early on and in a more uh… in your face manner than is typical. I found it amusing, but I think they should have just left it out.

Just got back from a comedian act hosted by the Gay/Straight alliance club on campus. He was alright. I could be a stand up comedian.

Housing is on Thursday. I got my card in the mail today that says I get to register. Keston, John, Mike, Kennan and I have hatched a plan to try to get the Lead Lodge. It’s fairly sought after, but we have a decent shot. I’ve not actually been inside the place… but so what. If it works, that’ll be cool. I haven’t figured out my backup plan yet.

Mother is coming down on Thursday or Friday for mother’s weekend. Hopefully she’ll make my blender problems fix themselves. My uber blender is sick. 🙁

I won an eBay auction to buy a box of Hecatomb booster packs. 🙂 In other nerd news I found a program that supposedly allows me to LAN with people no matter where they are. If it works it would be prekky sw33t.

Today I noticed a thing I have not noticed before. Up on the wall next to my CS professor’s office are all the awards my schools teams won this year at various CS and math contests. One of them was a modeling competition, and there was a certificate or something in the middle that listed a bunch of information about the event. It said that 798 team were in the competition, and only 12 won the top award. The schools that won this award were, Harvard, MIT, UC Davis, Univeristy of Colorado Bolder, Duke, some Polytechnic, two Chinese Schools, and Carroll College of Montana. 😛

Carroll doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the bunch. I wonder if Adam knows anything about it. Adam is my friend from back in high school, but he’s bad at responding to e-mail, and I’m sure he doesn’t read this blog… so I’ll probably not know for a while if he knows anything about the c competition. He should though, apparently there are some math/programming geniuses at his school.

I also got the second highest grade in the class on my last math tests. I woulda had the highest but the professor took of 4 of 5 points on one question where I did a more complicated task than the one he asked for. Whatever. I dunno exactly what my grade will be, since he hasn’t announced the curve, but hopefully it’ll be about %110 :P.

In cognitive neuroscience news, the record for most foreign objects in a surviving brain was broken recently by a local Oregonian meth head. Edit: I found an article… it made it up on digg. 🙂 Here. He apparently tried to kill himself with a nail gun while on meth. He shot himself 8 times, reloaded the nail gun, and got 4 more nails in before he stopped. He arrived at the hospital complaining of a headache and with no knowledge of the event. All the nails were removed, only one was near anything fatal, and apparently he’s going to make a full recovery. The previous record was held by a Japanese man who attempted suicide with a nail gun. He only got 9 nails in his brain. I wish I could link the article, but I’m not finding it quickly enough.

Oh well, that’s all the news for now. There’s no internet at 8’s, so that sucks. I’ll not be able to finish up the London stuff… or post from there if I wanna.

Well, I’ve been having difficulty working out the kinks in my revolutionary new sorting algorithm. I don’t think it’s going to change the world. I might be able to make it work though, might even be more efficient than the others of the class. Is tricky though, and I think even if I get it to work it will take up more memory which will decrease it’s value. Still fun to think about though, for me anyway.

Went to a lecture on spectroscopy, which you would all know if you looked at my calendar. (Nobody is doing the calendar thing /tear) It was pretty cool. They have spectrometers now that can pick up 8 ions. 10 years ago the $750,000 ones only picked up 50,000 or something like that. They’re also getting really small and portable ones… like tri-corders. So drug smuggling is going to get really tricky in the next couple decades. It’ll be like all the cops in the nation being able to breathalize (is that how you spell breathalize?) you from 100 paces for every drug known to man. Good luck. There are about a million more interesting uses than that, but I figured my readers would be most interested in the drug smuggling tie in. 😛

Now I’ve caught up in my programming and such and I dunno what to do. 8’s gone house hunting or something, so I have no instruction until she gets back. Hence the title of this post. I guess I’ll surf INTERNET!!

I have no homework to speak of again today. Awesomez0rs.

I went and got my Easter candy mother. It came in a box big enough to hold an Xbox 360, which seemed excessive, although I will admit that all the candy made it in excellent condition. I have not cracked the seals yet.

I also got a ballot in the mail. For 39 cents I can help make Oregon schools less deplorable, at least one Oregon school. I’m gonna do it, but I can’t today. I have to buy a 2 cent stamp at the mail place, which means it has to be open. Curse them.

I could also vote for various local positions. One of which is a supreme court judge position. A guy named Eugene (Gene) is running. I was thinking of voting for him based solely on his name… but I didn’t. I dunno anything about anyone running so I’m going to abstain I think. I don’t care enough to do research. 😛

I’ve been fiddling around with google calendar. I find it intriguing. I think it could be very useful, especially if anyone besides me puts stuff on their calendars. Then I would know where my friends are in class or doing something, and I would know when they had huge junks of free time available to devote to entertaining me. Most of you readers I’ve already invited to be able to view my calendar, but if you didn’t get an invite and you’d like one, just ask.

Game night tonight. Wee!

Let me tell you the story of excitement of yesterday. It’s not that exciting, especially not for you, the reader, but that’s beside the point.

I woke up and went to class at 11:00. I only got about 7 hours of sleep the night before though on account of the LAN on Saturday that kept me up to 7:30 am and messed up my sleep schedule. It wasn’t too bad though because I forced myself to get out of bed by 1. My roommate stayed asleep until 6, and had to pull an all nighter to get back to regular sleeping. That worked out ok for him though, so whatever.

Anyway, I went to class and check my e-mail because I’m a bit early and I get an interesting piece of information. My meeting with the professor I’m reading The Physiology of Excitable Cells with is moved back to today, which last night was the only day it couldn’t possibly be. This kinda sucks because I hadn’t done the reading yet, on account of up until Sunday I thought we were settled on meeting on Friday. So I had 3 hours and 40 minutes to read a chapter of this heavy book, 3 hours of which I was going to spend in class.

The next e-mail said Calculus was cancelled. So that was fortuitous. No math meant only 2 hours of my reading time would be spent in class. I had a glimmer of hope.

At this point my CS professor arrived and I spent my time making up sorting algorithms. At the end of class he told me, upon me asking, that I should submit any changes to the program that had been due Friday that I’d made over the weekend. I had to do it by 4:30 though, which meant I’d have to get all of that stuff together within an hour of being done with my meeting with the book professor, assuming we didn’t run long as we typically do.

I didn’t have time to worry about that though. I had to read. I didn’t even leave the CS lab, I just started reading. I read furiously, and almost finished the chapter in 35 minutes… I was looking at the clock which caused me to pause and think, and upon thought realized that the stuff I was reading had little to do with what the chapter I was supposed to be reading was about. I checked and I was in fact reading the chapter after the one I was supposed to be reading. Being the well adjusted guy I am, and just slapped my forehead and started up my furious reading again.

Before I got very far I was interrupted by a class coming into the CS lab. I checked my e-mail before I left to find that I was expected to attend an Activities Council meeting to discuss the funds I had requested, 3:30. I thought I wasn’t going to have to go to the meeting because they hadn’t e-mailed me over the weekend, and at the time I submitted my proposal, I thought I would be able to go, since my physiology meeting was going to be on Friday. As it was I had to find a representative to go. So I IM’d Keston and Kait, but didn’t get a response in five seconds so I decided to worry about it later.

I left the CS lab and went to where my Calculus class would have been meeting to have a quiet place to finish the chapter. I finished in with 45 minutes until my cog neuro class, so I headed back to the CS lab.

There I got all my updated program stuff together and printed, and got Keston to go to the Activities Council meeting. Actually, got Kait to get Keston to go. This took about 40 minutes so I had to rush to cog neuro class.

My cog neuro professor was late, so I spent the time reading the text that went with the figures in that chapter I had so hastily read.

Cog neuro happened, and then my meeting with physiology guy. Both went swimmingly well. I ate some chocolate.

After my meeting with the physiology guy, which got out promptly at 4, I went to the Registrar’s office, just to check, since they close at 3:30, on my way to pick up a check request form to get reimbursed for club spending. By some strange miracle the registrars were still working, so I’m officially registered for all those classes I talked about in my last update.

I then went and got my check request form and headed back home. Once home I burned a CD with the program I needed to turn in in 15 minutes, and talked to Kait. I found out she wanted some cake pans she’d left at my place forever, but that she didn’t want them for about thirty minutes so I had to preoccupy myself.

So I took the pans, and my books, down to the place where they keep our mail. I checked my mail, and got some candy (not the Easter candy mom, they close the mail package receiving thing at 4, so that’s still my to-do list) and did my cog neuro reading that will be over what we’re covering on Wednesday.

Then I filled out my check request form, turned it in to the ASLC people, and went to Kait’s. I gave her her cake pans and made a sandwich. Everything done by 5:30. I’ve got no homework to speak of, and no chores. It was pretty sweet. I was going to update the blog then, but my computer was difficult to reach, so I’ve waited until now.

I cut my left pointer finger yesterday when I was preparing strawberries for consumption and yet I still managed to type this huge thing. I’m some sort of warrior class nerd, I guess.

Hecatomb ftw.

This just in, one brother killed another in a fight they got into over a video game down in Nagasaki where the fellas chew tobacci and the women willi wakki woo.

As you may or may not have noticed, my presence on this blog has been zero in the past several days. Part of the reason for this is that I’ve been waiting to post to tell everyone what I classes I registered for. The larger part is probably that I’ve been pretty busy.

I still haven’t officially registered for all my classes yet. I’m official in Molecular Cell Biology and Introduction to Statistics. Stats is pretty much just something to take that I think my be useful, and I’m actually considering dropping it, but I dunno. Molecular Cell Biology is a nice class I guess. It goes towards my major, but I think it’s going to be pretty hard and it definitely is taking up a lot of time (2 labs a week).

I’m also going to take Evolution and Algorithms and Data Structures. I’ve got a slip of paper that says I can get added into these classes, although the Registrar doesn’t know this yet, so it’s not official. I tried to turn in my paper a couple of times but they foiled me by being inflexible and stupid. I think they’ll be out of excuses by Monday though.

Evolution I absolutely must take to graduate next year, so that’s that. Algorithms and Data Structures is the only CS class next year that is isn’t conflicted with Evolution or MCB. It has a corequisit that I’m having waved, so it might be difficult, and I might drop it. I think it will be useful information though, so I’m going to at least try it I think.

Moving past my registration issues we have my current class issues. Today I had a 10 page research paper due in Cognitive Neuroscience, a test in Calculus, and the biggest program I’ve ever had to write by far in CS. Paper is meh, the test went ok, I dunno, we’ll see. I almost got the program done. Frankly I think I did a lot more work than most people in the class. However, there are some congenital flaws in my program which prevents it from performing all the required functions. I told the professor I’d try to fix that over the weekend, and he’ll probably give me some credit for any success I have.

Part of the reason I have these flaws in my program is I’ve never written a program of this scale before. I think a large part however is that I tried to start the program before I had all the information, at the professors encouraging. So I’d already laid ground work in the program before I new what it was going to have to ultimately look like, and I certainly hadn’t learned all the planning skills they’ve taught me since. Oh well. Regardless of my grade I will now have a deeper understanding of the importance of program planning.

So I’ve been working on all of that stuff for the last few days. Today after I finished programming, and went to 8’s and found her missing, I returned to my place to find a ride to the card store in Salem to be available. I’d never been but went and it was swell. I bought a starter pack for a game that’s new to me and everyone I know, called Hecatomb. It’s similar to magic, but cooler. 😛 I also picked up Guillotine for LRPC, so it was a somewhat officially productive trip. We got back later than I expected, but 8 made plans, so she didn’t care. So since then I’ve been playing Hecatomb w/ my roommates and having glorious fun.

Tomorrow I hope to do some of that programming I mentioned above. Even better would be D&D, but I think our DM is busy for some reason. I have some small other homework I will do as well maybe. There’s also a free showing of Transamerica, which is a movie I know nothing about but which 8 wishes to see, so I’ll go. In lieu of that there’s the LAN at Ody’s to entertain me. That would probably be too much entertainment anyway.

8 is still missing. I might have to sleep w/o saying good night. 😛

I register for classes at 5 o’clock tomorrow. I think I’m going to take Evolution, Molecular Cell Biology, and Statistics. Only thirteen credits, but since I have to take Evolution, and I really should be Molecular Cell Biology, most other things are conflicted. Including all computer science classes. /cry Statistics will probably be tedious, but it will be useful. Evolution will be pretty easy but will require writing. MCB will be hard and take tons of time. Labs twice a week. 😛 What can ya do? This schedule means that over Jan term and the next semester I have to take Genetics, Senior Seminar, two credits of arts, and 3 other random credits. Pretty easy, pretty good.

The LAN was pretty good. Played some new games… got UT2k4 which is cool. We played some UT original and I managed to be the second best playing. 🙂 Played some DotA and a bunch of weird StarCraft games I’ve never played before.

Since then I’ve done my math homework and made a new Eberron character. He’s a shifter ranger. He’s pretty cool.

Jess, 8’s friend, is here randomly. Maybe I’ll make him draw my shifter.

1-25-06

Modern

Today started after class that is, with a short break. I spent it reading a celtic folktale to Mike and torturing him w/ it. He was playing on his computer.

Then we had lunch at the George Inn. I ate too much. I got some of the girls’ food. I thought it was quite good.

We had a tour of the Globe Theater. Blah blah blah. It was sorta cool and all, but the main thing I like about theater is the plays. Actors kinda irritate me.

The Tate modern was then inspected. I think I understood some of the art in there, which is fairly scary, but mostly it was just random. Some cool stuff though. I saw a couple of pictures of sculptures made of cigarettes that look neat.

After the Tate I hung out with Kait and Dimitri. We explored a bit but mostly just ate and talked.

Johnny English is on. Silly.

1-24-06

“That misery does not make all virtuous, experience too certainly informs us; but it is no less certain that of what virtue there is, misery produces far the greater part. Physical evil may be therefore endured with patience, since it is the cause of moral good; and patience itself is one virtue by which we are prepared for that state in which evil shall be no more.”

-Samuel Johnson, Idler No. 89

Paradoxical. Misery/evil makes virtue, yet heaven has no evil and therefore no virtue. Maybe that’s the purpose of Earth.

States earlier that youths are forced into religion before their minds are well formed but doesn’t question its validity. Maybe that’s a different essay.

I don’t think many of the girls got Rambler No. 18.

The Tower of London was pretty cool. I like castles. Saw a cool tour guide guy, he was funny. So were the guards. They were marching and some people weren’t getting out of their way fast enough so one yelled, “Make way for the guard”. It was cool.

Kait and the creative writers were found. We ate all you can eat pizza and then played cards. Good times.

Official CS LAN party tomorrow. 8 plans not to go. Have to register for classes on Monday. I don’t know what I’m going to take yet. I’ll let you all know. 😛

Students harass teachers – Aftenposten.no

I think I did pretty well on that test btw.

Got denied one of my internships… which doesn’t bode well for a “productive” summer. Still another one, and if not that there’s a lot of games I need to catch up on. 🙂

There’s a CS club LAN this Friday. Could be cool. I hope so. I’m going.

Test in cog neuro tomorrow.

Guess that is all.

Oh yeah, and I hate those huge sunglasses all the girls are wearing these days. They look like bugs. Cease and desist females.