It’s been an auspicious day for my nerdy cs friends. Paul just informed me that he is The Guy, apparently having defeated the 8 bosses of I Wanna Be The Guy. Quite the achievement. Give the game a try if you don’t believe me.
Also, Liam is apparently now the owner of a Bag of Crap, so congratulations on your purchase, I wish you the best of luck.
I have a test in about 7 hours in Operating Systems. I’m not feeling very prepared, but it’s a Boris test so that’s standard.
I’ve been having trouble meeting my push-up quota the last few days. I don’t really know what I’m gonna do about it.
I got an A+ on my ethics case studies. I’d like to take a moment to thank all of those who wrote in and contributed to my success.
*clears throat*
Thank you all very much.
You guys are watching all the TED talks, yeah? Well, I specifically recommend this one. Pretty concisely says lots of stuff I agree with.
I’ve not had a big update post in a while, but that’s because I’ve been busy having things to do. Let me explain.
Mom came to visit. Well, not really. She came to see Tyler and Danny, and band, play. She brought my PS3 and bought me PoP and LBP, so I’ve had new games to play in my free time. PS3 is getting quite a bit of love. LBP is a good game for my crowd here. Lauren and I have beaten the main story. The gang sorta paired off since I only have two controllers. Anyway, we’re working on getting all the items still, which will take a while. We explored some player made content today, which was pretty neat.
Ok, besides that, I also had a big 481 paper and presentation on Friday we were working on all week. Well, really just Wednesday and Thursday. We were busy working on the actual project for 481 on the other days.
Immediately after my presentation I went to Elisabeth’s with her and 7 other people. Like, immediately. I was still wearing that ridiculous get up they make us wear for presentations. So, we did a lot of hanging out and whatnot at Elisabeth’s. The guys, Hiro, Yusuke, myself, and Dan, played basketball.
On Valentine’s day each gender made food for the other. We male’s got fish, since there’s a female veggie, and a couple other fish haters, and they chose stuffed peppers for us to make them. In the end the division of labor was a little fuzzy, and there was quite a bit of sharing, but it was a very fancy occassion. We had candles, and the sparkling cider, and fancy plates, and suits and ties and dresses and all that good stuff. After that we went hot tubbing. After that we males did pushups. Then we watched Star Wars Episode IV. Kinda, there were two people who watched it, and everyone else kinda watched or slept or goofed off.
There was also some incidental shopping and driving around during the Elisabeth visit. And we all went and saw some children’s musical for some reason. Elisabeth’s mom got us in for free. Put on by homeschoolers, in like a church. Yeah. Whatever.
So, that’s pretty much the gist of what’s happened. Had today off cause it’s a national holiday and all that. School soon, though. Rest of the time for me here at Central is going to be quite busy, I think, so if I dissapear from the blogosphere for a month or so, pity is the appropriate response.
I haven’t updated in a while for a couple reasons. Probably the most important is that I’ve been busy. We had a giant paper due for that capstone class I have, and I also had some programming assignments due in my other classes. I was very productive during the beginning of this week so I’m a bit ahead now, although I still have much on the horizon. The other reason is that my internet is so atrociously slow back in the dorm that I can’t seem to load all the WordPress stuff I need to make a new post. Sad, ain’t it.
So what’s been happening? I wrote a genetic algorithm. It’s really simple, just supposed to optimize a two variable algebraic inequality, but it’s still cool, imho. I had a bug that flummoxed me for several hours until I got Keston to look at it. He fixed it in like 5 minutes. So, kudos to him. I tried to make it general, and some of that kinda went by the wayside when I hit the bugs and the deadline, but I’m hoping it’s close and can be easily adapted for alternative projects.
Lauren, keeper of the Netflix queue, has realized that I’m leaving soon, never to complain about their movie selections again, so she’s bumped up all the movies I’ve been suggesting over the year. So we watched Equilibrium, The Professional, and soon Airplane. Elisabeth and Sidney opted out of The Professional, which was stupid of them. I’m very disappointed. I was a little nervous I wouldn’t like it as much as I remembered, but I still stand by my 10 star rating on IMDB.
Funny coincidence, The Totally Rad Show that was released two days after we watched it had The Professional as their recommended Netflix rental, and Dan said he thought it was a flawless movie. I don’t really agree with Dan’s movie taste in a lot of ways, but we’re together on that one. Anyway, the point is, Sidney and Elisabeth are dumb for missing it, and I don’t forgive them. And anyone who doesn’t like that movie… well, I’ve never heard of such a thing, so please explain yourself.
Pat didn’t come visit me, cause he a sucka foo, or something. I didn’t get him anything for his bday, though, so we’ll call it even.
Helen Marie Havnaer is my friend on facebook now. You guys remember her? From camp that one year when I was like 12? /shurg Well, I do.
Tomorrow Tyler‘s band is going to play on campus. Mom’s coming to see him, and I’ll go. Hopefully I can get others to go.
There’s more, but I guess they’re the subject of different posts.
My site was down for a day or two a day or two ago. I trust you all survived.
Work is slowly encroaching in on me from all sides. I can feel it coming. It will crush me and drive any will to get a job from me before I graduate. Send your condolences and cash to my parents.
The gang only plays D&D for like 2 or 3 hours at a time. I dunno if they get into grooves that way. It doesn’t seem to groove right, exactly. I need that groove to improve my DMing. /sigh Still, at least they play, which is more than can be said for the game I’m in.
Perhaps on a related note, Pat’s grandpa died. Pat’s making the trek back up from Vegas, consequently. That is all I know on the subject, but I imagine Pat’s sad to some degree. So… sux0r.
Finished the first book of Dune. Not the actual book, the book within a book. You know how they divide books into books sometimes. I’m at the part where Paul attains a higher consciousness or whatever. Prekky sweet.
It was snowing outside. ForcastFox says it will some more. Right now we’ve got a slight covering, is all.
Today I swim, and shave, and shower, and various other words that start with S. Step, shimmy, shake, swallow, scramble, shamble, stagger, scamper, salivate, sashay, skip, start, succumb, stop, stroak, shed, scratch, slurp, snap, sniff, sneer, smile, slouch, slur, slump, shoot, splash, stride, strafe, sing, and possibly sneeze. But, first, sleep… snooze, snore, slumber.
Personal: I’ve implemented a new comment system. It should be all fancy and stuff. I primarily did it so you guys could comment using your facebook as a login as opposed to registering for something new. Hope ya’ll enjoy it.
Science: This is cool. Just so you know, generally advances don’t come in 8 orders of magnitude steps.
Politics: Obama has a digg type system for making policy recommendations. People can submit proposals, and vote on them, the most highly rated ones will be given in some big book to the President for consideration. Who knows what that means but I voted up this proposal because it’s a good pro science anti nonsense proposal. You should vote it up, too.
Charity: Freerice is onto my little game and has reduced the rice reward for answering questions with fewer options. So, now I’m down to my old rate of donation again. 🙁
Entertainment: I listened to all the Stephen Fry podgrams. He’s got quite the vocal and rhetorical skill. I think he pretty much played himself in V for Vendetta.
Fitness: I have been on push-up hiatus due to a mysterious abdominal injury. It seems to have healed now, though. So today I did push-ups on my new swivel devices. They make things significantly more difficult. They, combined with degradation from my inactivity, take my count down to 40. So that’s where I’m starting. I plan to attempt to climb back up to 100 in 2 months. We’ll see how feasible that pace is with these contraptions.
Conclusion: I’ve stayed up to see the sunrise. It’s really not my fault. The internet was so slow as to necessitate it. If any of you Central people read this it’s ok to bang on my door around 1:30 if you want. Extra sleep won’t kill me, I guess.
I even woke up early to do so. Pretty big sacrafice and all. I’m cool. The lady recognized me from last time. Also, I got an e-mail today from the Red Cross reminding me I’m eligible to donate again today.
The way they had it set up this time you had to get ur number and sign in and read the little packet of info outside the main room. When I was turning in the packet and getting my number a girl started to walk out the donation room, stopped, leaned against the doorframe, and then passed out. It was pretty funny. She came back when I was eating cookies saying she through up and wanted to get checked out to see if something was wrong or something. She had a test or something. /shrug I think she could just wear the sticker and remind the professor to be nice.
The I gave myself a bit more than an hour to donate and only needed 30 minutes. I only had about 5 minutes of waiting around time. Actual donation time 5 minutes. My bag of blood fell of it’s little hook onto the floor. I’ve never seen that before.
Only other blood related event of note was that they missed my vein and had to dig around a bit. I should just tell them which of my veins are all slippery and stuff, but it’s kinda funny to watch them struggle.
Also, I donated alongside Megan. She was ahead of me a bit so we couldn’t race.
That is all.
Free weekend had I. No homework really, yet. Played D&D, thought about D&D, worked on D&D, read about D&D, watched movies about D&D… my 5 favorite things. Well, not quite really, since by played I mean DM’d, but DMing is quite fun in my current situation, as well. The gang leveled and thought they were going to defeat their arch nemesis, but were tricked by my clever placement of a different human in the dungeon. :0
A bunch of us went swimming today. Consequentially, I took a shower. Strange happening was noticed recently. It is pictured below. There’s not a lot to see, but some of you still might not get it. See if you can see what troubles me.
I’ll leave you all to puzzle over that. Or at least, I think I will. Probably totally obvious to everyone and it’s only I that would never notice if it weren’t for it being me. /shrug
Also, listen to Stephen Fry’s podcast thing. It’s good. I’ve only listened to the most recent one, on language and grammar, but I suggest you check it out. Especially you linguists out there (Donny).
I’m sure work will commence in earnest soon. Boy how I’m looking forward to that.
Came back to Central yesterday. Was pretty good times. Had 5 girls in my room before I even got my stuff unpacked. Yusuke gave me a mug from Vegas. Consequentially, I drank 3 cups of hot chocolate when we watched Dark Knight.
I’m postponing my plan of eating only 2 of 3 days until I graduate. The people around here provide me too much free food.
So today was supposed to be my first day of classes but they both were cancelled. I still sat in the labs for 4 hours cause they didn’t bother to e-mail us. It’s ok. They’re the classes where the class part doesn’t actually matter anyway.
Didn’t ski on Thursday or Friday. Thursday the wind was very bad and only a couple lifts were open. Friday was pretty much the same, but we went up anyway to check it out. They told us they were definitely only gonna have a couple lifts open and nothing else would open up. When we went home and checked they had opened the main lift, though. So perhaps we shoulda stayed. I think we made the correct decision with the data presented, though.
Besides, because we didn’t go skiing that day, Pat and I went with Mrs. Anthony to do some cross country skiing by the river. I went with my normal skies. It was an ice sheet and not very fun for anyone, although I got a bit of a thrill from using downhill skis to cross country ski on an ice sheet. Plus, it was good cardio.
We also saw The Spirit. Not sure normal people would like it very much. I thought it was pretty good. It’s like hyper-noir or something. Not easy to explain. Definitely some highly enjoyable characters and lines and stuff. /shrug
Besides that there was lots of hot tubing and eating and WoWing. Hot tubs are good. Food is good. WoW is good.
We weren’t really planning on skiing on the day we drove home, but we changed those plans and went up early. Everything was open and everyone was there. The lines were pretty annoying, but the conditions were excellent. The end of the day I was on my own and went over to the back chairs, which they opened at mid-day and which had been closed for several days. It was great fun. Top had like a foot of smooth powder, and at the bottom are these crazy cat tracks that I barreled down so fast I got air on some of the little hills. Went off some jumps, went through the trees, went outside the ski park boundaries. It was glorious.
Beginning of the day I ran over Hannah. Other than that it was pretty fun.
Definitely was a good trip.
Oh, and my arms got better. Eventually.