Category: high school

The Otaku Alliance

I bring you a dual-media post, containing both a podcast as well as a post! This is Paul-style, with music and even a rip-off of his introduction! I tried to add some crazy effects to the introduction, but all I could do was make it echo, or change the pitch. Neither were what I wanted. Anyways, I had to chop this one up a lot, so there are some obvious changes in tone and inflection occasionally. Not intended (except for in the beginning).

#6 – “X3 Sucked”

Muzak – “Answers” by Vigilante, “The Price is Right Techno Remix” by a guy on YTMND.

As noted within the podcast, #5 was fully produced, but came out with large technical issues. If you’re so inclined, you can listen to it, but it’s pretty messed up. I reused some (a lot) of the content from #5 for #6, so that will make it even less interesting. I actually liked #5 a lot more than #6, but you can’t reproduce this stuff at will. Anyways, I can see you’re all desperate to procastinate, so, here you go.

#5 – “Super Deciding Banana Antics”

Anyways. I suppose I enjoyed my weekend – I have something of a tan from all the mowing. Speaking of which, I now have 6 customers, resulting in 80 bucks for every round of mowing I do. Not bad, although with all this mowing I’m gonna have to pay for the blade sharpening and the gas (I haven’t had to before). Non-taxable, though. I’m still gonna apply at Greenstar, since I don’t want to rely on such a varied resource for my income. It’s nice having money again, though. Nothing makes me feel more out of place than having people pay for me. It’s also nice to be able to get people presents on their birthdays.

Speaking of which, I went and saw X3 with Christopher on Saturday, as a pseudo-birthday present for him. I’m assuming most of you now realize that the title for Podcast #6 was a complete lie – I just wanted to proudly state that it sucked hard. Way, way hard. They completely overused Wolverine/Hugh Jackman, and gave him the worst dialogue heard in a movie since Star Wars (“It’s a trap!”). Motivational speeches, TWO references to the title of the movie, and one-liners abound, attached to one of the most disorganized and improbable plots I’ve seen in a while, with mediocre production qualities (did they really need a 1/3 scale model of the golden gate bridge?), and total abandonment of the X-Men canon (Jean never killed any essential characters), combined for a truly terrible move. Christopher and I laughed about it the whole way home.

Soon after, Paul and Karen rescued me from certain doom, and we went to see Thank You For Smoking, which was still quite good the second time. Afterwards we realized that no Chinese places were open at 11:30 PM, so we went to Wegman’s. Now, I was way confused – I thought we were actually looking for food, but we ended up in the candy section, and somehow, I ended up with 1.5 lbs of gummy bears and 3 boxes of Pocky (note this for later). Likewise, Paul was assailed by dozens of feet of licorice, and we managed to escape with our lives, and even a little money.

In all honesty, though, I was confused as to why we were strolling the empty deli section, as well as to why Karen was buying some of the nastiest salmon I’ve ever tasted, until I realized that I was actually buying my dinner. I remained confused when we just sat down and ate it in the car – perhaps I’m just silly, but the car seemed awfully lacking in convenience and an atmosphere conducive to eating. But hey, I shouldn’t be complaining.

In other news, I think I’m turning into an otaku or japanophile or something. I’ve started searching for more anime, and I’m patiently waiting as 6 more download (ever so slowly). I’ve been thinking about taking up learning Japanese, too – I don’t know exactly where I could learn around here, but I think it’d be totally sweet. I don’t want to turn into Steven Segal or something, but Japan in general just fascinates me. Four large alphabets sounds somewhat scary, though. Although, I suppose I already know the romaji, so it’s more like three. Except, you know, the kanji has like 2000 characters worth knowing.

I also found the the ultimate get-rich-quick scheme that I developed while mowing today.

  1. Wait for a controversial or “anti-Christian” film, book, or song/album to come out. The target must be fairly popular.
  2. Write a book addressing this piece of media. The title must include the name of the said media. In this book, “prove” that the media’s focus is wrong. Place images from the said media onto the cover of the book.
  3. ?????
  4. Profit!

Seriously, there’s like half a dozen or more books on Amazon focused on “debunking” The Da Vinci code. It’s insanity. Who cares? Is boycotting or disproving the movie doing anything for the cause of Christ? Why not take the 30 bucks you spent buying that book, and give it to someone who actually needs it? These authors are literally living off of the laziness of those who are unwilling to go research this stuff on their own. You don’t need super awesome laser technology with your lollornets and roflcology, you need common sense.

The movie apparantly sucks anyways.

Freakin’ Lasers!

Since I actually do need to go do that paper that I didn’t do two nights ago, I will again keep this short. I did another podcast, and this time I didn’t actually get the whole thing in one take, so I had to splice it together a little bit. I wasn’t actually able to notice the breaks, so I don’t think it will end up being a problem. It’s getting a lot easier to do these as I learn the program, though.

Podcast 4 (4:30) – “Snakes on a Comic Book”

Yes, I’m giving these titles now. I think it enhances the experience. Oh, and here’s the picture I was referencing.

This is not a Brothel

I’ve been increasingly frustrated lately over the fact that if I write something that I actually, truly care about, it is guaranteed that at least one, and probably two people will say they didn’t read it and/or don’t care. I don’t understand this – if you don’t care, then I don’t care to hear about how you don’t care. Seriously. It’s just obnoxious and, in the end, really just angering when people tell me they don’t care, when I never asked them to in the first place. Yes, I like it a lot when people read what I write, and it like it even more when people respond and discuss what I write. I know I can’t get you to be interested in everything that I am, but at least let me try?

A good example here would be if I wrote about the fundamental differences in the combat engine and character development between Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy IX, and what Square-Enix has to do to maintain the proper formula in the future without abandoning the basic idea of the TBC RPG. I can predict the following: Paul would probably respond by saying the FF7 sucked, but then continue to comment on what I wrote. An acceptable response. Someone else would say he stopped reading after the first paragraph. Someone else would say he never played FF7, and someone else would say he hated FF7 and/or FF9, with nothing else to add to the conversation. Someone else would say I have no life, and she would be right. And Ryan would probably leave some gem of wit, unrelated to the topic, and yet hilarious. Also acceptable.

I can handle getting fewer than ten comments on any given post, but if you look at each of those comments, not many actually stimulated true discussion of any kind. The actual number of comments lies somewhere between zero and two. I look at blog posts much the same way I look at books. Say you read the first chapter of a book, and you don’t like it. Do you proceed to write the author about the fact that you didn’t read his/her book because the first chapter sucked? Or do you write the author about how you didn’t read the book because it wasn’t about a topic you were interested in? Probably not.

Now, you might write the author after reading the whole book to disagree, or to critique the content or writing, or something. You might even go talk about the book with your peers, discussing its finer points or debating whether or not it sucked. Bottom line, you don’t actually talk about the book unless you actually have something to say. That’s what I’m asking for here.

That said, I’ve been considering a number of things. How about podcasts? Podcasts, as in, me, talking about something for 5 minutes, and then sharing it for you to hear. I thought this would be a fun thing to do, but, I won’t bother if everyone says no. Podcasts are fairly easy to do, so it’s not a question of effort. My bandwidth is large enough to support this, especially considering that the mp3s would be, at most, 3 or 4 MB.

I’ve also been considering starting a totally separate blog to talk about games and whatnot. Honestly, I’d love nothing more than to talk about games all the time to you, but as said before, I can’t get you to care. Alternatively, I could just post anyways and you could not read them. That, however, seems like it degrades the overall quality of the content here, mixes things up too much.

Finally, I will revamp the design eventually. I’m getting way bored of the current look, and you can be assured that things will change. It might happen soon, it might not. I’ve technically got a lot of work to do to catch up from being sick, but then again, I’ve stopped caring about school again. It’s all up in the air.

And I promise, I will post about Oblivion. Just not yet.

Of Cinematic Proportions

So, a weird thing happened to me today. I woke up miserable and coughing out the wazoo, and the chloraseptic (spray that numbs the throat) stopped working, so I resigned to chugging a whole bottle of Gatorade (and by chuigging, I mean sipping on continuously). Every time I swallowed, the resident sharp pain in the back of my throat moved down a few inches, until it was pinned down to my stomach, where it then converted itself into one of the worst cases of gas I’ve ever had. I’d like to think that I actually had a small alien living in my throat. One that just happened to have a weakness towards Gatorade (quick, I’m thinking of a movie!). Which would make for a very thrilling story to tell.

I won’t be in school tomorrow, but hopefully Tuesday I will.

For Honour

I’ve got a fever, of 103.0, and the only prescription is more cowbell!

Including but not limited to Tylenol and Benadryl.

With what first seemed to be an allergic reaction to the pollen count of today and yesterday, the inexplicable feeling of being sunburned all over, and yet being very cold, this massive fever, and
having sore joints, it is quite possible that I am not allergic. We shall find out in a matter of days.

This comes at a bad time, too.

On second thought, I don’t think I can keep writing. I’m kind of getting really fuzzy every few seconds. Sorry.

[edit]

So, it’s not allergies. It’s most likely some virus, but the symptoms keep changing. I’ve started throwing up the Robitussin, so I have to spray this stuff to numb the back of my throat so I can eat frozen stuff. The fever’s gone, along with the headaches and dizziness, but the codeine the doctor gave me isn’t working, and I can’t eat or drink without the numbing stuff because it hurts too much to swallow. I haven’t really gotten any sleep for the past two nights, first because of the fever, and now because of the dehydration and coughing. I keep waking up with really bad chills. I also can’t talk (literally).

This is not fun.

[/edit]

Cliche, Sir

Finalized schedule for next year:

1. AP Human Geography
2. AP Statistics
3. AP Lang
4. Precalculus AB
5a. Graphic Tech / 5b. Fractals & Chaos
6a. Government / 6b. Economics
7a. PE / 7b. FreePeriod
8. Free Period

I’m taking health over the summer (5 weeks FTW!).

Controlled Explosions

Sticking with the two-word titles, I’ve some interesting things to report. Apparantly wireless keyboards are, in fact, inferior. I’m typing on a different keyboard at the moment, so, any errors are obviously not my fault.

I hadn’t really noticed before, but when the gang came over (we dress in blue shirts and white khakis! we’re white! we make potato guns!), Nolan played some Stepmania. For those of you that do not know, Stepmania is akin to Guitar Hero or DDR, but on a keyboard, on a computer (any OS). I know all of you know what those are, so basically it’s just hitting arrows in time to music. The songs on SM are infinitely harder (and cooler) than anything you’ll find in DDR or Guitar Hero. To get an idea of how fast we’re talking, Nolan played songs at around 150-300 BPM (beats per minute). That’s not keystrokes, that’s beats. The notes come in time with the beats, so you’ll end up with anything between 1-20 keystrokes per second. I haven’t gotten near that good yet, so I hadn’t noticed that there was a cap to how many keys I could be pressing at any given second. When the game wasn’t keeping up with Nolan’s playing, we switched the keyboard out for a crappy corded one, and voila, things return to normal. While I was aware that wireless peripherals were indeed inferior in speed and precision, I had no idea that it was to such an extent.

I went to the farmer’s market for the first time on Saturday, and I think it’s enough to say that it wasn’t bad. If I had money, I’d have bought a loaf of cinnamon bread or something, but no, I had no such thing. Mowing has officially started, so, that shouldn’t be such a problem. Now I just need a job – I’m hoping Christopher will have room for two people. One can hope, right?

Fine Science

As I sat reviewing for the upcoming Computer Science exam (so far 10 questions have contained iterative loops in which you just have to add things up, it’s silly), I realized that I should go find out random facts about the Power Rangers to quip during the day tomorrow. Jumping to Wikipedia, I expected a half-written article with some helpful references. NO.

THAT IS NOT WHAT I FOUND.

Look at it. That’s the parent article. I challenge you to look at the articles for each season. All of them are complete articles, detailed and organized. Even worse, there’s information about the upcoming PowerMorphiCon (for those that don’t know, Cons are conventions for specific things). Never have I been so fatally put off by what people do in their spare time. Society has reached a new low. Rape of Nanjing? Tianenmen Square? (the choosing of two Chinese incidents is pretty much the result of a loss for good catastrophes) They haven’t got a THING on this, my friends.

Even still, I found it interesting that half of the show was adapted from the Japanese show Super Sentai(literally, super group or super task force, specifically used for air squadrons in WWII). It explained why it seemed so weird. Most hilariously, though, was the formula that Wikipedia gives for each episode. Never have I seen such a thing given for a TV show, making it that much funnier. For those too lazy to go check, I shall leave it here for you to awe upon.

  1. Rangers are seen in everyday life with a dispute to resolve.
  2. Rangers are attacked by an evil foe’s minions/footsoldiers.
  3. Rangers fight minions/footsoldiers.
  4. Rangers morph.
  5. Rangers defeat minions/footsoldiers.
  6. Optional: Evil enemy revives minion and makes minion grow to gigantic proportions, followed by Rangers summoning giant machines known as Zords and/or their combined form, the Megazord.
  7. Optional: Rangers find that their current powers are insufficient to defeat monster and discover a new power, such as a Battlizer armor for the Red Ranger, a sixth Ranger, or a new Megazord.
  8. Optional: Rangers fight and defeat said giant minion.
  9. Rangers are shown back in everyday life, having learned a life lesson which solves the earlier dispute.

FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS SANE AND HOLY, who would watch enough episodes to know this? No self-respecting human being should know this beyond the age of ten. Not a single one.

The Drawing Board

So, I was wrong. I, in fact, got a piece of crap 3 on the practice AP. This is sending me through all kinds of whirls of self-doubt and re-evaluation about everything. I honestly thought I did well, and although it’s pretty much guaranteed I’ll get a 4 on the AP, I don’t find that acceptable. At all. I want a 5. I just don’t see any other option. Nonetheless, I’m really disappointed with this.

I’m struggling to find the line between “I’m just not putting enough effort into this.” and “This isn’t what I’m meant to do.”. On an unrelated note, I dislike how punctuation comes out when quotations are involved.

Life’s User Interface

I am exhausted. This week has been a non-stop marathon of energy-sucking activities. Two birthday parties, two sleepovers, one get-together at my house, one trip to the mall, three trips downtown, and a long trip to Rochester and back. And now I’ve gotta work as fast as I can to finish this CS stuff before Monday. It feels good, though. My break was not wasted. I completed almost none of my goals (I had no time to touch photoshop or the design, really, although I did make a little progress, just not much).

Today, though, I drove up to Rochester with Daniel’s parents and hung out with him for his freshman recital, and got to see things at Eastman. It was great to see Daniel, but it was cooler to see his friends and such, and also really nice to see a college campus. Eastman is kind of odd in that it’s in the middle of Rochester, which is about as ghetto as cities come. There are totally clean and modern sections of the city which make the city look really prosperous, but you can literally walk a block away and you’re in a red-light district. As Daniel, as well as other friends of mine have told me, you’re often instructed not to wander more than a block away from the local college campuses, as the chances of being mugged are extremely high.

Seeing the campus, though, was kind of a surprise. I had NO idea dorms were so small – and Daniel’s was larger than most. The actual facilities were really nice and such, and I saw the motivation behind going to a school that has a nice design and architecture. Which kind of put me in the whole college-centric mood. Honestly, all I want right now is to get to a decent tech school and OUT of high school. I wait semi-patiently.

Pwnies for Christmas

To maintain the integrity of the below post, I’m now mentioning that I WILL be learning Photoshop and creating a new design, as well as implementing it. It will take a while, mostly to learn Photoshop, but, I’m not spending this week on my butt. I kind of wish I had a scanner to visualize my ideas more clearly, but alas, I have not such advanced technologies.

As a side note, I scavenged myself a new phone, courtesy of Christopher. It’s infinitely better than my old one, mostly due to the fact that the buttons are no longer exposed (the “new” one is a flip phone), and I have Bejeweled, instead of “sky diver” and “bowling” for games. It’s a year or two old, but works just fine. The numbers is the same (280 9288), but that’s irrelevant since I literally only had a total of like half a dozen calls that weren’t from my dad, and over 90% of the calling time (4 hours) was accrued while talking to just Daniel. Woo!

Oh, and go take THIS QUIZ! It’s actually ridiculously accurate (concerning terms and origins) – I came out “60% dixie”.

The Latest Craze

Tonight’s Maundy Thursday service was a little bizarre, not in and of itself, but because as I looked at the bulletin, I literally started adding () at the end of each header (mentally). This is a strong indication that I rocked today’s practice APCS test, with the exception of the last question on Trees and Binary Expressions, which may prevent me from attaining my preliminary “5”.

I feel like I really did well on that thing, not because I studied (I did a total of 20 part one questions, 10 on two consecutive nights, mostly to get in the APCS “mood”), but because I’ve started getting the rest of my life in order before even thinking about school (yes, a long school performance post is coming). I’ve often wondered why I can’t get a grip this year (even my “I WILL NOT BE LAZY. :)” slogan failed after 5 weeks), when the simple answer came to me that there’s no way I can come close to excelling in matters of the mind, nor the body, when my heart isn’t even in the right place. While every conclusion I’ve come to concerning my performance at school has not been wrong, they’ve been misguided at the core.

Take, for example, my original thought that I was simply overloaded with courses in the midst of a busy life. This was possibly the furthest conclusion from the truth. Why was I doing poorly in Math 11H? I was getting two hours of sleep every night and doing half the homework. I didn’t accept THIS part of the equation until later, when I decided that my problem was sheer laziness. Back to analyzing the former, however. Was I busy? Sure, but the lie I repeated to me teachers about having three hours of homework was certainly overblown. This was a time in which I compulsively manipulated my teachers to gain pity and leniency, but not necessarily intentionally. I twisted the facts just a bit to gain the sympathy I needed to continue being a slacker.

Hindsight, as always, is 20/20, and it’s easy to judge my past acts so unabashedly. Maybe I WAS overworked, but I specifically remember spending half a dozen nights blowing off homework to watch Lost or the Sopranos or some movie. I can’t say with complete confidence that dropping Math 11H was a completely bad decision, but, I think I can say it could have been avoided. There was a definite shock factor at the beginning of the year – I was not prepared to actually work. Freshman and Sophomore years had been absolutely effortless, although my failure to apply myself is highly evident in my Sophomore year – my first F on a progress report (remedied to a B) appeared of all time, as well as my first D. So, this was something that was long overdue to happen, but is not totally the result of what I felt like it should have been. I WANTED to believe I was doing poorly because I was so overworked. I made things a lot harder for myself than they should have been. It’s definitely hard to do complex math at 3:00 in the morning, that’s for sure, so in one sense, I was right. I failed to see the connection between actions in the rest of my life, and consequences in my school life. Which is where I’m heading, here.

My true low point came a little bit after dropping AP Physics. I had justified the drop to a multitude of things – crappy teacher, depression, crappy course, still too much work, you name it. All of it contained a level of truth, just like with Math 11H – as I’m hearing from a lot of the people in there now, it’s only gotten worse in every respect. I was definitely a little depressed somewhere in there. The depression was a circular illness, though. I do poorly in AP Physics, I get depressed, which makes me do more poorly, etc.. The ONLY way to break the cycle, I figured, was to drop the depression factor – AP Physics. It never occurred to me that perhaps my performance in AP Physics was directly related to my constant absence from school, or my increasing failure to do the homework before each test, or my failure to study for the tests. A lot of the latter (homework, studying) can be attributed to frustration with the material when I didn’t understand it immediately. I’m not a patient learner. At all. So, I’d sit down for 10 minutes and stare at the book, and pretty much call it a day. All this, I believe, was the result of chaos in other, more important portions of my life.

I believe the last diagnosis I had, that I was sheerly lazy, was the closest to the truth, but was only treating the symptom. When I look at myself as a whole, my best work is done when I can actually focus on school – not in the “close the door and study for 5 hours” sense, but in the “there are no conflicting situations with friends and family, nor with God”. This isn’t something I’ve thought about for a while, but I realized it when I fell asleep in the middle of communion last Sunday, and subsequently missed the usher passing out the bread. Nobody came and scolded me for it or anything, no weird looks, nothing. I often fall asleep in the middle of church, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. But this was ridiculous.

I started from the beginning, asking questions to get to the source. Why did I fall asleep? I was tired. Did I mean to? No, it was, at the moment of occurance, out of my control. I was tired enough to fall asleep in the middle of the prayer beforehand. Why was I tired, then? Lack of sleep. Why didn’t I sleep? I stayed up late (until 3:00, as per usual). Why? Because I was playing games and watching TV. Why? Because that’s what I wanted to do. I felt like it. It was purposeful.

I realized that when I choose to deny myself something that will enable me to do the simple act of properly worshipping on Sunday morning, I’m choosing myself over God. That, right thurr, is sin. So, this gets down to the problem of me falling asleep in the middle of church. How does this relate to anything?

I have a lot of other unresolved problems with friends, far and wide. Anything from just a lack of communication to miscommunication to discommunication. Probably one of the more haunting failures this year was with the old guy, Mr Dynkin. Although I’d already given me notice that I was leaving, I repeatedly delayed and canceled at the last minute for the last time I was supposed to work for him, he pretty much fired me for being so unreliable. I can blame him and his senility and him trying to make me put on those gigantic pants all I want, but really, that was mine.

That spawned from an overally apathy concerning work and duty in my life. I have a duty to do a lot of things in my life, and I can’t really take that as lightly as I used to. Keeping up with the world isn’t as easy as it was a few years ago, which, I guess, is just part of aging. If I don’t keep up with my duties to the most important things in my life, there’s just no way I can keep up with the lesser things, like school.

Hopefully, by God’s grace I can keep up with the greater elements.

Of Note

Mike told me about a rather widely-viewed program on National Geographic last night concerning the “Gospel According to Judas”. I hadn’t heard of it, so I did some research.

Essentially, it was found in the mid-to-late 2nd century by a bishop of Lyons, and this date has been verified by all the surrounding evidence. So, it’s definitely old. The “Gospel of Judas” apparantly is told through the eyes of Judas, and suggests the Judas did not, in fact, betray Jesus, but was asked to by Jesus. I haven’t been able to find any manuscripts of it online, but from what I’m seeing, that’s the big “danger” it poses to Christianity.

My initial reaction was mild confusion, whether due to being massively tired or whatever, but I managed to not hold judgement until I got some research done. Lo and behold, it appears to be yet another Apocrypha. For those of you who don’t want to read the article, the Apocrypha are texts from Jesus’ time that have been deemed false. The Roman Catholic church and some Orthodox churches still keep some of the Apocrypha.

The Apocrypha, in general, are massively inconsistent with the basic canonical text of the Bible. In them you’ll find stuff about Jesus getting married and having a child, or various Old Testament stories in which men are worshipped (iirc) with God’s sanctioning. The stuff is pretty blatantly contradictory. That doesn’t automatically qualify it for being excluded from the Bible, but considering that a lot of this stuff was made by Gnostics, I fail to see how the “Gospel of Judas” is any different (the author is apparantly unknown, although it is told through Judas’ eyes).

Call the Fire Department…

I’ve been put on SLASHDOT, YO!

None of you may understand the significance of this, but a hundred thousand people just read my question, and 100 were kind enough to leave really, really helpful responses.

The big idea I gleaned from this is that the math I’m doing now is far closer to Arithmetic than true math. Additionally, Computer Science, although math-based, can be understood with average math talent. There were also several really helpful suggestions dispersed throughout there as far as other careers – informatics, network administration (sysadmin, IT, etc.), and even being a lawyer.

The bottom line? Not so much video game design. According to them, that is possibly the most math-intensive line of programming in the field. Perhaps my feelings towards math will change in college – we’ll see. Even then, though the big thing I kind of realized is that I should probably just suck it up. Another encouraging point was that a few people said that those with the ability to communicate clearly and in a grammatically correct format are in short supply. This gave me a whole new drive to keep pushing for RPI (or whatever, I don’t really care where I go so long as it’s a tech school). This feels good.

I just hope it lasts.

[edit]

I love Slashdot. I got an email from a guy suggesting Interactive Journalism, which sounded pretty interesting. Equally notable was the fact that his email was from mac.com, which is most definitely Apple-owned. Slashdot, the place where 17-year olds get answers from Apple employees.

[/edit]

[edit]

//03:54:04 JRGuitar04: so…you could play like…NASA on your computer?
//03:54:18 salandarin: pff, NASA is old-hat
//03:54:32 salandarin: it’s all about the Department of Defense now
//03:54:51 salandarin: i can simulate the beaurocracy down to each secretary and unanswered paper!
//03:55:03 salandarin: oh wait, that’s Homeland Security

[/edit]

Blue Moon Syndrome

Every few milennia, something happens that one will probably not see twice. This is what as known as “things going as planned”. My 1 GB stick of RAM arrived today, and I was totally expecting it to be entirely incompatible with my current two sticks, which are all DDR 400, but would inevitably have different timings and voltages. Lo and behold, however, this was not the case. I’m happily chugging along with my 1.54 GB of RAM, which has pretty much transformed my computer into the monster it was meant to be. I’d never understood why my computer so consistently failed to Alt+Tab efficiently in any kind of application, but it was indeed the RAM causing the issue. The blame could also be placed on Windows / M$ for their inefficient event handling, but I only have so many fingers for pointing. Some fingers must be left available for playing Oblivion.

In any case, I was indeed pleasantly surprised to see this work. Perhaps it’s just balancing out how utterly screwed I am because of Mr. Briegle’s antics (or lack thereof), but whatever the reason may be, I am pleased. The end result is that I can finally play Oblivion at maximum settings without ripping my hair out every time a loading area appears. I still have to keep the grass distance down, but, I don’t really care at this point.

Other things are on the radar, however. Such as the fact that I’ve got a whole lot of work to get done in a short span of time – the marking period ends soon, and I’ve been lazy. And now, /. wisdom.

“Anyone can learn these tricks at any time anywhere. They don’t need to go to a school to find them. If you think someone going to a boot camp is going to become some 1337 h4x0r, well you might as well also start advocating destroying the internet.”

“Agreed. I’m about to cost these bastards lots of money by giving away their secrets. Gang, listen closely. First, watch the film Hackers a few times and try to dress as they do. Nothing shows up a non-hacker faster than one out of uniform.

Next, install any CLI-based OS. DOS, Linux, doesn’t matter.

Now that you have a command prompt (with the blinking cursor, nothing else will do), you can hack anything! Type in a command like “reroute airtraffic > Boise” and watch all of those jets turn around. Steal the latest hollywood flick with “download harrypotter.movie now” Want to make your idiot neighbors power blink in and out, spelling “I am t3h fag0rz” in morse code? Go right ahead. You’re only limited by your imagination.

DISCLAIMER: I am not responsible for the misuse of the preceding information.”

“Wouldn’t you also need a keyboard which beeps with every keystroke and a monitor which projects shapes onto your face as you work?”

“What about the exceedingly slow save program?

I want to make sure that whenever I save a file it goes extremely slowly and show’s me every percent along the way.

Oh, and it has to flash every bit of data on screen as it saves. I’m sure it’ll work out some sort of proper layout too.

Otherwise, how would I know it’s actually saving the proper data?”

Who Saves Daylight?

I hate Daylight Savings. Not because I dislike the extra hour of sunlight, but because of how it forces me to adjust my aural sense for time. My sense of time generally relies on the color of my wall as seen through the top left corner of my left eye, but that is no longer a reliable source, forcing me to turn all the way around to my clock, which is occasionally obfuscated by various objects.

Daylight Savings royally screwed me over last night, too. I was exiting Oblivion expecting the clock to read 2:00 AM, providing for a full 7 hours of sleep prior to Church. Nay, it was 3:00 AM, forcing me to sit down and watch cartoons that had been dubbed with fart sounds most hilariously (it was an April Fools thing).

As for April Fools? I’ve taken a liking to the internet version of this holiday. Generally I hate April Fools, but this year, it did not fall upon a school day, and waking up to a world of bizarre news was rather exciting, until I realized it was indeed April 1st. What I find more amusing about April Fools is what is unintentionally interpreted as a joke. But then again, Snakes on a Plane is quickly coming.

Speaking of movies, I saw Slither last night, as a sort of birthday doodad with Christopher and Jonathan. Akin to movies such as Army of Darkness or Bubba Ho-Tep, this movie, whether because it really was hilarious, or because I was just in the mood, had me laughing the whole way through. It was really, really gross, through. I’m no fan of gore, especially the visceral, intestiny kind that Slither had, but I still managed to find it really hilarious.

I won’t bore you with Oblivion details right now, but rest assured, it’s coming.

Along with a gig of RAM (should be here Monday or Tuesday).

Oblivion, lol

[geek]

I am now taking a short break to give you some preliminary (after 30 or 40 hours of playing) thoughts on Oblivion. Eventually, I’d like to do a nice, extensive review with some of my personal favorite screenshots and whatnot, but for now, I just want to jot down some interesting things.

The first being, the graphics, and my computer’s rendering capability. I am ever so close to being able to max out the settings in every category. My main limitation lies in the speed and capacity of RAM. PC3200 is standard, but contains no capacity for overclocking, and combined with the mere 512MB (hopefully being rectified tomorrow), my computer is unhappy with Oblivion’s extensive use of textures.

I’ve been running the game at 1024×768, with HDR enabled, and all other settings set to maximum. Because Oblivion uses floating-point HDR (Half Life 2 and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory use an “interlaced” version that is much closer to Bloom than true HDR), anti-aliasing is off by default. I have not yet tried forcing AA on, but judging from the performance I got with Bloom and 4xAA, I do not expect a strong display of computing prowess.

For those of you that do not know, HDR is a lighting system that attempts to simulate the intricacies of the eye – moving from dark areas to light areas results in greater brightness for a period of time, which is inversely true for the reverse situation (that is, moving from light to dark results in a very dark environment). However, the lack of native AA almost makes Bloom (what is generally referred to as the “cheap knockoff” of HDR) more preferable. I took some comparison shots which you can see here.

Anti-aliasing becomes a serious issue when I’m faced with large patches of grass. Much of Oblivion is covered with truly spectacular fields of grass that will make your computer commit seppuku if you are not properly prepared. I have not sufficiently played with the settings to rectify this situation, but that will come soon. Playing with the settings can be rather frustrating when you have to restard Oblivion for any kind of major settings changes.

As for the game, I can safely say this is the best game I’ve played in years. Is it the best game I’ve ever played? I don’t know, but it just might be. More to come later.

[/geek]

These Times of Ours

In many senses, this is what one could consider the second part to my post about my paths in life. This is probably not the final portion, but it is a continuation, of sorts.

My overall progress towards pinpointing where I should be headed has actually headed in a negative direction. I’m no longer sure about anything at all. Sample questions that have been running circles through my head might be:

Do I want to do something in English? Writing? What kind of writing? Creative? Books? News? Editorials?

Do I want to do something involving communication? Commucation theory? Media?

What kind of media? Modeling and rendering? Image manipulation? Web design?

What about computers? Computer science? Game design? Software development?

I can’t help but wish that through all this, I had some kind of guiding motivation. In some kind of weird way, I wish something bad would happen to me that drove me to a specific career. This brings me to wishing these times of ours were more exciting. One could argue that there’s nothing more exciting than carbon nanotubes and cloning (even if it was faked), but recently, that stuff just doesn’t interest me.

This train of thought brings me back to a belief I once had in elementary school. I was thoroughly convinced that I had been born in the wrong century. In specific, I was really meant to be a chivalrous knight of old, fighting for the honour (I’ve taken to spelling that with a ‘u’ – I read a quote that went something like “I put the U in honour because it seems to be missing these days”) of…something. Needless to say, I had some issues with reality back in the day.

The point here is to say, I don’t have a direction. I spent an hour today staring at prospective colleges, not because I’m worried, but to get some kind of inspiration from their lists of majors and minors. The trouble is, when I think of any one profession I might like, I see huge blocks that would severely hamper my enjoyment. Examples:

Computer science (being my original choice) is still a viable option at this point, because I do enjoy programming. The problems here are that I don’t know if I enjoy it THAT much, but really, the killer is the math. Supposedly, I’ll need lots of math. I don’t enjoy math enough to spend my life doing that. Is there a compromise?

Engineering, I suppose, is still on the table. I don’t like the vast majority of fields in engineering, and this pretty much leads me straight back to computer science. What I do know, however, is that I do NOT want to be a computer engineer.

The most obvious combination of the above two is Software Engineering, which may just be the solution to the problem. Software engineers are lovingly known as “code monkeys”, mostly for their ignorance of elegant and robust technique. This is the main problem with software engineering – I do not want lesser training. I, like Will Wright, am very fond of the algorithm, and would thoroughly enjoy applying elegant solutions to complex problems. Could I do this with software engineering? I have no idea.

Journalism is just kind of a random thing that sounded cool. Potential issues I see mostly involve the content of what I would write. I could see myself writing for some website (preferable) or newspaper (not so preferable), but I definitely don’t want to write about politics or sports.

More thoughts out loud. I submitted a question to /. that probably won’t get answered, and I’ll submit another one tomorrow regarding the mathematical difference between SE and CS. Comment, please.

(also, I fixed the javascript to work for Opera)

The world, slightly askew

Having missed church this morning for some reason I’m not really aware of, I spent my time looking at this catalog I got from RPI entitled “Private Colleges and Universities”. As I expected, it was mostly the same old sensationalist drab, but the helpful part about it was one part of an “Admissions Q&A”. It said for those who don’t know what they want to major in, to attend a school with a wider array of classes. I thought that was pretty good advice,

Prelude to the Epilogue

Today’s Onion Day Calender reads:

Gay TV
Gay themed televeision series like Bravo’s Queer Eye for the Staight Guy and Boy Meets Boyare popular with mainstream audiences. What’s the Appeal?

  • Better than Oxygen’s Lesbian OshKosh B’Gosh Outlet-Store Shopping Spree
  • 90% of Americans are latent homosexuals
  • Fans can live fun-filled life vicariously through gay characters before having methodical sex with wife in Mobile, Alabama
  • Explode myth that gay people are human beings like the rest of us
  • Homosexuals not so intimidating when they’re 22″ tall
  • Lost remote, accepting alternate sexuality easier than getting up and crossing room
  • The Mexicans already had a network, why not the fruits?
  • Crocodile-huntersexuals, Osbournosexuals, and antiques-roadshowsexuals are old hat.

In other news, I may have a soft spot for orchestral power metal. What is that, you ask? I sort of stumbled upon it while watching this video (which, by the way, I’m pretty sure isn’t fake). I really liked the music to it, and the description mentions “Trans-Siberan Orchestra”. I found this name to be super awesome, so I did some poking on Last.fm, and lo and behold, there they are. The only trouble is, half their music has some form of singing in it, which is not okay. I’m now on the quest to find what is possible the most obscure genre: Instrumental Orchestral/Symphonic Power Metal.

If anyone could, you know, help me with this, that’d be super.

You Call Down the Thunder

Here, ladies and gentlemen, is my CIA rant. I gotta get this out of my system – I was babbling about it pretty much all day after the speech, so otherwise, I’ll be doing this for practically EVAR until I write thoroughly about it.

(for those of you who don’t know, CIA stands for Congress in Action. it’s where US History students get assigned a representative, an issue, and must argue for or against this issue based on the opinions of their representative. this involves a lengthy research paper, a short speech, and an open debate.)

My representative is an ultra-crazy Democrat from Texas, strangely enough. I don’t exactly agree with her on 75% of everything, but thankfully, for this, I can argue my true opinion. The topic I presented was a fake bill providing for the legalization of Bush’s warrantless surveillance program. My job was to explain why this is a bad thing.

All around, I’ve actually had trouble with delivery of my content. I have really excellent content (if I do say so myself), but in both the paper and the speech, I’ve had issues with getting that message across. In the paper, I had serious length issues. I barely pulled it up to 6 full pages (although this can depend on which text editor you use), which is kind of the minimum. I had plenty of sources and research to use, but I ended up having to quote excessively, which I wasn’t too pleased about.

I initially had trouble coming up with convincing arguments, but in the end, it came around like this:

  • the bill is improper:
    • violates IV Amendment (surveillance is unwarranted, and entirely unreported)
    • violates all provisions of FISA (exceeds the full year under which the president may conduct warrantless surveillance)
    • not provided for under the PATRIOT Act/AUMF (intended for action against the September 11 terrorists, and none others)
  • the bill is ineffective:
    • america faces much larger issues of security:
      • we’ve failed in the war on drugs (it’s a $65 Billion business in America alone)
      • we’ve failed in our border control (60 million people travel through the US yearly, 7 million living on american soil illegally)
    • the targets are hardly traceable considering the aforementioned facts
  • the bill is unnecessary:
    • warrants provide necessary checks & balances against abuse in the system
    • warrants are easily obtained (usually less than 24 hours), and not necessary for up to 72 hours under FISA, therefore meaning they do not hinder time-sensitive situations
    • aforementioned time-sensitive situations are EXTREMELY rare

That pretty much sums up my arguments. I tried to communicate most of that in my speech, but I was REALLY nervous and it was REALLY cold in that room, so I stopped a lot, coughed a lot, and apparantly scratched my nose a lot. Apparantly my “content was great, delivery was not so great”. Because of my bad delivery, a lot of my points didn’t reach home.

The ensuing debate was very infuriating. The “Republicans” were ABSOLUTELY obnoxious – they’d clap whenever anybody said anything supporting their side, and kept using the SAME argument over and over even though I’d proven them wrong (ex. they kept saying time-sensitive situations were still threatened, I kept quoting FISA, which provided exactly what they needed). I also didn’t get to address the biggest point which was “if you have nothing to hide, then why does it matter?”, because Khoa (the Speaker of the House) kept picking the same people. I really hope they let us finish it tomorrow.

So, yeah, that’s CIA. I’ve had fun with it.

And I’ll reap the whirlwind.

[edit: This is entirely unrelated, but I found this snippit from a BBC article on a truly awful military idea very funny.

“During WWII: Attach a bomb to a cat and drop it from a dive-bomber on to Nazi ships. The cat, hating water, will “wrangle” itself on to enemy ship’s deck. In tests cats became unconscious in mid-air.” /]

The world, up-side down.

One of the scariest realizations you can ever have is that maybe, just maybe, you’ve been wrong for eight years.

I’ve been telling myself since, heavens, even before I moved to Ithaca that my true destiny was to do something with computers. I knew it had to be computers. I knew it. Knew it. Knew it. But as I stayed home today because I blew off all my homework so I could hang out with Daniel, and dreaded doing the next APCS project, I started talking with Paul. We discussed our schedules and all that jazz, and he asked why I was taking math next year.

Because not taking math would be silly, of course.

Why is that silly?

Because…you have to have math to be a Computer Scientist. I don’t really like math, though. I don’t dislike math, but I gotta know it.

Why?

It was somewhere around this point that I kind of realized that although I enjoy all things technological and computerized, it just isn’t what I want to do in life. I like programming, it’s fun, but I don’t like programming under deadlines and doing things that I WOULD have to do were I to go into that field. I enjoy the idea, but I definitely don’t enjoy it enough to live it.

The thing that really sold me in the first place was when people started telling me I was good at this stuff. Boy, was that reassuring. But then came Digital Electronics. Wow, do I not care about this stuff. At all. It didn’t really hit me until just now that – hey, I don’t enjoy this. So, what DO I enjoy?

At this moment, I’m really not sure.

The basic fact I can rely on here is that I like computers and like playing with computers. But the times at which I’ve enjoyed the technical aspects of computers were always towards other ends. In general, towards advancing this blog. I didn’t learn javascript or PHP for the heck of it, I did it to improve the blog. My motives behind learning the hardware inside my computer weren’t just to build a computer, but mostly to learn how to improve it, so I could run my games at leet settings. The learning was a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.

What do I want to do? I don’t think it’s computers anymore. I’ve known for a while now that I enjoy analyzing things a lot more than doing things that require analyzation, and I think some form of creative expression is a lot closer to what I want to be doing. Paul says he’s looking at journalism, which I find to be a really intruiging idea. I am a geek, I know that for certain, but being a writer for some kind of magazine or website sounds a lot of fun. I admire the guys at Gamespot a lot – what they do isn’t as easy as it looks.

Something that’s always stuck out in my mind is a story I wrote in 7th grade. Those of you that had Mahadabe (NO IDEA HOW TO SPELL THAT) for English at DeWitt, you might remember that really crappy slave story we read, called Nightjohn, and the extra chapter assignment we did. I did it with some level of vigor, and when I read it in front of the class, there was a collective “….huh?”. Upon recieving the paper back, it was covered in gigantic letters reading: “WOW!!! THIS IS AMAZING!!!”. I had accidentally left the file up when I was done, and my dad had read it (family computer days), and then proceeded to send it to my brothers and showed it to my mom and my cousins, and my uncle, which resulted what could only be described as very bothersome.

Now, I know a 7th grade English paper proves absolutely nothing concerning my skills of an author, but upon retrospect, I really enjoy writing. That’s why I have this blog, that’s why I make this blog look pretty (actually, the current design isn’t all that pretty, but that will eventually change). I enjoy the technical aspects of making this blog work, but honestly, I enjoy the things that have instant output. I don’t like the drawn out process of programming, I like the NOW aspect, which is what I got in Programming 1 & 2 – extremely basic programming that produced pretty results, thanks to BlueJ and Objectdraw. So, what does this all mean?

I’m not entirely sure. This leaves me baffled as to what I’m gonna do with college. My entire future was set on this idea of going to a tech school. I think the main reason I really wanted to go to RPI was not for the training, but the poeple I’d be with. I find the idea of being in a gigantic dorm with hundreds of geeks like me extremely appealing, but I don’t think that’s the reason I should be going to a place like RPI. What this means for me next year, I really don’t know. I need time to figure this out, but until then, I have to work. Work, work work.

[edit: i revised this a good bit, so it will look significantly different to those of you that already read this]

STARCRAFT LAN INFORMATION

Some of you know I’m doing a LAN party of sorts on the 31st, my birthday. I have some “official” details involving this, so listen up, y’all:

It’s gonna be on March 31st, which is a Friday, 19 days from now. Required items:

  • $5 dollars (I’ll need all of it)
  • Your Computer (please don’t bring anything less than 500 mhz, this isn’t a Smithsonian exhibit)
  • CAT5, ~20 ft length (NECESSARY)
  • Large blanket (explained later)

Other helpful but not necessary items:

  • A large hub/switch. Larger is MUCH better. Karel said he might have this covered, but, just in case, please bring one, if possible.
  • Starcraft (we can burn copies, but…)

I’m having issues with the limit of people that will be here. I had originally wanted to keep it at 8, but I will have to go to 10 for various reasons. 10 is pretty much the max, for a lot of reasons. Various information involving this:

  • Starcraft, the main game, only supports 8 people. This in itself is okay, as I’m willing to sit back and let other poeple play, but we obviously can’t go much higher than that.
  • Starcraft will be a mix of melee and custom games. I know a lot of the people coming aren’t good at melee, but a few of the people that are much prefer melee (I enjoy it a lot too), so I’ll do my best to make a balance.
  • Other games that are up in the air are Tribes 2, Warcraft III, and Quake 3, these are all possibilities. If you have ideas, LET ME KNOW SOON. Games must be at least 8 player, and fairly low performance.
  • We’ll be playing in my basement, not the attic, so space will be slightly tighter than in the attic, but I’m confident there will be room. This means that if it’s between bringing a laptop and a desktop, you really, really should bring a laptop.
  • I am not entirely sure how sleeping arrangements will work. I have one extra bed and one couch in the basement – most of the basement is unfurnished, so a lot of the space is no-go. We may have to stretch to the living room, which has three couches (let’s see, that’s 5 people covered thus far). This means a few people (assuming all 10 sleep over, which isn’t going to happen) will have to sleep on the floor. I have blankets and such, but, BE PREPARED. Bring a large blanket or something.

If you want to come, let me know, maybe we can work something out. Some of you may have noticed that this coincides with my birthday; please DON’T get me presents. PLEASE. It’s not a birthday party, it’s an excuse to have a LAN. If you really, really, really want to, fine, but there won’t be a ceremony or anything. You have your warning.

NO WAI!

Many things to report! The first of which, are my grades. They are good enough (I don’t know the GPA) to justify coming back, but I still have work to do. In fact, I have a programming project that’s now 3 days late that I need to finish for Monday.

So, the grades are like this:

English: B+ (one bad quiz and poor attendance)
US History: Pass
Math: Pass (bad homework, that’s because i have no calculator still, so i can’t do it)
APCS: A- (gonna fall with this next project)
Physics: B (i keep forgetting the homework! argh!)
CIM: B (poor attendance)
Digital: Pass (one bad test, keep forgetting homework, terrible attendence – it’s my first period class)
PE: A

Funny story with Digital – I walked in 30 minutes late one day and they had actually taken bets as to what time I’d get there. Mike was the winner with 8:20. When I say they took bets, Mr. Peters actually wrote down the bets on the board. The worst part is that the only scolding I got was from Mr. Briegle (read: he’s not even the teacher of that class). Digital has improved since like three people dropped the class a few weeks ago, though. Much, much improved.

I’ve basically been getting NO sleep. Generally around ten hours for every five days of school – this isn’t really because I’m playing games or whatever, it’s because I fall asleep when I get home for an hour or two (I’ve been walking home recently, so I get home at 4:00), and somewhere between two and three days a week I now have Judo. Keep in mind, this isn’t me complaining. I’m actually thoroughly enjoying finally taking on school and doing something with my time. I’ve pretty much adjusted to the sleep thing, and I’ve found I actually feel much better with 3 hours of sleep over 5 or 6. Moving on, though.

[semi-geek]

Several things have changed about my computer recently, which I think concerns each and every one of you. Firstly and most earth-shatteringly, I’ve switched to Opera. Opera, you ask? Opera was once the ad-laden alternative to Firefox, but has recently been purged of such foul inventions. Opera is, in general, significantly faster and less laden with “memory leaks” (I don’t care what you call them, Mozilla Foundation, if it sucks up 100 MB of my memory, it’s a memory leak). It’s, in general, just more awesome. It has some issues with AJAX/Flash, but it works just fine in general. The biggest selling point for me was that it played about 50% more YTMNDs natively than Firefox did.

The only unfortunate part is that the widget support (AKA extensions) isn’t as large as Firefox’s was. I’m using the 9.0 beta, which is the only version that supports widgets. The widgets themselves are more akin to the Konfabulator I once used, which is now called something else under Yahoo’s ownership.

[/semi-geek]

Other things I’ve gotten into? Last.fm is in there, which I had previously ignored for lack of knowledge of its radio-doodle. I’m now frantically trying to catch up with Zach and Paul in their track counts, which, considering my current Winamp stats, won’t take too long, but it will certainly take time. I cheated last night and left music on overnight (with the volume off, silly), but I probably won’t do that again. Note “probably”. Ahem.

[geek]

Most importantly, is the fact that the world will collapse in on itself with the arrival of Oblivion in a SINGLE WEEK! A SINGLE WEEK! AHAHA! I’ve not been this excited since the arrival of Halo 2! I scoured the internet for scans of the March 2006 OXM review of it (9.5 out of 10!), to no avail. Luckily, we get an early dismissal on the Thursday of that week, as well as a day off Friday. Truly, the heavens are aligning to accomodate the arrival of this magnificent piece of game.