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I just completed a pretty difficult meeting with Sterling and Tyson, where I made a recommendation that I never take lightly.

My goals when it comes to Systems Administration here in the Computer Science department are always excellence and restraint. I am always an enormous advocate of doing things The Right Way, even if it isn’t the easiest way. I’m also a huge advocate of doing things for the least amount of money, and above all costs, avoid providing additional services that can’t be backed up.

So it was with great contemplation and care that I made a recommendation to Sterling this afternoon for the systems staff to offer a significant new support service. One that I shall not even mention in this blog, for fear that the possibility of a major undertaking be heard by faculty or staff and become a self fulfilling prophecy of doom.

Much more research is necessary before the triumverate of systems administrators whom are most effected will decide if this service is something that should be suggested to ‘the establishment’. But this is definitely an about-face on my part and it will certainly take some time for the cognative dissonance to subside.

Okay, so first… I realize that I haven’t blogged about my QuakeCon experience. It’s just too much. It’s was so huge, so important, that the typical quickie blog entry didn’t seem to do it justice. So I’m still thinking on it, and hopefully an entry about QuakeCon will still happen.

However, in the mean time, Fargo did a pretty damn good QuakeCon coverage blog. While the press doesn’t really “get” the volunteer angle of QuakeCon (and Fargo is no exception), he does give a great blog that highlights exactly what’s apparent to the general attendee.

Yeah, so anyway. Linkage Ahoy.

Last night was supposed to be a very boring night. I had procrastinated my math510 homework until the night before the due date and I expected quite a bit of punishment.

It was Thursday night, the infamous dollah-you-call-it night at Rusty’s, which is a huge favorite here at The Bunker. However, I had already given up any chance of hitting Aggieville last night, and watched most of the guys trickle off to Rusty’s while I sat in the study typing away on my homework. (Yes, I type my math homework sometimes. This was one of those times.)

But then, much to my surprise, the homework went pretty smooth! It wasn’t exactly easy, but I think my friend Cole said it best when we discussed the homework the other day: “It’s really not too bad once you get your mind into the Combinatorics mode. But getting your mind there? Ouch!”

In my case, I needed to get LaTeX running on my laptop anyway so that I could effectively type my math homework. (insert rave about how cool LaTeX is here) That time spent setting up latex seemed to do a pretty good job at getting me into the “math mode”.

Anyway, enough about my homework. So I finished, and I decided that a celebratory Jack and Coke was exactly what I needed. Especially since there would be a lot of people at Rusty’s that night. And oh shit, was there a lot of people at Rusty’s that night. It was even extra crowded, because the air conditioning was out in Rusty’s Next Door, causing more people to crowd into Rusty’s, Rusty’s courtyard, Rusty’s Outback, Rusty’s Other Side, and Rusty’s Pool Hall.

There was also a ton of people there that we knew. Besides the full posse from The Bunker, there was Sam, Shannon, a-blond-haired-girl-that-had-her-birthday-tuesday-that-I-should-remember-her-name-it’s-something-like-elizabeth, Dan, Zimm, Amy, Kate, and a bunch of other Alpha Chi’s. I also ran into Shawn, a good friend from Butler County. Well if there’s anything dollar night is good for, it’s getting people to spend way more than a dollar.

So twenty dollars later, I’m thinking it might be time to head back. Dave, Pat, and I had originally planned on walking back home after drinking, since most of the other guys had decided to eat some Pita Pit and head home. But the quick trip home was not to be. Next thing you know, Dave and I are following Pat to some random girl’s car where we crammed into this vehicle with four other people we didn’t really know…. and off we go to some skinny dipping party.

Well there’s not a lot going on once we reach the apartment complex that the skinny dipping was to commence, but after the girls were in their panties and in the water… there really wasn’t much to do but get into our underwear and hop in.

This is the part of the story where I reference back to the beginning of the story. Remember how I didn’t really plan on going out last night? How I only planned on doing homework by myself in the study? Well my clothing selection certainly reflected that lack-of-plan, as I found myself swimming in some well-worn tightie whities. Of course, the inhibition stiffling effects of the 20 dollars on dollar night didn’t let my poorly scheduled fashion sense get in the way of anything.

At one time during the night I ended up defending the virtues of the tightie whities to a random girl in stylish matching black underwear and bra, bobbing around the shallow end with a cheap inflatable mattress. I don’t think that I succeeded. For some reason drunk girls don’t seem to understand the eternal control vs freedom balancing act that guys go through when selecting underwear. But then again, why would they?

So the night went on with a damn-near-naked cannonball competition, a damn-near-naked backstroke race (I almost won), a damn-near-naked flip contest (I won), and then swimming concluded with a disproportionate amount of male:female nudity.

By the time we had finished, dressed, noticed how soaked we were, crammed back into that little car, and been dropped off one by one, it was definitely 3:30am on a Friday morning.

I woke up this morning at 8:30am… still drunk. I’m definitely not going to my morning classes today.

So, as a fun conclusion to a long story about random college craziness, lets hit the moral(s) of the story:

• Don’t procrastinate math510 homework.
• I will drink until my pockets don’t have any more cash in them. Next time, I’m only bringing 10 dollars in my pockets.
• Jager is still full price on dollar night, that Jager Bomb I took in tribute to Mel was 5.00!
• When going out, wear cool underwear. Seriously, you just never know.

And that’s just about it. Oh, one more thing:

• I love the College Life.

Well, this last Tuesday was the deadline that Dr. Wallentine had set for the CIS690: Game Programming course that Nathan Bean and I were set to teach to make or not make.

Tuesday has come and gone, and the course didn’t make. Much to our surprise, the offering didn’t pull nearly the interest that was expected. From the very beginning the course building strategy was aimed at a graceful way at capping the number of students that would be in the class by setting relatively stringent entry criteria.

It appears that it may have backfired a bit, or at least didn’t help the situation. There are a number of possible theories for why the class didn’t make. Genuine lack of interest is one, though probably unlikely. More likely was the timing, I think. We didn’t actually get a public announcement made until well after the semester had started, and that announcement kind of underscored the “elite” nature of the class. Regardless of why, it definitely didn’t make. I think there were only a couple resume’s that made it to Dr. Wallentine for consideration.

So it’s time for a backup plan. The current plan is to form some kind of club, and see if we can drum up some interest for a computer game programming class. I think that a club could be moderately successful, especially if we emphasize the playing of games as well.

To make this a reality, I think that we’re going to need to something pretty damn fun in the club. I’m starting to think that maybe I need to get the Bunker ready for a LAN party or two… I’m thinking that will drum up the support for a cool game programming class. (And have the advantage of being not completely university related. It’s not immediately obvious to a lot of people that beer and Quake go together oh-so-good.

To sum up, the Game Programming class isn’t going to happen for the Fall ‘04 semester. It may indeed still happen for the Spring ‘05 semester, but things are still up in the air. I’ve got high hopes though. I’ve still got my eyes on graduate school after my BS, and TA’ing for some gaming classes would be hot. Real hot.

Yes! I can finally see the words I’m supposed to speak in Japanese 191!

Today was starting to be a below average day for me and Japanese. For whatever reason, I was a little slow on the uptake while trying to understand the Japanese dialog and I was getting increasingly frustrated. There is no doubt in my mind that I have become a wholly visual learner since I left high school (where I remember being able to handle much more variety in learning), and I have been getting demolished in the last several classes as dialog portions have been learned and recited. My short term auditory memory might as well not exist, because I have almost zero recall of unvisualized words.

Though, the opposite seems to be true for the words that I am able to read and study. Well joy of joys, Yoshinaga-sensei provided a handout today. This was enough to take my relatively poor day in Japanese suddenly start kicking ass. I immediately started pouring over the handout like it was printed in gold. It was absolutely euphoric.

To add to the excellence, it was also relayed that hiragana lessons will start next week. Soon I will finally be able to write and visualize this hyper-interesting language. I am seriously pleased.

It’s been a full week of classes now and so I figured I’d throw down a mini-review of my courses thus far. I’m going to start with a rant about Introduction to Computer Engineering.

eece241 - Introduction to Computer Engineering

Well, to say that I attend this class would be a little bit of a misnomer. More accurately, I skip this class… but it’s for the best! Honest!

Dr. Stanton teaches this course, and without bringing up any direct accusations of incompetence, I can comfortably say that he gives the worst introductory lectures that I have heard from a science course. I should know… this is the the third time that I have heard them. (I know, I know… THREE?. It’s thanks to illness and apathy, but that’s another topic entirely.)

He starts with this horrific lecture trying to make the “multiplexer” the greatest achievement of human kind. More so, he then goes to relate “multiplexing” to everything significant in existance, from blades of grass and other organic forms, to language and communications, to philosophy. In short, it’s a load of crap. A MUX is a simple device that allows for encoding. But instead of thinking of some real reason that eece241 is significant in the life of a student, Stanton just scratches out words like replication, segmentation, cloning, duplication, recursion, addition, formation, publication, and more… and replaces them all with “muliplex”. AAGH! It kills me.

If there is anything that is critical for emerging engineers and scientists, it is the ability to communicate clearly about complex and uncommon topics. We accomplish this with a rigorously guarded vocabulary of precisely defined terms. This glorious, precise, and fragile (excuse me while I metaphor) crystaline structure of vocabulary and understanding is exactly what facilitates the cooperation of great minds that in turn facilitates some of the greatest achievements of humanity past, present, and (I believe) future. Stanton takes the giant sledgehammer of vague idiocy and slams into this precious lexicon over and over again in his initial classes. I die a little inside with every swing.

The second time I was in this class (Spring 2004, I think), I even tried to correct him. I politely suggested that perhaps mass communication was indeed a huge turning point in human history and that perhaps the multiplexer was a tool to achieve that goal. I was belittled, and then he returned to bashing the entire concept of the binary number system by applying it to real life situation that clearly are “black, white, and gray” to finish his analogy.

So, I had a solution this semester. I just haven’t been going. I have my good friend Cole who is in the course, and I usually have a nice instant message conversation with him during the class time. I think he might be ready to move on to some material soon, so I think I’m going to start attending with tomorrow’s lab.

And in conclusion, this ends my first rant^H^H^H^H review of my courses this semester.

First, I’ve already messed up my title by saying “good morning” (politely) at 2:26pm.

Japanese has full started, with about two days of classes. I have never been in a more uncomfortable class in my life, though that could be because I’ve never really taken a foreign language class before. But I kind of knew what I was getting into after the first day…

So the instructor comes into the classroom and she’s a fairly attractive young petite Japanese woman. She begins to deliver the syllabus material in very broken English and then delivers this cute disclaimer: “You might be worry about my horrible Engrish. Well don’t worry, because today is the rast day that I speak Engrish. And I think you will find that my Japanese is very good.”

Now I’ve been through two classes of Japanese 1 and she wasn’t kidding. There hasn’t been one bit of English explaination for anything so far. This presents a three problems for me right away. First, I’m a visual learner. I like to see things and then recall what they look like, especially when it comes to linguistics. Everything in this class is spoken in a language that I don’t know. Second, I like to think about things as systems. I like to know the whys and hows early on so I can start to figure out the system and apply that system to learning new information. This class is definitely about exploratory trial and error, and not about the whys. Not that trial and error isn’t fun, but I like to have a framework that I can build on before it starts. Finally, I can’t take notes. I really just don’t know how. Hopefully I can learn three of the alphabets sometime soon so I can start taking them, but until then I’m just slapping down phoenic approximations… and then that hurts me later because I then learn the word visually. (Bad news… need to learn it right the first time).

Okay, so that’s the end of my petty gripes, I think it’s critical at this point to outline some good things about my Japanese learning experience so far.

Bacon has been invaluable. He’s provided me with some pretty awesome links, like this one, that have been filling in the gaps that I’ve been wanting to learn. I think, (barring any major life changing decisions), we’re going to start having lunch a couple times a week to talk Japanese at the Student Union. He’s also set me up so that I can do Japanese input modes on the computer, and type Japanese. That’s probably worth a blog in-and-of-itself.

The language is absolutely facinating, and pretty fun to speak. I’m excited to keep learning more.

Wow. It has been a long time since I’ve made a blog entry. Though, to be sure, it hasn’t been for lack of want. I’ve thought of all sorts of things that I’ve wanted to commit to the great digital archive of the net in the last several weeks, I just haven’t had the time. I know, I know, it sounds so cliche.

So one of my more immediate goals is to find time every day to put something down in the blog, and I think I’ve found a solution:

For quite some time now, I’ve been wanting to try out the myriad of sweet new over-the-counter dental products… especially the new Whitening Strips from Crest. (I’d provide a link, but I’m typing into links2 right now.)

So the way that these bad boys work is pretty simple. Two times a day you pick out a pair of the strips, one for the top, one for the bottom. Then you put these on your teeth and leave them there for 30 minutes.

What’s this? Thirty minutes? Two times a day? You got it… it’s blog time.

It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten a good blog entry written and I’m afraid this isn’t going to be the one. We currently don’t have an internet connection at the Bunker, and so my leisure time on the internet has dropped to just above zero.

However, this was just too good to pass up. It seems that QuakeCon has a cameo in DOOM 3.

QuakeCon in DOOM 3.

Considering how much I’ve been working on QuakeCon lately, it almost feels like a person cameo for me and my friends.