Why pay somebody to tell you about yourself, when you can just ask your friends to do it? That seems to be the premise of this site, which I saw on an old note of Richard Mehlinger's (yes, Facebook is weird like that). So, yeah.
Today marks my first week back in sunny California. Actually, scratch the "sunny" part — it's rained here almost every day since I arrived. It's still nice to be somewhere where the average daily temperature has more than one digit, though.
Class is exactly as I remembered it. Hours drag by, but days seem to end almost without beginning in the first place. I'm staying on top of my homework, which is a good thing. We'll see how well I can keep that up, particularly when biology and STEMS (signals and systems engineering) start to load it on.
I've also started a new job here at HMC. I've joined the Computer Science department staff, which is awesome. I've always enjoyed systems administration, and now I get to do it for a large and sophisticated network. So far I've identified and provided a solution for a misbehaving compiler problem on the CS105 machine, and helped Yaniv rewrite the kiosk to be valid (and working) HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Not a huge list of a achievements, I'll admit, but I've only been doing stuff for a few days.
Speaking of computers, I've got a new face returning to my stable of productive machines: an Apple Newton MessagePad 2100. I just purchased one off of eBay to replace the one that got broken at Durfee, and so far it's working out great. I never will cease to be amazed at how incredible the handwriting recognition is, or how perfect the form-factor is for good handwriting recognition. I've got a LAN card coming in next week, so maybe I'll even be able to bring it into the 21st Century. Cool, no?
Not everything is sunny in the world of computing. A recent Gentoo change (unwisely pushed out to ~x86 and ~amd64, in my opinion) caused keyboard mappings to come from HAL, which had the end effect of completely breaking my keyboard under X. Yes, it's possible to fix with a clever combination of .fdi files and a corrected Xmodmap, but the problem should not have happened in the first place. Silly devs. If you're afflicted, this bugzilla thread should help.
Okay, enough procrastination. I suppose I'm going to go do some more work. Good bye, reader.
PS: Feel free to add a Comment, if you exist. I have strong suspicions that you do not...
So, the news stations are calling the Iowa primary. And, I guess I'm happy. On the one hand, my preferred presidential candidate, Barack Obama, is being hailed as the winner of the Democratic primary. Which is awesome. I think his progressive policies are a breath of fresh air to the White House, and I think that it's time for this country to show the world that it is big enough to elect a man to the Oval Office even if he is a minority. So woo hoo to that.
Oh the other hand, Mike Huckabee is winning the Republican nomination. This is both a blessing and a horrifying curse. The man is what I've heard termed a "religious nut job". He's clearly a Libertarian candidate, favoring removal of pretty much all taxes (a commonly-held and idiotic belief), but he still thinks he'll have money left over to poor into Iraq and rejuvenate schooling in the U.S. Oh yeah, and did I mention that he's a religious nutjob? Do the Republicans of Iowa really dislike the Separation of Church and State that much?
Okay, calming down a bit. As you can tell, I am not a fan of Mike Huckabee. I happen to like the services provided by the Federal government, and think that we have no need to go back to the conditions that we had under the Articles of Confederation. But, like I said, there is an up-side. No sane Republican (i.e., one who knows how a government runs) would actually vote for Huckabee. So if he were to win the nomination, it would be just about the best thing ever for the Democratic party. The sane Republicans (who I have to assume outnumber the insane ones) would have to either vote for an independent candidate, or vote Democrat. So, that's a good thing, I guess.
Anyhow, yeah. That's the news. See you next time, anonymous reader.
So, apparently, people actually have read this blog. I haven't the foggiest idea why somebody would want to do that, but I suppose it means that I actually ought to post here once in a while. I guess I can at least try. I'll start with the last, you know, three months.
It's been at least as crazy a semester as I thought it would be. I ended
up pulling a few more academic all-nighters than is strictly good for
me, but I think I survived anyway. Some surprises included Discrete
being a much more challenging class than I had anticipated and
ChunkyString (the CS70 reimplementation of C++'s std::string class
using an efficient chunked list data structure) being somewhat
anticlimactic. Barring any surprises during finals next week, I think I
even managed to pass everything. Okay, that's about it for the school
summary.
The downside of posting so infrequently is that so much has happened over the last three months, it seems like nothing at all has happened. <insert joke about congruence mod three months here>. So I don't really know what to write. Maybe I'll write more later if the urge strikes me. I've got some ProbStat homework to do, then a lab to hand in, then finals to study for. Adieu, anonymous reader.
Okay, so I'm a slow blogger. At this rate, I assume there isn't actually anybody reading this any more. No? Good.
So, as you might have (hypothetically) gathered from the title of this post, I'm back at HMC for another year. No, scratch that. Another crazy, insane, sleep-depped year. That's more like it. I'm taking, erm, 9 curses this semester. Plus research with Professor (D. Money) Harris. Any some grutoring (grading/tutoring, for the uninitiated) for CS5 on the side. So, yeah, it's busy. Right now I'm supposed to be doing some math homework. But, honestly, who wants to integrate electric potential fields when there are blog posts to write?
This summer was ruddy terrible. I worked at the FRCC, where the staff hates me and does their best to either (a) get me in trouble, or (b) just ignore everything I say and hide somewhere when there's work to be done. It turns out to be rather hard to get anything meaningful done if your entire staff is in some random closet in the basement. On the plus side, I did make a decent chunk of money over those two months. Considering the amount of time that I spent taking care of my ailing grandparents, I suppose I can't complain about the work. The whole barely-seeing-my-high-school-friends-because-we-all-seem-to-have-drifted-apart bit was a bit of a letdown. But, whatever. I guess I'll just stay out here next summer. No worries, right?
Damn. I can't procrastinate that physics homework much longer — I've got to leave to flex out presently. Until next time, anonymous reader.
As you may or may not have noticed, I haven't really done... well, much of anything with the website lately. I've been very busy with my real life, and haven't had the time to fiddle with the painfully ugly PHP that powers this website. If you're still interested in the continuing adventures of Roguelazer, I have a blog which I have been known to update. I also quite intend on putting new VO screenshots up sometime, and when I do, I'll make a newspost. It might be in, like, two hours. Or two years. Who knows! Anyhow, ciao.
I guess I've been neglecting this blog for a while. It's all right- nobody reads it anyway, so who's going to notice? But I'm a bit bored today, so I thought perhaps I'd post again, just for old times' sake. As you might be able to guess, I'm back in Fall River again; I'm home for the summer. I made it through my first year at Harvey Mudd College with my lowest grade as a B- (in Chemistry, obviously).
Not too much exciting going on since I got back. I spend a couple of hours every day taking care of my grandparents- driving my grandmother to see my grandfather at the nursing home/hospital, doing errands and chores, etc. It's not glorious, but somebody has to do it and I have a pretty free schedule. I ended up going back to the Country Club, mostly because nowhere else would hire me. Unfortunately, it's been a very slow summer at the Country Club so far, so I'm not exactly making much in terms of money. C'est la vie.
What else...? Well, I had a birthday a few weeks ago. Woo, I'm 19. Apparently, it's one of the uninteresting years between 18 and 21. Who knew? Anyhow, I got some good loot. Mainly, I got a totally awesome pair of Sennheiser HD280 Pro headphones (sealed, circum-aural, etc.) and a HeadRoom Total BitHead headphone amp. Combined, they let me hear more detail than I ever dreamed possible in music. Of course, I've got to put them to good use, so I've taken my iPod Color and installed Rockbox on it, giving me the ability to play back my Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files on it. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that in honor of my incredible new headphones, I've taken to encoding some of my music in FLAC format. It's not easy to tell the difference between q=0.7 Ogg Vorbis files and FLAC files, but for some things (Brian Wilson, Lisa Gerrard, and some others), the extra quality boost leads to really incredible sound in the headphones. And I've been listening to a lot of new music lately. Since I went to see the Richard Thompson show on Friday, I've been listening to a bit of his stuff lately. And for the last few months, I've been on a Dead Can Dance fling (including breakaways like Lisa Gerrard's solo albums). 's all good.
Perhaps you (my imaginary reader, that is) read this blog because of my up-to-the-minute tech information (that was sarcasm, if you didn't catch it). Well, there's lots of interesting stuff going on in the tech world. I guess the "biggest" thing since I last posted would be Apple's release of the iPhone. However, it doesn't particularly interest me. It's just a well-done smartphone, and, importantly, not one that I can afford. I would have been happier had they released a new Newton, but we all know that that will never happen. However, I am very impressed by the latest Leopard betas. Mac OS X 10.5 is shaping up the be a very well-done release. Perhaps I'll have to get me a new Mac this October...
Well, I'm gonna sign off. It's been fun, imaginary reader. Ciao.
Yep, I'm back in Fall River. The plane ride (Sat. Mar. 10) was, as expected, painful and long. But I am indeed home. Yay me.
I just read Chris Clarke's "How to Explain Things to Libertarians". It is officially an awesome piece of writing that I recommend everybody read - particularly those of you who may be tempted by the writings of Ayn Rand et al. But hey, I'm just a crazy leftist, what do I know?