Retto

I'm not fantastically interested in math. To be honest, I'm pretty convinced that I'll never need to do anything beyond some basic calculus, and even that rarely. But I have to take a lot of upper level math courses for my Software Engineering major, so...

...understandably, I get bored. I don't have a watch, so I play a game with myself and see how far along I can get in a class before I pull out my phone and look at the time. Once I have my phone out, I write the minutes left until class is over at the top of the page. Once the class time is over, I'll put the phone away, because it doesn't matter how many minutes are left.

I've done this for the past two months, and my professor, I think, is catching on. He's taken to standing right in front of my desk when he asks what time it is. "What time is it? Real time? Cell-phone time?" The two are one and the same. Last week, I'd been paying attention a bit, so the last time I had written was 4 minutes left.

The professor pauses in front of my desk and looks down, "What time is it? We have four minutes left?" we had two. I looked at my phone and told him such, and laughed inside to myself, because my game had become the class' clock.

on The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (Movie, 2005): Really Just Fantastic

... that while Labs in high school took up to three hours to do, and write about, even introductory college labs will take up to six hours.

... that while homework in high school was a passing thing, a set of physics problems can take upwards of four hours to complete.

... that while you have less time in class, and theoretically more free time, you spend a lot of time just hanging about with friends.

... friends are really really easy to go and hang out with.

... Girl/Boyfriends, if they go to the same college, are very easy to go and be with.

... You will be foiled at least once by drunks, even if you live in a substance free dorm.

Just because depressingly few things in this are right:

( The whereyoufrom meme )

Am not very sick with mono anymore. Can still give it away, though.

Had fun time in Rhode Island on vacation. We watched Spider-Man 2, which was cool, and we agreed afterwards that if we were rich, we would put car-racing arcade games in our house.

Enjoyed Redwall: Commanders. Made Dashboard, which is a cool conglomerate of everything important.

Am keeping up Mirror of ROCS 3; I am thinking I shall vote for Jessandra, for she does not post.

Parents are calling in loans - I need to in turn ask more urgently for payment on my recent projects. Am reminded of Great Depression. Am reminded of Fight Club: "We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives."

Have decided to keep track of voracious reading habits:
Eaten Books: Catch 22, Joseph Heller; American Gods, Neil Gaiman; Wee Free Men, Terry Pratchett; One Knight Only, Peter David

Still Have Mono. Sleep: 7 hrs.

RWL Turbo will be fun, and Redwall: Commanders will be a blast - exceptionally fun.

I am going to Rhode Island for the next 5 days. I will be checking my gmail account, and ROCS.

Still Have Mono. Sleep: 6 hrs.

Installed new car stereo! Lost 3 screws in center console, took out 3 screws because we didn't like them. Stereo moves a little, affixed by duct-tape.

Went to graduation party. Knew one person there. Was the same age as three people there. A little out of place.

Wishing they would stop naming new movies with ideas similar to old ones the same names as the old movies that the new movies are based on. "Around the World in 80 Days" was an interesting Jackie Chan Movie. Jackie Chan has a whole kind of movie named after him.

Still have Mono. Slept: 12 hrs.

Installed new car antenna! Sig. Less wires. Got puff of dust in mouth. Ptui.

Still sick with mono. Fewer symptoms, just extreme drowsiness.

Had blood drawn today. Did not have fun. Nurses were v. nice second time around.

Commanders will be July 2nd - 4th.

Am encouraging more people to e-mail me at zlopid@gmail.com. More on e-mailing people instead of stalking their LJs in a week or two.

I don't know which is the worst part of being sick: the constant temperature fluxuations (now I'm hot, now I'm cold, now I'm hot again), the coughing until I want to throw up, or the lethargy.

Like most others, I think I'm going to do a great majority of my posts from here out as Friends-Only. There will probably be some not, but if you're not on my friends list, you'll be missing out.

Um, so if you want to be added, leave a comment and let me know.

At some point, you have to look at something, and ask, is it worth it? This is in a purely economic benefit/cost way. Do I get more out of it than I put in?

Creation is harder than destruction - indeed, and the first helps less than the second hurts. Keeping up RWL is pretty fun, given that I don't have to weed out cheaters every day. Given that I don't have to weed out cheaters every week. Given that cheaters are weeded out themselves.

Cheaters are never weeded out themselves.

I had a moment of grim satisfaction today - in the sort of "I told you so" sense. If anyone is idiotic enough to think Josh is just a nice guy now, I will call them a deluded waste of attention, and be done with them. I can do this, because it is a major indicator of their feelings of right and wrong. It is like (on a much, much, much, much smaller scale) holocaust deniers.

I don't know if I should try to get more in-game admins. I suspect not...in a purely benefit/cost way, their eagerness to do /something/ as an in-game admin will provide more trouble than the benefit of having someone to watch over things.

so...I guess I do what I can.

I have come up with what I think has happened. Josh (Southern Shadows #182 on turbo) had been switching between proxies for the past week, and I had been keeping up. I suspect he finally hit one that was caught, and got Scores Impaired (put to the bottom of the scores list). That may or may not have happened, but it might've.

Anyway, he was complaining that he'd like to mess with RWL, probably to Beatles, and Beatles went and told him about his newfound language: HTTP, where he could spoof referrers and do all sorts of things. Josh and maybe Beatles or Dead Eye took that advice, and then went and messed everything up, because he hated RWL and the fact that he kept getting found out and disabled.

He thought it would be funny if he deleted everyone's password, gave everyone lots of stuff, and put his name all over everything. Haha. Funny. Like getting a candle stuck up his butt.

Then he went to sleep, confident that he was a funny and cool and powerful guy. We shall see if we can change that perception over the next few weeks. If you happen to be talking to him, call him a Useless Waste Of Life, and ask him to jump off a bridge.

I grabbed Fight Club yesterday.

I read it in four hours.

The cover is so beautiful. The inside design is so-so, but the contrast, the layered complexity of the cover is stunning. It's not Brad Pitt, and it's the newer version, and it has little soap bubbles layered over things in a sort of veneer. "Fight Club: A Novel" is in Serifed text, centered, white, on the picture of some guy with a bloody lip. I wish I could design stuff like this, seriously. These fiction writers sure do get the good cover designs.

Anyway...I liked the movie better. More than any other book (even Invisible Monsters), the way he ordered everything (This has happened. This was how it happened) ruined a lot of the fun. So far, Lullaby is my favorite still (but I like the more mythical stuff - my favorite Neil Gaiman is Stardust, whereas most like American Gods or Sandman [though those don't count]). Survivor is my brother's favorite, and that's a nice second. The movie just took the book and streamlined it, and took all the fantastic tricks which were out in the open and hid them away.

The introduction by Palahniuk is also pretty cool, it goes on about how the book was a first effort, a short story centered around the seven rules of Fight Club (http://www.geocities.com/clockworkadam/page2.htm) and then the actual novel evolved around the rules and could have been about anything, could have been about golf.

It goes on. Working backwards, this time.

I wish people who are permanently banned from RWL would just give up. This means Josh. Oh, haha. Let's all find him and kill him. I've disabled his entire clan, and hopefully it'll let people in on the message - this guy shall not play. We /really/ don't like him. If anyone whines, I will tell them to shut up.

Anyway. Very busy. I need to somehow pick up Fight Club and Diary...but I don't know when I'll get time. Not now, certainly.

I have got (measured in humanly-possible-workloads [ HPWs ]):
- AP Week! [1 whole HPW]
- Trying not to get killed by parents for a D+ in Physics! [1 HPW]
- VI [0.5 HPW]
- RWL [0.1 HPW]
- A work project for a friend [3 HPWs, and low pay, too. I, perhaps, will be able to remedy the last bit]
- Other [0.5 HPW]

For a combined workload of 6 humanly-possible-workloads! yaay. yaay.

yaay.

Give me serenity.
Flash.
(What an ending. Chuck took Invisible Monsters just one tiny step too far, the rest was just a big, "Ahh...")
(What a book [in reference to the title, from "Choke"]. Can you say...sex-crazed? Brilliantly done, I doubt any other author could pull around the reader like that, but...well, it just wasn't my cuppatea)

I woke up this morning to a storm, rumbling across the sky as I had lunch. It was near noon out, but it seemed like five AM it was so dark. I went down and started up the computer, but within a minute or two the power flickered and died. I picked up the camera and started shooting some pictures just as the rain turned into big, centimeter-wide hail.

Within a few minutes, the hail had sloshed over the gutter and piled on the porch.

In other news, my camera is officially totally dead. It takes pictures, but I can only press three buttons: On/Off, Take Picture, and switch between the last taken picture, and taking new pictures.

A week of vacation, and a lot of activity, though, admittedly, without too much progress on certain things.

I spent a lot of time hopping from college to college. Clarkson for two days, then RIT for four hours, then Syracuse for two days, and now home again. It's good to rest. Clarkson was pretty fun - a lot of work, but I think I'd fit in there. I met a few people at RIT, and was extremely wierded out. It would be a great school to go to if I didn't have to live there. Syracuse was a lot better than I expected, nicer people, nicer campus. However...37th CS in the nation? I sat in on one of their physics labs, and was a bit put off by the fact that I knew the material better than they did. It's down to Clarkson Vs. Brandeis. I'll be seeing Brandeis next week.

I got my new glasses! Yay, yippie? They're pretty interesting; it's taken a week to get used to them. When there is a bright light (intense reflection, window, light bulb, monitor, etc...) behind me, I can turn my head a little and see it reflected a bit on the edge of the glasses. It offers an unparalelled opportunity for me to be reacquainted with the tops of my ears. There was a few problems with it - the manager initially forgot to remember that he had promised a backup pair of lenses for free. and had forgotten to order the clip-ons as well. So, it turned out that we convinced them to give us both the extra lenses and the clip-on sunglasses for free. I kinda feel bad, because that's $200-$300 of free stuff they gave us...but it's very nice. The glasses are rimless, so it is a strip of titanium which bends over and connects through some very small holes drilled to the side of the lenses. Then another strip of titanium in the middle conects to small holes in both lenses, keeping the whole thing together. It is light as a feather, and very comfortable. The clip-ons just have little clips along the middle which latch onto the strip between the lenses. They're darkened - but not too darkened. It is rather nice.

Another big event in our house is the new cable package we bought, and it's subsequent purchases. We switched from DirecTV, which was an eh service (we didn't have any particular problems with it) to the Time Warner package which was the same price as our DirecTV package, but offered tons more channels and options. It has OnDemand, so on several (there are about 40) channels, you can choose what movie or show you want to watch, and when you want to watch it, and viola! it is there. Free. It also has OnDemand of box office hits (between theatres and video) which you pay for. And - and this was the bit which spurred all later purchases - it has HD.

Our old TV was just that - about 8 years old. An impressive time for a TV, and we would have thrown it out except that there is no such thing as an inexpensive big screen TV (it was 45"). I grew pretty proficient at tuning the TV so that the slow twist of red was limited only to the top right corner - barely noticable with the widescreen movies we watched. But, eight years ago, they didn't have a lot of technology which exists today. So, we (my dad) were looking for new TVs...and with this new HD ability, we decided to go and buy one.

Of course, we couldn't /just/ get a new TV. Our DVD player was old - a DIVX-DVD player which didn't have progressive scan. Our amp didn't have the right optical connections, so that needed to be replaced, and because we had a new amp which supported 7.1 surround sound instead of 6.1, we obviously needed a new speaker. A TV doesn't just stand at the right height on its own, so we needed a stand, too, and...well, you get the idea. Half the equipment in our movie room is new, all to compliment our new TV, which is very nice. It's a 64" (I believe) LCD Rear projection widescreen monitor, HD-enabled. In essence - very fine.

Suddenly, the Nature Channel is worth it to have - nothing else lets you revel as well in the amazing clarity and sharp precision of HDTV. James Bond flicks are not just intense...it's like you're there, stuck to the front of the hovercraft as he jets across the minefield in Korea.

We have 7 remotes now. It can be confusing - they are all meant to be universal remotes.

People I need to talk to: Jason/Tiven, Kenshin, Ironpaw, Newspaper Staff. Now I shan't forget.

Have you ever stuck your tongue out so far that you can see it? Without a mirror?

Have you ever tried googling your RL friends' Screen Names? Mine didn't turn up much - just the regular sites I already knew about, where they have interests or are members. If one of them googled my SN, though...it'd probably be a big surprise. I don't tell /anyone/ what I do online except people I talk to online. My real life friends (and teachers, for that matter) are completely in the dark about everything I do online, from terrouge to RWL. Sometimes I wonder what they think I do all day. Probably just sit around and watch TV. If parents ever wondered why kids drunk and did drugs, they'd have to realize that it's because their kids are dead bored all the time, and the only thing which makes life interesting is degenerating themselves to the point where walking around is a real accomplishment.