School, music, and Halloween.

Whoops.
by AC - permalink

Funny thing about my last post: I did actually have a lab due after the break in my logical programming/PERL class, but I somehow misread the due date. I explained this to my professor after miraculously getting two-thirds of it done in the half-hour of lab time she gave us during class, and she said I could just finish it and turn it in next class, only losing the standard 5 points (out of 100) for being one day late. Oh well, I thought, but after lunch I was feeling productive, and wrote the final, unexpectedly complex program in about an hour. I printed out the source and console and brought the final lab to her in her office. And surprisingly, I got full credit. Let's have a round of applause for her flexible grading, and for my procrastination skills. I never had a wasted, beer-and-football-filled weekend be so productive in my first go-round at college ten years ago.

School has taken up so much of my idle time that I've been neglecting most of the things that used to make existence bearable, including gaming and music. I'm spending so much of my time in front of my monitor, both at school and at home, that I haven't played much of anything lately, only spending an hour or so every now and then on a new play-through of Far Cry, which just never gets old. But tonight I devoted a couple of hours to my sadly neglected bass guitar, digging up some old songs via YouTube that I used to play religiously years ago. Amazingly, not only could I still play bass lines like Radiohead's "Paranoid Android," Clutch's "The Yeti," and Flea's immortal line in "Soul to Squeeze," they actually came pretty naturally and easily. I can't begin to fathom how going from playing almost every day to playing three or four times a month can have made me better, but that's how it feels.

Anyway. Halloween is here, and like every other holiday, I was sick of it weeks ago. The other day I was in a Rite-Aid and they were stocking an entire aisle with Christmas items. What the fuck is that? The orange-and-black-labeled Skittles aren't even in the discount bin yet, and you're trying to sell me wrapping paper and garland? In another week I'll have had enough of Christmas, and it won't even be winter. Bah.

Time well wasted.

Mini-vacations rule.
by AC - permalink

Fall break, aka five-day weekend, ended today. I had no assignments from any of my classes, other than to read two pages of the PERL intro and to start on a tutorial on tables in my HTML class -- both of which I finished last Thursday. So the break was pretty much just football, beer, and catching up on my gaming. I finally got around to playing the Prey demo, which I downloaded to my backup drive way back before my system restore, and I was really impressed. It's a solid, polished demo of what looks to be a much deeper game than I expected. While the art direction is very reminiscent of Doom 3 and Quake 4 -- not a great idea for only the third game, after those two, to use the Doom 3 engine -- it does have its own style of gameplay, with its much heralded (at the time) portals. They go way beyond just level-hopping, on one occasion delivering a truly fantastic, "What the hell just happened?" moment. I even like the Duke Nukem-ish way your avatar, Tommy, frequently speaks. Usually, it's just something like, "What the fuck is going on here?" but hey, whatever. The demo took me well over an hour to complete, which was a nice surprise.

On the other hand, we have the single-player demo of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which is more like 20 minutes long, but which left me so floored that I've decided to put off buying the Orange Box and save my money for this game. It's just spectacular. Even at fairly high in-game settings, it runs shockingly well on my rig. It appears to run on a modified version of the same engine powering CoD 2; i.e. a heavily modified Quake III engine. Even without the shader model 3 goodies, it looks amazing, and I love Infinity Ward for recognizing that backwards-compatibility is very important in PC games. That damned MoH: Airborne Assault demo turned out to be a wasted download, as it requires an SM3-compatible card to even install. Just when I start to forget why I hate EA, they give me another reason.

Anyway. I'm working slowly but surely towards 100% completion in GTA San Andreas. I'm at around 94% now, and all that worries me is beating multiple levels of Bloodring Banger, which I hate, those air races at the Venturas airport, and the NRG challenge, which I've never beaten before. We'll see. I'm also replaying Far Cry after installing the 1.4 patch for the first time. I've been wary about this patch for a while now, as the others have done more harm than good, but it seems to be working out well. Load times are significantly lower, those instant-reboot bugs are a no-show, and I haven't seen any rainbow shadows yet.

Speaking of which, I just finished downloading Radiohead's In Rainbows free and legally, though I feel a little guilty about entering a price of $0. In my defense, I don't have any money, and though I did pay for OK Computer once upon a time, I lost it a long while ago. I really like In Rainbows so far, "Bodysnatchers," "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi," "All I Need," and "Videotape" especially. I was disappointed by Kid A and Amnesiac, and while I did like parts of Hail to the Theif, I never got around to buying it. In Rainbows, though, hooked me immediately. I'm looking forward to burning it so I can listen to it on the long drive to and from school.

Homework.

This page contains over 100 code faults.
by AC - permalink

My god, have I been busy. My web programming class alone is sucking up over six hours a day outside of class, just sitting in front of a monitor writing HTML. I actually had a dream about coding a style sheet this week. My long-lost background in web page design has been a godsend, as I'm way ahead of the curve in terms of concepts and basic HTML structure. The problem is how far things have progressed since I stopped writing web sites. Simple tags I still remember are now either redacted or style attributes of other tags, and much of the syntax is totally different now. The upside is that it's helping me in my programming class, which is starting to kick my ass.

Technically, it's called Logic and Problem Solving for Programmers. What that means is that now that we've moved from the basics and are now actually writing programs in PERL, I have to go through these steps that are really just bogging me down. Instead of just figuring out the objective and thinking in terms of the programming language, which I'm doing automatically, I have to write it down in "pseudocode," create a friggin' flowchart, and then actually write the damned program. I've got perfectly working bits of code here, but I'm working overtime trying not to lose points on the stupid goddamn flowchart I have to turn in showing how I planned out the program that I wrote -- without the flowchart. Essentially, it's writing the program all over again, but deliberately leaving steps out and trying to remember which ones not to omit. Bah.

I actually do enjoy the web programming class, though. I'm not doing much copy-'n-paste, as I've found the more I type out the code, the better I remember it, which means less referencing. We've been given our first test, a long list of required elements for a pre-defined site consisting of several pages, and I'm hammering it out fairly quickly. Unfortunately, it's due the same day as a detailed run-down of the elements I'll be using in my final project original site (which means I'm going to have to write most of it way before it's due), a huge lab assignment in the PERL class, and an exam in my regional geography course. This is going to be a fun fucking weekend.

On the geek front, it's nice having new episodes of Heroes to look forward to. It's the first time I've had a new, non-syndicated network show to anticipate since the last, sadly underrated Trek series was canceled. Sunday makes me happy with new episodes of Lucy, the Daughter of the Devil and Metalocalypse. Putting aside my loathing of Michael Crichton after his laughable State of Fear, I'm reading his '99 novel Timeline, which was made into a dumbed-down but somewhat enjoyable movie. I'll probably re-read the final Harry Potter book after that, and I'm thinking about diving back into Chuck Palahniuk's early books later. I think I've had time to heal after reading Choke four years ago. Maybe.