The internet owns me.

Bah, these kids and their techno-whatever.

So I was finally peer-pressured into setting up my own half-assed blip in the MySpace continuum. "Everybody has one," they said, so like a good doggie, I obeyed. It's been a decent time-waster, if nothing else. And sorting through the spam friend requests is pretty entertaining. I mean it was, until the sixth one in two days, after which I started filtering them.

I'm in a weird head-space about school this semester. The only course I'm taking that I have even the slightest interest in is the client-side JavaScript programming class, and it only meets once a week. The networking course would be interesting if it weren't so frustrating that it's three hours long and taught by a total dingbat. I just want to get down to the really fun, challenging stuff, but for now I'm slogging through the requirements. Meanwhile, Real Life is hammering on my door, I'm busy trying to find a job that will fit with my schedule, and school is suddenly more of a burden than an opportunity.

Whatever. I started looking into the recent news about Mozilla hiring some guys from something called Humanized, and found a beautiful bit of programming they've written called Enso. I installed Enso Launcher this afternoon and I'm already addicted to it. If you meet the minimum recommended nerd requirements, be sure to check it out.

Speaking of which, apparently I don't meet the requirements for xkcd. I mean, I get it. But I don't think it's funny. I think it's one of those things where you're supposed to love it if you have the dork-cred, because you can water-cooler how cool it is with your fellow techies. But honestly, do we really need an unfunny, stick-figure, hardcore-geek version of Penny Arcade? Anyone up for that? Thought not.

Somewhat off.

Blah.
by AC - permalink

Feeling curiously tired and discombobulated (long word of the day), especially considering I slept all day. Well, it wasn't really "sleep" so much as a long series of continuously interrupted naps. And I didn't even go to bed until 7:30am, so maybe it's not so curious. This is so fucking boring, okay moving on.

The Li'l Film Fest went down Saturday and it was a hell of a thing. Giant, huge rush hearing people laugh at my short when it came up, especially as it followed Oddly Bouyant's faux-commercial starring Markus Seaberry, which was hysterical. The film turned out great -- not perfect, but funny and I think my idea came across well. If not, who fucking cares, people laughed!

Somehow I ended up sitting three seats down from Craig Brewer. I didn't really talk to him, but that probably wouldn't have turned out well anyway. I have a very strong suspicion that I would have blurted out something like, "Yeah, I'm glad you thought it was funny. Ah, you know, listen you should know that I've seen 15 minutes of a bootleg of Hustle & Flow, but otherwise I really don't know anything about you at all... I hear you do films." Not awkward at all.

Anyway it was also a pretty bittersweet night. Morgan Fox announced that after February the MeDiA Co-op will no longer be able to use its current space at the 1st Congo on Cooper. Then Sarah Fleming said that she and Chris Reyes are just flat out of the time it takes to keep the Li'l Film Fest afloat, and that Live From Memphis will not be producing it anymore. Fortunately there is definitely some hope on the horizon on that end; way, way too early to say anything about that just yet, but I do hope to be involved one way or another.

Oh, I have two of my final grades, in my two toughest classes, although "tough" is relative compared to those other "courses." Anyway 95 and 99 is a hell of a start for me. I never, ever expected to do this well. I mean that was the plan, but jebus, when did I get all book-smart? Where was this a goddamn decade ago? If I can't keep this going in the Spring, I'll be... well, not too shocked, but not very happy about it either.

Where am I?

Oh, right, I still have stuff to do.
by AC - permalink

Sometimes it's nice to just sleep all damn day. I topped several consecutive late, late nights working on stuff for finals week and getting almost no sleep with a badly-timed late night out. Sort of sleepwalking right now, but I'm wrapping up my XHTML final project; after tomorrow I'll be done for the semester. Anyway, I went out to see Annie in the karaoke finals at what I'll politely not call a redneck bar. It was worth it though, both for her "giant parrot singing Tracy Chapman" act and for some girl named Michelle's bluesy take on Purple Rain.

Afterwards I headed home because I was exhausted, but then I caught myself copping out on some potential fun, said "Fuck it" out loud in the general direction of my windshield, and headed to Newby's for open-mic night, where my friends in Falling for Grey were playing. They were fantastic, btw. By 2am it had started to rain and I was nearly unconscious after basically not sleeping for 48 hours, so I decided to book and came on home, and promptly passed out for too many hours to count.

Just before heading out though, I watched the Griz get their brains beat out by Detroit. It was relatively close at the end, but it just felt like the Pistons were toying with them. I don't know what's going on with this team's defense. I mean how can it be getting worse? This is one of the most nauseating box scores I've ever seen. Two steals? Fourteen fewer assists on just four fewer made baskets? And why did Mike Miller take four shots in 39 minutes? I watched the game, and I still have no idea.

At one point Warrick was isolated and actually passed the ball to Lowry, who gave it right back! No! Okay, it was the right play, as Hak's man shifted to help on Kyle. The problem is, Hak made the shot. Positive reinforcement of bad habits is not good. But whatever. I'm still finding it worth the pain to watch Rudy Gay. I love the fact that you can see him flip a switch in his head every night when he decides to just take over, and then he actually does it. Jacob Riis agrees with me:

The rap on Gay coming out of college and on into his rookie season was that he wasn’t assertive. Well, that’s not the player we’re seeing on the floor right now. We’re seeing someone who really wants to try to take over games and take the big shots and someone who’s ability to create good shots all over the floor continues to develop and impress.

I'm not so crazy about the fact that Rudy has to keep flipping that switch back on again during a game. Why is it going off in the first place? But overall the signs are all positive with this kid.

It's crunch time, whatever that means.

That was quick...
by AC - permalink

The end of the semester is suddenly here. I managed to get caught up in all but one of my classes, somehow. I still have labs due next week in PERL and HTML, as well as a test each, and my final HTML project, but at least I'm not behind anymore after last night's marathon coding session (thanks, Mountain Dew and cheap beer). I'm done, for all intents and purposes, with my 1001 Office class. The only thing left to turn in is PowerPoint tutorials 1 and 2, and I did them this afternoon. I won't even mention that geo class. I may be kinda screwed there, but it's my own fault. I got too behind while working on my short film.

Annie did manage to submit our tapes on Monday, and I owe her for that as she and CMB were evidently editing her short until 4am that morning. It's a good thing I got in, as I've been handing out copies of a flier to my friends at school that Monica threw together in class yesterday. I have a revised version I'm going to get approved for posting around campus tomorrow. We want as many people as possible to come out to the fest on the 15th.

My mobile playlist in the car and at school lately has condensed to Deftones, Flyleaf, Portishead, and Violent Femmes. At home I'm still looping my .flv library of cool bass songs. More school work has meant less TV and more music as I'm spending hour after hour in front of my PC. All I've really made time for is Heroes (which is over now) and Grizzlies games, which are bittersweet most of the time. I've been breaking from work to play bass and write email, and occasionally to eat. Haven't had time for much else. I guess this is what the next three semesters will be like.

Finally managed to speak in person to my new advisor today, he seems like a nice enough guy. He's actually involved in planning courses for the Web tech major, so he should be exactly the guy I need. Have a meeting with him Thursday at 4, so by the end of the week I should know what kind of course load I'll have in the Spring. Trying to balance it with what I'd like to do in the local film scene will be the tricky part. Turns out a local director/musician, who I randomly bumped into twice in the last week, lives like three blocks from me. Hopefully some opportunities will open up for me there. We'll see.

Well, that was interesting.

We now returned to our regularly scheduled drudgery.
by AC - permalink

After a hectic, exhausting, and fast weekend, my short film is done. Not by choice, there are still several things I'd like to tweak, but there's just no time. It should be turned in tomorrow morning (God I hope it is) and it's just out of my hands now. From script to completion in 48 hours. Hell of a timetable for an utter n00b. I started setting up at 9:30am Saturday, we started filming around 11:30, and we were wrapped by 4:30. Byerly and I got the editing and post done tonight in around four hours. All that's left to do is show up for the fest on the 15th.

So now it's back to schoolwork, and for the first time since I've been back I'm way, way behind now. I may well end up missing my class tomorrow afternoon so I can focus on the huge amount of PERL and HTML I haven't gotten done yet for Tuesday and the paper I'm supposed to have been writing for my regional geo course. All we're doing tomorrow is introing PowerPoint, so I might actually go in and just sit there writing code. The instructor knows pretty clearly that I'm probably more qualified to teach this course than she is, and she lets me do whatever I want in class. Never thought I'd say something like that.

Last night the Griz beat the holy hell out of the Wolves, so naturally it wasn't televised. This is becoming a recurring theme and it's really damn annoying. Still, they've won three of four, and Darko's back in the lineup. The best news about this game is that it was a game they really were expected to win -- which can be dangerous for a young team -- and not only did they take it seriously, they ratcheted up their level of play quarter after quarter until they finally sent in the subs with nearly a 40-point lead in the fourth. They've put a shellacking on a few lesser teams this year, and coupled with very close losses to powerhouses like San Antonio, Dallas, and New Orleans, and a victory over Houston, I think they're still deceptive at 6-10. This season should hit a noticeable upswing by the new year.

Finding something meaningful.

Bail out now, because this post is just for me.
by AC - permalink

The word "busy" cannot even begin to approach how complicated things have gotten lately. But I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way. First, of course, we have school. The semester is winding down, and my workload on that front has jumped up considerably. While I've managed to stay ahead of things in my HTML class despite a pretty imposing workload, I'm barely keeping up with my programming. Each lab assignment is built upon the last, which was built upon the last, etc. That means each of the three to four programs in every lab incorporates everything from each previous lab's programs. Things are getting complicated here, and I'm working my ass off to maintain the A average I promised myself I would have in my second stab at college.

But the real reason I've been so busy is the short film I'm making. I'm directing a short I wrote for Live From Memphis' eighth quarterly Lil' Film Fest. It's been a tremendous amount of work, but I don't think I've ever worked so hard at something so satisfying. Everyone in the Memphis indie film scene who has been helping me has been fantastic, as have my friends who have also never done this before. My friend Monica encouraged me to make this after reading my first draft, which I basically threw together on a whim out of sheer boredom, and before I knew it, she had contacted some great people who are volunteering to act in it, edit it, and just generally hold my hand as I try to do something I've never even considered attempting before.

To add to the stress, shooting was pushed back to next Saturday, just two days before it has to be submitted to be eligible for the festival on December 15. With so much going on, I feel like I'm on the clock 24 hours a day, unpaid, as I'm continually fielding questions about the film from those involved and perfecting the script and schedule, all while trying to take care of my house and my dogs, who are getting needier every day because of my long absences, and trying to maintain my insane grades in school.

Going back to school, I'm sort of in uncharted territory here. I'd never been more than a C+/B- student before, at least outside of standardized testing, and I'm averaging high-A's in everything now. This was my goal when I decided to go back to school, but realistically, I didn't think I could pull it off. Now I'm trying to maintain it, and the pressure is building. On top of that, I'm putting more into my music (playing bass guitar) than I ever have before. I still can't explain it, but I've never been better, and I'm determined to build on it. So I'm forcing myself to find at least an hour every day to practice. All manner of songs and genres, in multiple keys and styles. If I didn't enjoy it so much, I wouldn't be working so hard.

But all this is wreaking havoc on me physically. My insomnia is worse than ever, despite how tired I am. I'm also losing weight, which is not a great thing, as I've always struggled with gaining weight, and right now I'm 6'2" and barely reaching 160. My appetite is virtually nil, I have to force myself to eat. I'm intentionally eating healthier food, and I started working out again daily two months ago, but I think all that's doing is decreasing what little fat reserves I have while building a little muscle mass, which my abnormally high metabolism immediately starts consuming. If I had the resources, I'd consult a nutritionist, but I don't even have a fucking GP.

Still and all, I think I'm getting to a really good place. I'm done playing catch-up to my younger days, when I was first on my own, going to college, and things were still on the upswing. Trying to get back to that point -- over a decade ago now -- was a fucking pipe dream, and I held onto it for far too long. I'm hitting a new plateau now, doing things both personally and professionally that I didn't know I ever could. I have a great new friend with a beautiful little daughter, and this afternoon she handed me a painting she made, and said it was just for me. I have no idea what the hell it's supposed to be, but it's one of the most beautiful gifts I've ever been given. That's the kind of purity, artistically and personally, that I'm trying to reach now. I don't care if it's with music, or film, or web design, or just being a good person. For the record, I put it on my refrigerator.

A while ago, Monica said to me, just in passing, referring to another conversation she'd had, that we're just into our thirties, and that's not old; we're entering the prime of our lives. When she said that, everything went blurry for a moment as I realized I'd just heard something very important, and I needed to figure out why. No one had ever said that to me before. And she was right. Now is the time to make the most of life, because this is when the really good shit starts to happen. I'm grabbing every new opportunity that comes along now, because I'm tired of playing conservatively. I feel like I have the tools to do anything now, and if I fail, fine. It's a feeling I haven't had since I was as little kid, and the implications of suddenly finding my potential again at 31 are so profound that I'm sort of still processing it. The only thing I know for sure is that I'm, if not entirely happy, at least hopeful again, and that's not a feeling that you can fool yourself into believing in.

Changes coming. Maybe.

Also, I'm really busy.
by AC - permalink

I'd apologize for the lack of updates, but nobody reads this anyway. I'm thinking hard about archiving a number of posts and relaunching the blog with a new, ground-up redesign. I'm kickin' ass and takin' names (yes, literally) in my HTML course, and I think it's giving me an undeserved confidence in all things Web. My average is currently something like 99.6, and that's only because I keep passing on simple extra credit opportunities. The overall average from all four courses I'm taking is in the 97-98 range, but it's only because I'm doing virtually nothing else but schoolwork.

Real Life (read: having a life) is also eating up my free time, but in a good way. Saturday night I went with my friend Monica to the Memphis MeDiA Co-op to see the premier of a local indie film called omg/HaHaHa that she and her daughter had bit parts in. The film was fucking unbelievable. Director Morgan Fox, who's a really sweet guy, btw, addressed the unexpectedly large crowd before it started, and extended an open invitation to play Pac-Man on the big screen before the event started. Don't even try to rank that on the Midtown-o-meter, it'll just break. The movie itself was indescribable, so I won't try to describe it. But it was touching, and sad, and hilarious, and real, and thoughtful, and joyous, and beautiful, and experimental in any number of ingenious ways. He's working on getting a limited run at the Studio on the Square, and I can't wait to see it again (and again, and again...).

An extended trailer, more of a mini-cut, really, of Morgan's new documentary, This is What Love in Action Looks Like, ran before omg, and unbelievably, it looks even better. The trailer alone choked me up, it's just (and I'm going to do this again, but shorter) illuminating, and uplifting, and heartbreaking, and will definitely demand attention, just as omg will when it hits the festivals. More of Morgan's films and those he supports can be found at the sawed-off collaboratory pictures MySpace page.

To make the weekend even more surreal, I was back in Cooper-Young the very next afternoon to visit my grandma with my dad. Prowling exactly the same streets just hours after watching such a moving film all about the dynamic between parents and children for such a reason was... interesting, to say the least. I think I'm still processing it.

This seems weird and wrong, but I'm going to go ahead and move on to basketball now (that was my half-assed segue, and I'm not apologizing for it). The Grizzlies had a ridiculous night against the Rockets this evening. Darko went off (20 and 6), Lowry out-rebounded Yao, and Pau stepped up and clinched it with four straight freebies in the final minute. Miller had another solid all-around game after his slow start, and Rudy is proving to me that he's determined to bring something really special to the floor every night this season. His game is improved in every possible facet over last year, and his confidence is off the charts. This kid could be really, really good. My 6pm class ran long, so I missed most of the first half, but it was still a great way to wrap up a long, exhausting day.

Sometimes a loss is still a win.

Yes, I'm still a homer.
by AC - permalink

The new-look Griz lost their season opener Wednesday night, and I haven't been more encouraged by a loss since they were robbed in Detroit a few years ago during the Hubie era. They played their asses off, and could easily have beaten the defending champion Spurs were it not for some new team chemistry-caused turnovers, questionable time out management, and bad officiating down the stretch. I don't really blame the refs for the latter, as the Spurs are notorious for browbeating ref crews into giving them calls, and Wednesday night it was no different. The San Antonio Floppers Spurs left the Forum with a win, but the Griz earned a highly documented moral victory, taking an elite team to the wire. Not bad for the team with last season's fewest wins.

Darko was awesome. Rudy was solid. Lowry was fearless. Pau, Damon, and Miller showed why they deserve their new Team Captain badges. It was a terrific game, and the first thought I had when it was over was that if these guys play this hard this season, they're going to win a lot of games. This is a heavily-overhauled team, and the lineups that played Wednesday have really never played together before other than in practices. As the season progresses, they will only get better. If they started the season by nearly beating an elite, Western Conference powerhouse, they may be a lot better than even the most optimistic of us thought they could be.

Moving on, I have a lot of work to do this weekend. I tried to get way ahead in my web programming course by finishing my second test a week early, but I ran into a couple of doc-level sub-classes I've never heard of before. I'm positive we never went over this in class, and I can't even find anything similar on the web. I wanted to get this thing done because I have a huge amount of PERL to write, and it's incredibly time-consuming. I should probably be working on it now, but I'm just too tired. The only reason I'm up so late is I'm waiting to see a friend on channel 5 at 4am. She sent out a text message reminding me of it, and I made a mental note to TiVo it. Then I made another mental note to buy a TiVo, but I never got around to it.

I guess I'll fill the time with some gaming. Taking the advice of Koroush Ghazi of TweakGuides.com, I decided to move my cache file (virtual memory) to my secondary hard drive and increase it from 1.5GB to 2.5GB, and it seems to be working. I haven't run any really system-taxing games yet, but Unreal Tournament 2004 ECE and Call of Duty 2 (in DX7 mode) have been flying along without any hitches. I'm going to jump back into Far Cry and Half-Life 2 to see if there's any difference there.

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.

Mice need attention, too.

The importance of dpi. Also, I feel old.
by AC - permalink

I finally got around to buying a new mouse this afternoon. This is riveting stuff here, I know, so hold on to your ass. Anyway, I've been using a cheap IBM optical mouse for at least two years, and I never liked it, but have never been able to bring myself to either compromise and buy a cheap mouse that's marginally better or spend a ton of money (for me) on a nice six-button programmable dual-laser mouse with built-in cruise control and stun setting. But today is my birthday, so I thought, "Fuck it, I hate this thing," and bought a new mouse. It's a nice, affordable little Logitech 1000dpi tilt-wheel deal. Not a barn-burner, it's sort of a Toyota Celica of a mouse; sporty enough, but it won't blow your panties off. It's narrower than what I'm used to, but smooth and quick and has a little more weight to it than most mice, which I like. My first mouse was a very light little Logitech two-buttoner -- this was before wheel mice existed -- but when I replaced it with a much heftier Microsoft number, my Quake scores went up dramatically. End of discussion.

On Monday I'll have finished my first round of tests since returning to college after ten years, and it hasn't been too difficult. I'm taking things more seriously this time around, and was better prepared for my exams than I was before. That's how it seemed, at least, as twice in one day I easily finished my exam, double-checked every answer, and was still the first to finish by a wide margin. Most of the people in my classes are a decade younger than me, right out of high school, with one or two others my age or older. The kids (yes, I'm calling them kids) are like me when I was attending the U of M; they just don't know how important a single test can be when you get to college. When you only have four, they all matter. This ain't high school.

I'm really enjoying the programming (1002) and basic HTML (2010) courses. In 2010 we're about to start CSS, which is where I left off in writing my own HTML years ago. In 1002, we've passed the basics -- which has already been all new to me -- and are about to start actual programming in Perl. Considering I've just gone from having only the most rudimentary understanding of binary to being able to do binary-to-decimal-to-hex conversions in my head, I'm somewhat confident, although I know the real memorization and formatting slog is coming up.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention, being an unapologetic homer*, I also treated myself to a sweet birthday official Tennessee Titans baseball cap. So now I have my Titans cap, two awesome University of Memphis caps from my dad, and my retro-2001-style official Memphis Grizzlies cap I found brand new at, inexplicably, a gas station for four bucks. I'm all geared up and ready, head-wise, for the upcoming seasons.

*A "homer", one who roots exclusively or disproportionately for athletic teams from one's home town or area. -- Wikipedia

New tricks.

I don't feel like an old dog. But I am.
by AC - permalink

So obviously the blog has been left to stagnate this month. I've been busy navigating the almost incomprehensible administrative mess that Southwest calls its admissions and registration departments. After hours and hours of being shuttled from one office to another, three dozen unheeded voicemails, and two weeks of limbo after my University of Memphis transcript was lost -- twice -- I somehow managed to get fully admitted and registered, and I've just finished my first week of college in almost nine and a half years.

I'm taking an intro computer course focused on MS Office 2007 (which explains why the book costs $136), a basic (not BASIC) programming course, a web programming course, and a gen-ed cultural geography course. I had planned on taking at least one more, but surprisingly, my U of M record covers 14 hours I can apply to my IT Web Tech major. This semester shouldn't be too difficult, the fun will start later on, when I get into client- and server-side apps, advanced Java, XML, SQL, etc. Since I have virtually nothing else to do, I'm determined to ace every course I take over these four+ semesters, but after a decade, it's going to be hard to retrain my brain for this kind of focus and constant work.

I did get a surprisingly encouraging sign from the deeper recesses of my head when I had to take the math portions of the COMPASS test at the last minute to qualify for the web programming course. I haven't done any sort of higher math since high school, but I managed to get through it with almost perfect scores with no preparation at all. I have no idea how that happened.

The most surreal thing about this whole experience has been wandering around the campuses and realizing that I'm older than a good 95% of the students there. I feel like a high school senior in a school that goes right down to sixth grade. The thing is, I don't look much older than any of them, and in fact I look younger than a lot of them. But I realize much better how different this is from high school, and even in the first week I've noticed that I'm spending a lot more time talking to my professors after class than, say, standing around in the hall talking to my cell phone. If we were all dropped into the Thunderdome, these kids would swagger right up to Master Blaster, absolutely certain that they can kick his ass because, hey, how hard can it be? Meanwhile, I'd be on the outside calculating exactly how quickly I can get at that chainsaw over in the corner, and trying to figure out a way to smuggle in a shotgun, just in case.

Starting over.

Aka, what the fuck?
by AC - permalink

I woke up this morning (okay, afternoon) to an insurmountable drive error that ended up with me being forced to perform a full system recovery. For whatever reason, the sector on my primary hard drive containing all the boot data was irreparably corrupted. So after hours of fruitless troubleshooting and more hours of reinstallation, here I am again, with a clean Windows XP install and all my 120+ GB of whatever-I-had-that-took-up-all-that-space gone. It's actually not as bad as it could have been. At first, I thought my 200GB primary drive was fried, leaving me with my backup 100GB drive. If I'd been forced to reinstall Windows to that drive, not only would my total drive space have been cut by two-thirds, I would have lost all my backup data I was using it for in the first place.

Still, it's going to take me days to restore everything, and a lot of data has been lost forever. The timing is just fucking perfect, as I'm in the middle of the readmission process. I'm trying to get back into college full time, and I'm going to need my PC. The last thing I need is a driver error that wipes out a damned thesis and all my research. So I'm concentrating on getting all my drivers and software updates reinstalled and working together.

The stock-level system restore has brought to my attention all the gradual updates I've made to this rig, and how difficult it was getting everything to work. Since I bought this PC last January, I've added a second hard drive and a new video card, yanked the modem, and replaced the power supply unit, CPU, main cooling fan, and heatsink. On top of the 76 updates I've already downloaded from Microsoft, I still have to re-up the sound and video drivers, find all the Media Center and Media Player updates, and rip my entire CD library again.

Just to get ready for all the re-installations I had to spend an hour uninstalling all the prepackaged software I never wanted in the first place. My favorite moment has to be when my PC suddenly crashed and rebooted during the removal of the AOL software. Now I'll need TweakUI just to remove the defunct AOL entry in the add/remove programs list. But that's the tip of an iceberg, I have Gigs worth of utilities to reinstall, everything from Open Office to Ad-Aware.

Okay, I'm going to microwave some leftovers and start combing through all my backup discs now. 'Night all.