Looks like this next semester… my last semester till grad will be pretty hot cha cha.

Compilers. VLSI. Graphics. And then some. hopefully everything will be simple and easy. hahaha… right.

Well, I have a ton of experience in Graphics… and I yell at compilers almost daily now.

Also, I might be modding again some time soon for the game Neverwinter Nights 2. We’ll see.

Classes over, Spring ’09

Hoorah hooray. I guess.

Things in engineering all went pretty smooth. B’s and A’s, it seems. But everything else seemed less than satisfying. Oh well, grades will be grades, and nothing better or worse.

I’m going to keep working on user interfaces. I need to develop some better context solutions for a digital canvas.

Planting all sorts of things in the garden. Most of them really neat flowers.

The last thing to mention is that I told someone I would illustrate a bunch of their characters in watercolor… I want to practice some advanced shading tricks that I’ve seen others use.

I was thinking of doing a website design contest, but man. I hate contests like that. People waste countless hours, the design is usually sub-par to what the client could have gotten and the designer could have created. The ambiguity is killing me. I wish that people would stop doing that kind of thing, bite the bullet, and just send out a request through the university pipes, asking for someone who is interested in design work to give them a call or something. I would totally go for that.

Much like obsessive OO design hierarchy, the problem with this stuff is that it’s next to impossible to decide how much work you should put in to different portions, and many times things just get lopsided or you have to spend extra resources reducing the problem in your head or on paper.

Okay, enough ranting. I need to get back to work. Raytheon might be contacting me any hour now.

I’m having a problem logging in to moderate comments on my usf blog. For now, it appears to be a login redirect loop. I’m not sure how this could have happened, but several sites refer to it being not quite as uncommon as I’d like to think.

I am unable to do anything since I don’t have direct access to the site’s resources (it’s likely just a plugin got bust up or something).

If you’d like to comment on something here, more than likely you have my email. Just use that fellow instead.

Sorry for the inconvenience
(I got several emails recently about comments I need to moderate or look at, so that’s why I’m addressing the issue)

I have the best group ever.

Pretty much, we’re going to use tankcat or hovercat… or something else random as our logo. I’ll be posting the work I do on it as I get stuff done.

I had to reinstall adobe design prem CS3. Egads, annoying as ever. But now I have 90 some odd Gigs of free space on one partition, and 92 on another. Hoorah!

Well, this is looking good now.

Networks 2 is going to be a fun class. Doing a good bit of work in there just for the fun of it. I went through and the first thing I did was change /etc/issue and /etc/motd so that now while I’m telneting into the machines, the messages display corny jokes and such. Later, I’ll probably add a watch script to the /var/log/messages log, so that when anyone telnets into one of the machines, the /etc/issue and /etc/issue.net files read different things. That’d be awesome.

As for Cryptology… the first assignment was a little dull, but the class itself is hilarious. Be sure to go watch “The website is down” if you want something funny to watch. Should be on youtube. It does have some language, so be mindful of minors.

The rest of my classes are… well… required. Ethics is going good, communication has had it’s moments of sheer laughter (cmon… communication for engineers is like stilts for kangaroos). My semester is pretty packed with just a lot of reading and writing. And by packed, I mean barely stuffy… because last semester was the hardest I’ve ever had, and now I can’t even choke on two projects and an exam if I wanted to… because it’ll never compare to last semester, which three finals and four projects and two presentations. That is a workload to ne’er be forgotten.

More later… as I feel like it.

Amazing. I made a comic for SQL Divisions, and the prof liked it! Imma happy!

Well, I’m back in the seat. the hot seat. the ‘skip class whenever possible’ seat.

I also have filled several bristol pages and such with doodles… the kind the simply scream “The show must go on!”

I may post those… especially if class gets boring for the first month (which it always does)

Also, burnout paradise is going to be eating me alive again. Fun stuff!

This is what I have to say about programming in the 21′st century:

It’s hard…

but at least it helps you sing things that no one else understands!

Ahhhhhhhh!

I looked at document.body …. I farted around… figured out what I was actually doing with firebug… and screamed.

Holy cow, that’s some serious hot sauce. I mean, you want to code a website? Now I see just how they must be doing it. And I want to shake the hands of the guy who made Spry, in that case. That is class A: “Good grief! Do you not have a life?”

*ahem*

Amazing stuff… amazingly hard to deal with stuff.

I’ve also been playing around with Aptana Studio. Brilliant, but a tadbit unstable. This stuff is like webservice steroids (without the rash, itching, and unseemly hairy-bits)!

Well… okay… I take back the hairy-bits part. It sure has a lot to it. But web services… I’m starting to really enjoy this junk! It’s pretty flipping cool! And now I know why the people behind it get angry when others call this stuff “Web 2.0″… it makes me writhe all over again… because now I know why I should writhe!

D:

So… I dunno… my brain is smoking… either that, or there’s another forest fire near hernando county in Florida.

Ah! both… Oh, em.. golly, what a fun night!

This is a dupe from my livejournal, but just as applicable to college and my life with school work

If you aren’t in to coffee, read no further… also, if you simply don’t love people raving about old schoolisms and the “old ways” of doing something… you probably should also not read on…

I have found the meaning of life in the coffee press. After several experiments, I turned it into a science… (otherwise, you’ll wind up with coffee that tastes worse than if you percolated it) whereby I fill the pot with the water I’d want in it, then I pour it into a kettle and put it on high for 2 and a half minutes… pour it on three scoops of coffee… begin pressing after 2 mins, and then finish pressing by about 3 and a half minutes. It’s working great for the coffee I have right now… and dude! It kicks arse when you can adjust the temp like that… the coffee has a little less acid since I steep at a lower temp (it’s very easy for me to tell since I’ve had heartburn from coffee usually… so far, when I do the press right and keep it cooler, I don’t have anywhere near the trouble that I did with espresso), and the coffee has this awesome flavor to it since I get more oils out of it…

Not only that, it punches a serious kick to it if you balance it right… seems that the caffeine tends to still come out a lot even if the acidity doesn’t seem to rise… which I need to check and make sure that makes sense (chemically, I thought that caffeine might add to the acidity a bit)…

Anyhoo, AWESOME! but now I end up making my fam coffee all the time… everyone is freaking out because it was such a cheap aparatus. I think within the first two days of having it we’ve used it about…. seven to eight times? The new bag of coffee we got (this chocolate raspberry flavor is awesome) is almost completely done…

If you like to almost “cook” your coffee and enjoy messing around (the first few batches were nearly sacrificial and horrific… but then, I drank those… so no one knew) until you get it ‘just right’, then try this stuff out! the coffee presses are a lot cheaper than an espresso machine and I’ve gotten nearly the same caffeine overload (especially when you steep longer and add more heat… you just make the grinds a little larger so it doesn’t get as bitter… and that means you’ll need to get a good grinder or have a good ‘trigger finger’ for those portable, cheapo grinders).

Coffffeeeeeee powurrrrrr! *blast*

*dances around… bounces off walls… drives parents crazy*

WOOOOOOOOOOEEEEEEE!