Archive for November, 2003

Holy shit! I’m doing my homework… er at least I’m looking at it. I can’t even understand the question, let alone come up with an answer. So, I figure.. fuck it… I’ll Google it. Lo and behold, only 1 hit on the entire internet. The Queen’s Unversity of Belfast, Ireland is the only place that shows up this question. And it’s on their required test for graduation for a degree in engineering. WTF is that all about? Kinda makes me think that this shit is a little bit above the level of a junior int the “School Internet Technology” at Illinois State University. This teacher of ours would make Darth Vader say, “Damn! The Dark Side runs strong in this one!” Oh well. I’m just gonna keep pluggin away at it. I’m gonna try to take as much out of this class as possible, hope for a C, and take it over if I must. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

My Wednesday is gonna be a rough one. I have 2 tests, a quiz, a lab report, and homework all due on Thursday. Looks like I’ll be sleeping existing in the halls of Old Union tomorrow night. Thank –insert diety here– we’ve only got about 2-3 more weeks of class. I don’t know if I could take it any more than that.

On the bright side… I struggled all damn weekend to get the stupid Sparc “emulator” working. I quoted it because it is not truely an emulator. It’s a bastardized, this is how the Sparc register system works, imitation of an emulator. I first attempted to write the damn thing using a class containing an array of integers that represented the registers and a nested class inside that one to represent each window. What a fucking mistake that one was. I was choking on them big ol’ donkey balls. I had pointers pointing at everything from the kitchen sink to the moon. I’d try to put the window on the stack… and I’d get 1 of 2 things back: the right number and shit…. and we was fresh out of the right number. The problem was that since my window was really only an array of pointers to each of the members of the real array, that when I put the addresses on the stack the data values were being written over. So when I restored the window, they were pointing at the correct registers but the correct data was visiting Jimmy Hoffa.

So, Tuesday morning at 8 am… program due at 12:35… I started coding it all over again from scratch. This time I created a doubly linked circular list with each node representing a register. I then simply pointed the current window pointers and the window invalid mask pointers at their respective locations. Then when I needed to put the window on the stack, I simply put the data stored at that location on the stack. It worked like a fucking champ. From scratch to function in less than 3 hours. I spent the rest of the damn time trying to figure out how to make one of those –insert diety here– -forsaken Unix makefiles. What the fuck kind of sick ass joke are those!!!! Lets just say I learned real quick, and that I got the damn thing turned in on time. Oh glory!

I’d have to say that getting that program done was the highlight of my whole week. I really need to get back to my training. I’m getting weak and fat again, and vanirtjones is getting lazy on me. ;-p I need to wup that boy back into shape.

Well… as they always say in the movies…. That is all.

Well, this week is about par for the course, as the cliche goes, for my life. I had aa physics test, a physics lab report due, a statistics quiz, and our hardware exam was returned.

Item: Physics test.
Condition:
I went into the physics test feeling great. For the first time this semester I knew exactly what I was doing. I understood all the concepts. I did all the sample problems and the practice test perfectly.

Result:
I performed all the calculations correctly. I worked the problems correctly. I simply used the wrong data. Go figure. I hope the guy is lenient and gives me some partial credit. It just pisses me off because I knew what I was doing, but I simply used the wrong values so that I actually got all the problems wrong. I’m terrified to see the results.

Item: Physics Lab

Conditions:
We performed the lab as a table instead of as partners like normal. The lab was very time consuming and very noisy, so we were ordered to perform the lab as tables. We broke the lab into two parts. Ryan and I did one part. Goober and Gomer did the other. All seemed to go well. That is, until I got around to performing the calculations…

The lab was to compute the velocity of a projectile shot from a “gun”, in two different situations, to demonstrate that mechancal energy is not lost in a closed system under conservative forces. Thus, the two velocities computed should have been very close to one another. This was not the case. I ended up with two VASTLY different velocities which had the result of “creating” kinetic energy… which we all know to be impossible. I’ll be lucky to get 10/30 pts on this lab.

Results:
Still Pending

Item: Statistics Quiz

Conditions:
I have been doing well in stats. The concepts have been very easy. Most simply reuse the same formulas over and over, and the entire course revolves around mean(mu) and standard deviation(sigma). I went into the quiz with great confidence. I looked at the quiz and suddenly realized that the quiz vaguely resembles a couple of Klingon poems. Fuck me!

Results:
Results still pending, but I’m sure that it isn’t good… especially since I don’t read Klingon.

Item: Hardware Test

Conditions:
Well, I spent 2 days studying for the test. I went to the instructor the night before to discuss some concepts. I informed him that I was very concerned about the exam. He told me, specifically, that if I understood the organization of the CPU, how the DMA works, and the organization of the SPARC circular registers that I would do fine. So, I proceeded to study these topics.

Any guesses How many of these questions were on the test? Here’s a hint… there were 22 questions on the test. Answer: 4 questions remotely involved these things.

Results:
Last night I talked to him in the hallway and he told me that he was grading the tests. He said to me, “I don’t remember the specifics, but you did just fine.” So, I’m pretty stoked. I get to class today and he puts the test stats on the board. Out of @ 18 students, 4 failed. Any guesses where I was? I’ll give you 3 chances and the first 2 don’t count. Fuck me running!

Sometimes I really don’t know why I even try. I spend all my time, or a big chunk of it anyway, studying this shit and I consistently fuck up. I just don’t get it. At ICC I had a 3.5x GPA. I kicked ass in every class. Here, my GPA is in the fucking dirt… and I’m still considered one of the better students here. It’s sad.

The worst thing is… I’m gonna be a coder. All these bullshit classes that are killing my GPA are idiotic and have about a flea’s dick’s width worth of relevance to what I’m going to be doing for a living.

I fucking hate ISU! If you’re thinking about going to school here, shoot yourself now!

I’ve always been a firm believer that a person’s dreams mean something. I believe that they are our subconsience’s way of guiding us through life. That is… until last night.

I dream a lot. Most of them are just harmless composites of past memories, usually involving old friends that I haven’t seen in a long time… except for this one where I’m having sex with someone but just can’t seem to bust a nut. I have no Idea what that one’s about.

Anyway, last night’s dream was a strange one. It involved 4 things that I can remember: the new fountain they are building in between Stevenson Hall and the College of Business, the Toyota Prius, the new movie AVP, and the circular register structure of the SPARC architecture. Talk about a true VanirTJones dream. Damn!

It starts out with Matt and I driving around in his new Toyota Prius (that he hasn’t purchased yet), and we’re just laughing and having a good time when it suddenly got really dark. It was one of those “movie darkness” scenese with the really eerie white glow that give you just enough light to see.

Next thing I know, I’m running in terror from the Alien. It was all gooey and slimey and shit, and that damn little head inside the big one was screaching something terrible. I’m running in terror, but it’s that slow motion running where I seem to be getting nowhere but the creature is gaining steadily.

Suddenly, I’m now watching myself run for my life from a distance, as if I’m following me, but not the one chasing me. Then I realize that I am The Predator and I’m watching the pursuit with my infrared vision. Just as the Alien is about to eat me, I shoot it with my laster rifle gun thingie, and the creature explodes all over the me that I am tracking; like that toy you could buy in the 80′s that had the creature in the bucket of slime. I realize as I shoot this creature that the me I am chasing is running near the uncompleted fountain in front of Stevenson Hall. The prey version of me is frozen in fear and disgust.

I leap into the air to pounce on the prey, when I am suddenly floating over the uncompleted fountain. It currently looks like a big cirlce with a bunch of pie slices. As I’m looking at the fountain in my “statis,” the fountain suddenly transforms into this gigantic, Tron-like representation of the SPARC register layout… then I wake up.

I’m still confused by this one. And what creeps me out is how “real” it seemed. I hate my dreams, because I dream in real-world, 2Gbit, super, duper, true color mode and it makes it almost impossible to tell my dreams from reality. Thus when I wake up from my dreams, I often have trouble telling that the dream is over. And this one was kinda scary.

So, any thoughts?

Yes, another weekend has gone by, and par for the course I didn’t accomplish a goddamned thing I needed too. I still have several chapters of physics to catch up on, a quiz in statistics to study for, a big physics test to study for, and a god forsaken SmallTalk program in the pathetic Squeak environment to write.

This morning Ann and I went to the gym to work out. I really didn’t feel like it, so I simply went up to the treadmills and did 2 miles on that evil machine. I made sure I called Raleigh and invited him early this weekend. He showed up and did a mile or so on the treadmill next to us. So, it ended up that Matt, Sarah, Geoff, Raleigh, Ann and I all worked out today. It was a pretty weak workout. It was cold as a witches titties and none of use really felt much like working out. So, we did the next best thing and headed to Kouri’s pub for some lunch.

Kouri’s was the usual. It’s a pretty nice little pub, but it’s getting kinda old. We all ate a decent meal and shot the shit for a couple of hours. I scored an Ippon today with the most disgusting statement made. I thought Ann and Sarah were gonna vomit on the table. Someone made a comment that reference the “salty” taste of semen and another commented, “How would you know.” To that I spouted, “All guys have to taste there own at some point.” Damn! I even make myself sick sometimes. LOL

I’m sitting here contemplating this damn “program” that I have to write in SmallTalk and the more I think about it, the less I want to do it. To be honest, it’s not even a program and it isn’t even written with SmallTalk. It’s simply a collection of useless “classes” that do nothing written in Squeak. It’s a horrible environment that resembles something you would buy at Toys R Us. The excercise is supposed to help get the idea of Object Oriented Programming across to us because the SmallTalk language is 100% OOP. I guess it might do that for the average Joe, but I’ve had 5 fucking semesters of programming with C++ including a 16 week course that dealt 100% with OOP and another that was writing programs using the Microsoft Foundations Classes… which are 100% OOP as well.

I’m so fucking sick and fed up with ISU. It seems like I do nothing but a bunch of fucking busy work that has no real world application and simply wastes all my precious time. My friend Doug, whom I work with, did some math one day and discovered that it actually costs us somewhere in the neighborhood of $20/hr for every hour we sit in these pathetic excuses for college classes. It makes me fucking sick.

That’s brings me to work… tomorrow is monday. Probably the least productive day of the week for me even though I usually work 8 hours on Mondays… and that’s bad considering I don’t even work on Wednesdays. I have a love hate relationship with my job. I love what I do… when I do it… but I hate my Job. I like the people I “work” with, but I really hate what I have to do. I actually have a job that most would consider a “dream” job… except for the shitty pay. I have free reign. They tell me they want a project and I pretty much can do whatever I want with it. The problem is… I’m a fucking creative leach. I’m a veritable black hole of creativity and motivation. Other people around me actually have 0 productivity and creativity if I’m even in the room. I’m sure that somewhere on the other side of the universe there is some poor fucker that is a volcano of creative ideas and is so fucking motivated that he’s gone insane.

It really wouldn’t be so damn bad at my job if I didn’t get such vague descriptions of what needs to be done. Make it “better.” Make it “prettier.” Make is “cooler.” Well, what the fuck does that mean. The one project that I did that on, I worked 6 damn months and came up with a site design that was not the flashiest thing in the world, but it was very elegant and everyone I showed it to loved it… except my boss. His only concern was that on a monitor with the resolution set to 640×480… no I did not stutter… the header took up over half the screen. Well fuck. Who uses a god damned 640×480 screen? I mean really. Get a clue. The minimum standard is 800×600, and most places are even as hight as 1024×768. It looked fine on both of them. So, after 6 months of work, I ended up with a site that was nothing more than a damn text header and some links… exactly what was there before, except for a change of color from an ungodly bright red to a dark maroon. What a fucking waste.

What really pisses me off is that I’m not one of those people like vanirtjones who are perfectly content to sit at work all day and read webcomics or work on personal stuff. I actually feel like I am ripping them off if I don’t get something done. And the worst part is that I feel like it makes me look like I don’t do anything. But this isn’t the case at all. When Shane or Kip, my bosses, give me something to do with concrete requirements, it has never taken more than a week to have it done. Arghhh!!! Such frustration.

And, to top it all off, I have my own damn site Barbecuguy.com that I haven’t updated in about a month because I’m so frustrated with my job that the last thing I feel like doing is more web shit when I get home.

Oh well, I did not intend to rant this long. I was actually only gonna post something like, “nothing much happened today.” Guess that point is moot.

Ok. I don’t fucking get it. I have been playing Starcraft since the fucking beta way back in like 97 or whenever. I suck so fucking bad. I don’t understand how someone can play a game for so long, so consistently and still suck so bad. I have read the articles. I have read the strategy guides. I have taken advice from others. I have played the game. I am still King of the Fucking Newbies.

Newbie… that’s an interesting term itself. When I started this fucking game, newbie meant someone who just started playing. Yeah, they usually suck because they are inexperience. I contend that I AM NOT A NEWBIE! I just suck. It seems imperative to me that I create a new name for the class of players like myself. Those of us who are definately not newbies… but suck just as bad. I must think. Hmmm….

Well, it’s somewhere after 11 pm. on a Saturday night, Die Hard 2 is blaring on the tv, and I’m sitting here posting this. Most people would be out having a good time on a Saturday night. A true coder would be writing some cool ass code. A true nerd would be doing some nerdy shit. Not me. Boy am I some kinda loser.

I’m still kinda sluggish from the drugs I took and I can barely type this. Drugs you ask? Here’s the deal. I managed to drag myself out of bed and fall into my gi this morning around 9:30 am. Ann and I jumped in the truck and headed over to Mackinaw for the “clinic” that Sensei Evans was having. I actually made it there early, which is quite a feat; as those of you who know me. Sensei Evans wasn’t there yet, so we hung out in the parking lot bullshitting with Sensei Hartman. I bet we looked really cool standing in the parking lot of a bank, in small town America, wearing angry white pajamas.

Sensei Evans finally showed up and we all piled into the dojo with much excitement. God Damn was it cold in there this morning. The floor felt like a hockey rink. In true Brian Evans style, Sensei Evans refused to take any money to pay for his clinic. He said we could all pay him by “coming up and training sometime.” That man is way too nice for his own good. If it wasn’t for Sensei Brewer and Sensei Hartman, I’d be paying over twice the money to train with him in Mackinaw.

We all kinda milled around for about 15 minutes waiting for the clinic to start and I realized, as I looked around, that there was nobody from the Mackinaw dojo there to train. Every last person in the building was from Pekin. I asked Sensei Evans where everyone was and he said that all of his people had to work. Eventually about 5 of his lower grade students and Scottsan showed up. Then began the training.

I don’t much care for Sensei Evans’ warmup routine. It is far too fast, and far too short for my problem hips. However, his goal is to get straight to training and it accomplishes that. The theme of the training for the day was one that Sensei Mullins really emphasized and that Sensei Evans really picked up on: Loading the Back Leg. I do enjoy this concept, but it does take a toll on my ankles. We started out by doing reverse punches, moved into jabs, then onto jab/reverse punch, then some kicking drills. It was really fun. I got to beat on both Erbesnan and Parrotsan. It’s so much fun. Dave really tries hard, and Raleih… well… he’s Raleigh. I think someday I might design and make the “Raleigh J. Punching Bag and Training Partner.” It would be like one of those weeble/wobble punching bags that kids beat around… except that it would just giggle and say “your bad.”

Anyway, back to the clinic. Sensei Evans really pushed up hard, and we were all sweating profusely in a very short amount of time. Unfortunately, the sweat became a little profuse and the floor became very slick. We had two minor injuries, Mike McCabe and I both went down due to the slippery sweat spots. Mike tried to stop himself and sorta did the splits. He pulled his groin pretty badly when he went down. I few short minutes later the same thing happend to me, except that both my feet went out from under me and I went down hard; busting my elbow on the floor pretty hard. Luckily, it only removed a little skin and I didn’t lose too much blood, but God Damn did it hurt.

During the drills, Sensei Evans awed us all with a display of punching and kicking expertise. He first used Odie for a demo, and after about three demo punches he had to tell Odie, “Don’t block me! Just tense harder.” I almost started laughing out loud. I know that Sensei Evans hurts when he hits, but Odie just rubs me raw. The boy is clueless. On a side note, I just don’t understand Odie. In class Thursday night, I was next to him during out little episode of “The Hartman Show.” We were doing reverse punches and I couldn’t help but notice his amazingly weak and useless punches… those of you who know Odie, know what I’m talking about. Today in Mackinaw I was watching him hit the maki and he was doing it incredibly well. Great posture, proper form, great technique and lots of power. I don’t get it. Most people do good “air” techniques, but can’t hit the maki for shit. Kevin is the complete reverse. It just mystifies me.

Back in seminar land, Sensei Evans was now demonstrating on Sensei Hartman. That’s always a pleasure to watch. It’s like “Clash of the Titans” on the floor. Sensei Evans was pummelling Sensei Hartman with punches and kicks. It was all Sensei Hartman could do to get out of the way. One day, I will kick like that man. Oh yes, ONE DAY I WILL!

The seminar conluded with all the guys going to the big tournament next weekend on one side of the room and all the others on the opposite side of the room. Sensei Evans wanted us to do some mental training. We entered the ring, bowed to each other, then jumped into fighting stance, with great spirit, when hajime was called. Then he would call yame and we would go back to yoi, bow, then back out of the ring. The upcoming tournament is a big, international affair and Sensei Evans wants to make sure his guys are in the right mindset and aren’t too caught up in the excitement. It was an interesting little drill, but I wouldn’t want to do it all the time. I believe that mental training is something that one must do on their own.

The clinic ended. We all thanked Sensei Evans for the hospitality, then headed out. Sensei Evans, Sensei Hartman, Walker, Matt, Ann and I all headed across the street to the little food stand the local IGA does every weekend. They got great food there, and we had a nice little lunch together discussing the recent political hooha going on. Afterwards, we all went our seperate ways.

As I was leaving Mackinaw, I was suddenly strickin with a massive migraine headache. I almost had to pull over and make Ann drive, but I took some of here prescription migraine medicine instead. That helped deaden it a little bit. I got home and realized that the leaves in the yard needed to be raked and picked up. And, knowing how pissy Ann gets when I don’t do anything productive, I decided I oughta get on it. However, being the lazy fuck that I am, decided to “suck” them up with the riding mower and the bagger. Hey, use the equiptment you have I always say. So, I spent several hours out in the yard picking up the leaves and burning them. About half way through, though, the smoke from the fire brought back my headache with a major vengeance. I guess that would have been a little more ironic had Die Hard 3: With a Vengeance been on tv right now. So, I ran in and grabbed a couple of generic Tylenol PMs. I took the PMs because they tend to knock the shit out of a headache much better. Unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, the PMs also put you on your ass. Within an hour, I could hardly keep my eyes open, so I headed to bed. That was about 5pm. I woke up at about 10:30. I can still feel the drugs coursing through my veins, so I’ll probably head back to bed within an hour. Hopefully the drugs will be enough to help me sleep throughout the night. I hope so. I have to go to the gym tomorrow and I really hate working out when I’m sluggish and tired.