The Merc248

Well, that wasn't fun. I shouldn't have saved all of that homework for the last day before it's due. I ended up omitting a few problems, mostly because I was almost turning insane from the lack of sleep and the hours spent toward homework. ;p

Anyhow, I went to the doctor's office today for a physical exam. Seems like I have to go to a sleep apnia clinic due to me practically gasping for air at least once or twice per hour of sleep. Yes, it sucks, it feels like I'm about to suffocate and can't do much of anything about it for the first few seconds.

At least I'm gaining weight, though. Went from 120 to 130 I think. 140 will be the magic number for me. ;p

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Here comes a rant:

I feel like I am a somewhat outgoing person and will not condescend upon those who, you know, act "weird" or in some other way that isn't socially acceptable. I think I'm pretty generous also; I can't see myself withholding anything if there's someone in front of me in need of assistance. However, the way I see people treat others literally makes my blood boil. Jesus, I mean, with some of the passive aggressive condescending crap that people pull sometimes, it's a huge wonder why they haven't felt a fist to the mouth yet. I'm not saying that I would do such a thing, but it's just really... aggrevating, I'll just say that. Like I said, I'm all arms to other people, but seeing this stuff happen in front of me is making me distrust the "good will" of others.

While I'm on this same topic, I absolutely, and I mean absolutely, hate it whenever people are selective with how they treat others. Why not save yourself the trouble and treat everyone equally? I'm really trying not to be a self-gratifying bastard, but I personally don't try to treat anyone any lower than any other person. God, there's so many examples that I can pull out of different sorts of hypocrisy concerning this very topic.

I suppose you guys think I'm giving a bad impression of myself... well, just take this away from the rant above: be good to others, don't be hypocritical, and be generous. I try to hold myself to those standards at least.

I started looking at NeHe Productions for introductory OpenGL programming tutorials. Seems to be pretty good so far, although I admittedly haven't advanced too far (still on the first tutorial), mostly because of school work. :x It still seems pretty cryptic to me so far, so I'm just going with the flow at the moment. What's crap is that since I don't know much about creating GUI windows in any sort of environment, I have to follow with the tutorial's default bias toward Windows programming. Thus, I ended up somehow obtaining VMWare Workstation 5 and installing Windows XP and Visual Studio .Net on a virtual machine. Hopefully I can render OpenGL stuff on VMWare, though.

VMWare is pretty slick, by the way. I've been trying out various Linux distributions through VMWare rather than going through the trouble of reformatting my current computer and installing a distribution like that. Seems like a great way to test code in a contained environment as well. Way better than Virtual PC.

Alright, that's it for now. I've got to spend more time finishing up my math homework. :\

Apparantly, socks + slippers = 40 year old dad. Socks and slippers is exactly what I wore today. I need to thank my bro for that bit of intuition. ;p

Did it make my ass look round?

I somewhat liked this movie, although the person who played the woman Senator was almost as annoying as someone scratching their nails on a chalkboard; I suppose that was the point of her character though, seeing that she is extremely powerful and manipulative.

Oh yeah, spoiler alert.

Anyway, Denzel Washington and the guy who played Al Marvin were extremely convincing as fucked up Gulf War veterans. The storyline kept me engaged as well. Man, now I want to watch the original 1962 version.

Conjecture On Why I Am Still Awake

No, I don't know why I'm still awake. Sorry to disappoint.

Resumé Stuff

I think I have most of my resumé done for at least a computer support position. I'm probably going to finish it later today and see how much luck I have in getting a job. If all else fails, I could always work as a burger jockey at McDonalds.

MATLAB Stuff

Thank God I found MATLAB on a Bittorrent site, by the way. I can't even afford the $100 discount price for the student edition at the UW Bookstore. Now I can finally do some of my Linear Algebra homework. ;p

I Need To Stop Gaming So Much... Stuff

Yeah, like what the sub title says, I need to stop gaming so damn much. Why? Well, I'd actually have time to write this post before the next morning, plus I'd have more work done. It's like masturbation in a lot of ways; you know, how it really feels good but you are still being screwed, stuff like that. Case in point: I've been playing way too much Battlefield 2 lately, and have been neglecting various crap in my studies. Hell, I haven't even really cracked open this book that I bought a week ago called "The C Programming Language" by Kernighan and Ritche; I've been meaning to read at least the first two chapters sometime before summer quarter started, but hey, I ended up pissing away that entire time by playing the Battlefield 2 demo. Oh well, it felt good, I suppose.

Sleep, and Stuff

So yeah, I lied in the title of the post. It's now 5:00 AM; I started on this post at 4:45 AM. Great. Now video games are making me lie, I don't think it's very far fetched to say that they will make me shoot someone because of Grand Theft Auto. Whoever thought of that correlation is a damned genius.

Seriously. There's still idiots across the street beating on their drums and snares as if it was 8:00 PM. It's not. It's 3:00 AM. People in this neighborhood need to understand that there are OTHER people in this neighborhood that need to sleep too. Not me, of course, I'm still wide awake. ;p

The other people at the asenine off beat drumming session are loud as hell, too. Yeah, lets rev up our cars extremely loud and go 5 mph, because we are HARDCORRRREEEEEE. No. You're not. You're idiots.

Gah. I think I'm going to chance going to sleep with this cacophonous crap still ringing across the neighborhood. G'night.

Well, shite. I got an email from my former boss, who said that there aren't any positions available due to one of the other people who worked there returning for the summer. So... yeah, time to write a new resumé and hope that I can get a semi decent job sometime soon. I could use some spending money.

Luckily, my brother can possibly get me a job at the law firm that he works at. I also got an offer from one of my cousins about a possible IT position at the Starbucks headquarters (free coffee is always good.)

I'll admit, IT is quite possibly the most boring and mind numbing division in any company, but it pays a pretty penny. I just hope that I'm not going through college just to land in a crap IT position for the rest of my career; I'd really like to get into game development of course, but anything involving software development outside of creating VB scripts in order to deploy Windows to millions of unlucky users in a multitrillion company would be great. Research in either pure mathematics or computer science would interest me quite a bit as well.

Oh God, don't let me be as arrogant as Derek Smart when I become a full fledged game developer. :p

Anyhow, I'm going to play more Battlefield 2. Till next time...

I'm liking both of my classes so far. I'm also growing to like the UW's campus as well, especially the game room in the basement of the HUB :p (Husky Undergrad Building, for those who haven't been to the University of Washington before.) But yeah, I can finally find a couple of buildings on my own without having to look at a map. :p

However, it's a bit irritating having my professor for Adv. Multivariable Calculus writing incorrect equations every time he goes and writes a solution on the board, and then having him spend 5 minutes per problem trying to correct the equations. ;p

I really like Linear Algebra, though; it seems like the elementary row operation stuff (Gauss-Jordan elimination in particular) we're learning right now can be written in a C/C++ program. It would be interesting to figure out a general algorithm to get whatever matrix into reduced echelon form. I need to get my hands on a copy of MATLAB, though (read: $100 that I don't have.)

I probably also need to get another damn math textbook, even if the calculus textbook I have has some of the same sections as what's covered in the other textbook (same author, slightly different textbook title, less multivar. calculus stuff.) So yeah, that's probably another $50-$100. I'm fucking broke, by the way... Battlefield 2 sucked the remaining money dry from my account. I'm not exactly what you would call a "financial mogul," but eh, at least I have Battlefield 2. ;p

And I think it might be time for me to look for a new job... I can't rely on waiting for my former boss' response for a prospective job. A job somewhere around the UW would be great.

I suppose I'll finish this post off with a quote:

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!" - Darth Vader

Okay... redoing this whole Blogger junk here. Blogger is much better anyhow; there's a lot more artistic freedom with the entire web page, plus the server seems to be a lot faster and more reliable than Xanga's.

I might change the design a bit later, but I think this will do quite nicely for a while.

I'll probably post a few of the stuff that I had on Xanga on here in a few minutes.