What A Wave Must Be

More photos on Flickr.  Also, plans for getting a domain are coming to a head.  I’m still conflicted over which name to actually get, but I am pretty sure which it’s going to be.  I’ve decided on Bluehost for my host.  Last step is to just put in my payment info.

So here I am again.  It’s the second day of orientation and we’re pretty much done with everything.  Seriously, we could’ve done all of this in one day without all these worthless workshops and presentation.  It would have been a lot cheaper and a lot less trouble.

First thing on the list today was taking a French placement test.  I didn’t expect I’d do all that well, seeing as I didn’t take French last year so I was sort of rusty.  And if I did do well at all, I entirely expected to only get to third level, mainly because Chun was such a joke.

I was pleasantly surprised, however, to learn that I not only placed out of the language requirement (level 4), but placed clear past it and got into level 5.  I guess Lowney made up for Chun’s terrible class?  But then, her class wasn’t all that good either and I always thought she was too easy on us.  I guess this confirms that I am the smartest person on the face of the planet.

In other news, I’m signing up for classes now.  What with having all of my University Requirements done (except for the Writing II one, but nobody has that before entering), I can get right into focusing on my major prerequisites.  Planning my schedule is proving somewhat tricky though.

I’m not entirely sure if I want to have most of my classes on similar days, or spread out all of my classes over the week.  The first option means that I will have more free days where I don’t have class at all.  However, it also means that I’d have to cram a lot of classes into one day and so I’d have a dichotomy of packed days and totally empty days.  The other option is to have a spread out schedule.  This eliminates packed days, but means that I won’t have any days that are entirely free and will always have class.  I suppose that this is the best method as I’d rather have a more generally relaxed schedule than one with hills and valleys.

I’m just going to hope for the best in this schedule.  I can’t totally mess up anyway.

So in other news, I’m looking to go home early tomorrow instead of staying around for the useless (at least to me) campus tour.  It seems that Dad has no problems with leaving the parent orientation early, although Mom does want to have a tour of the campus seeing as she didn’t come with us the last time we came down here.  However, that’s arrangeable at a later date, so no worries.  I really really want to go home.  If only because I want to play Villains and Heroes.  And also because I’d like to try driving Kong Kong’s car.

That’s all for now.  I’m having another meeting with my counselor.  I’m not sure what this one’s supposed to be about.  Oh well.  At least the day is almost done.  I’ll probably go kill the last hours of the night watching GoF and then going to sleep.  Maybe I’ll come back up here and see if anyone’s online to talk to.  I’m getting rather bored, if you can’t tell.

So we all drove down here to Westwood on Tuesday morning. The drive wasn’t all that unbearable. I did a good bit of reading on Wicked and progressed a bit. The story is nice and I am intersted in what happens, but I’m finding that this particular part of the book is getting rather slow. Elphaba has just gotten out of a mauntery and is traveling across Oz to the Vinkus. She doesn’t speak much anymore (what with having been under a vow of silence for the past seven years) so the chapters are somewhat dull. I’m hoping that it will pick up and I can finish the book before we go to Japan. I want to be able to read Talyn by that time.

So I stayed in the Hyatt for that one night but now I’m here in my dorm room where I’ll be staying for the rest of the two nights were down here. My roommate is a guy named Blake who’s from the LA area. He’s nice and I think, were he my actual roommate, I’d like him. I’m hoping my actual roommates are nice too.

We’re staying in the new construction, Rieber Vista, which incidentally is where Adam is going to be staying next year. He has it pretty good, I think. The room we’re in is spacious, even if it were going to be a triple, and the bathroom is nice. The bath is shared between two rooms, but is pretty big. There is, however, only one shower and one toilet. I was hoping there would be two showers and one toilet. Not to be, however. Blake and I are going to have to work something out with the neighbors as to what we’re going to do about that. We both have placement tests tomorrow, so we have to get up early and get through with breakfast. Hopefully the neighbors won’t have to, so we can get ready quickly.

My orientation group is made up entirely of (Bio)Chemistry majors, and our counselor is a Neuroscience major herself. I am not surprised at all to see that just about everyone (save three) in my group is Asian. They’re all pretty nice.

The day’s activities so far have been a bore. We’ve just been sitting through “Welcome to UCLA” presentations which have been entirely sleep-inducing. On a happier note, I was supposed to go for a Math placement test this afternoon, but it turns out that I had already placed out of both single-variable Calculus classes (which were the ones that the test was supposed to place me into) and straight into multi-variable Calculus, what with my 5 on the AP BC Calc exam. That was a pleasant surpise.

I’m rather disappointed that we don’t have internet here in the room. I’m writing this as a draft through Flock and will publish it and then back-date it when I get home/ get internet. I may try to go downstairs and see if the lounges have internet.

In other news, it appears that I will be getting Kong Kong’s Accord to drive for the remaining two months of summer. I guess I’m happy about that seeing as it will mean I can drive around myself more freely. I’m debating if I should go out and get one of those iPod tape decks. It would probably be a good idea, although I’m not sure how much I’ll actually be driving. And, what with my going down to UCLA at the end of September, there won’t be much time for me to drive around anyway. It’s a hard decision.

I’m seriously already looking forward to going back home. I really want to play more Villains and also Heroes.  Twilight is at 39 and is really close to 40.  I wanted to get her up to 41 in double XP weekend, but I didn’t manage to.  I want to try out the different ancilaries.  I’m still not sure which one to get.  I’m seriously considering the Psychic pool.  Getting it will give me some of the best psychic resistence in the game and will allow me to tank the Psychic Clockwork King.  That could be very lucrative in XP.  However, Psychic doesn’t have any big damage attacks, self buffs, or endurance recovery.  The Power pool has all of these, but the shield is only against smashing and lethal, which are really common, but I’d like to have another damage type too.  The Electric pool gives smashing/lethal/energy, but doesn’t have the damage booster.  The Dark pool has smashing/lethal/dark, but lacks a big attack.  It’s all very hard to decide.  I realize that I have to give up something, but I’m not sure what I want to give up.

Valerie is also running into some build issues. 

Flow is this really cool Flash game I found while reading through last month’s issue of Wired while I was waiting at Supercuts for a trim. The basic premise of the game is that you’re a microorganism in the sea and are trying to evolve. You swim around and eat stuff and grow larger and then evolve by perfecting combat skills against other creatures. If you evolve enough (i.e., defeat all the creatures in the sea), you evolve into a whole other species and go through the same drill again.

The game is actually very addicting in its simplicity. The creator seems to have ceased development on it for the time being though, so there are only two levels and only four different species of creatures. I suppose in later levels you can become the other two species, but those haven’t been programmed yet.

In other news, I’ll be going down to UCLA for the rest of the week to attend orientation. I will be bringing my laptop because we’re driving down there and I want to do more prework on BROKEN GLASS, but I don’t know about internet connection reliability. There is supposedly wi-fi in the dorms, but I don’t know if I can get that or how much they let me use it. So this may be the last from me for a while.

I finally did it! YES!

Countess Conflict – Ice Control/Icy Assault/Mu Mastery Dominator

Got a new mouse today because I was tired of the battery-eating nature of my old one.  So now I have a wired optical mouse instead of a wireless optical mouse.  The thing has a pretty high DPI (1000, to be exact), and also has a really smooth and sensitive click wheel.  I both like and hate how sensitive it is.  It also apparently has a slide wheel too for side-to-side scrolling, though I haven’t encountered any situation ever that I would need to side-scroll.  One last nifty feature it has is a “magnifyer” button on the side that will supposedly let me zoom instantly on a picture when I click it.  I’m not sure how that works, but I think it might be cool.