What A Wave Must Be

Haven’t been blogging recently.  Apologies for that.  Not much to say really.  And I’ve sort of been working on the new Aergonet, so I don’t want to put too much new stuff into this blog.  I still don’t have a good way to migrate between WordPress and the blog app I wrote.  I should probably take a look at the WordPress export XML structure.  That’s probably easy enough to read through.

Since I’ve been back, haven’t been doing much.  Spending a lot of idle time at Jon’s house.  Standard fare, as usual.  They got a Wii recently, and Jeff likes playing Wii Boxing.

Beryl and Compiz merged to produce Compiz Fusion.  It’s still super unstable, but I had to have the fancy effects, so, of course I installed it.  It’s been working well.  The only thing that’s a little annoying at the moment is that Fusion seems to take a long time to start up.  It’s that, or there are some rendering problems when the desktop is being drawn initially.  I’m not sure what’s going on, but Ubuntu will boot, load my panel, the show desktop applet and the date applet, then stall for a minute or so, and finally load everything else in quick succession.  I can only assume that it’s because Fusion is taking a long time to boot.  My other suspicion is that Beryl is trying to load, even though it doesn’t exist on my system anymore.  I might not have removed it entirely.  I’m a little apprehensive to use apt-get remove to remove all of the libraries.  I don’t really trust the statement that they’re not used by anything else anymore.  Especially because Fusion takes a lot of its effects from the Beryl core.

Bah, I really just don’t know.  Word has it that Fusion is going to be the default WM for Gutsy Gibbon in October.  I may wait the short time until the release to fix this up.  Fusion should be stable by then.

The Gombei SG is moving along nicely.  I have good fun on Sue Shii.  I especially like that my blasts actually do good damage.  The invention system is actually pretty cool.  I’m working on building up some good enhancement sets.  I’ve got one started in my snipe that’s given me increased recovery and some energy and negative energy defense already.  I sort of want to craft some of those costume pieces, but they don’t really fit with my character.

Nothing else to report, really.  People change and you’ve just got to roll with the punches.  But sometimes I wish I could just forget it all and go back to the beginning.

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Finally got home after the long drive up with Uncle Willy.  Miraculously, we fit all of my stuff and all of Tiffany’s stuff into the car.  Good thing they decided to rent a van.  I’m almost certain that our stuff would not have fit otherwise.

Speaking of other close packing calls, Adam, Marike, and Evan were almost unable to all fit into Marike’s car on Thursday.  That was amusing.  We had to get creative and exercise precision Tetris skills to fit all the boxes and whatnot into the car.  And even then, Adam had two enormous boxes and a suitcase of clothes left over.  He ended up leaving the suitcase with Nathan to take up this weekend, and giving one large box each to Donna and Yvonne.  We’re going to make a road trip to San Leandro sometime soon to pick ‘em up.  That’ll be fun.

In other road trip news, the PAX trip is falling together.  We’ve pretty much decided that we’re going to be taking my car and one of the Wangs’ cars, likely Jon’s.  We’ve also got the hotel all worked out, although it is somewhat far away.  We’re going to have to look into buses.  But, all in all, the trip has come together and it promises to be a lot of fun.

Not much else to report.  I just discovered that I had $1.6k lying around, unused and largely forgotten.  I don’t even think it’s been promised in tribute to anyone yet.  Plus the $750 I’m getting from the Music@Menlo internship, I have enough to buy one of those MacBook Pros.  I am now very very tempted to do so, as one of my only set backs was that I didn’t have enough free cash to do it.

The only hurdle that remains is the finding of a home for this Dell.  I think I may be able to con Evan into it.  He has a shitty laptop at the moment, so it might be pretty easy to con him into taking mine for $800-ish.  I’m still trying to swindle Pat into it too.  He’s getting in the market for a first laptop, and I’m pushing the idea that mine is only a year old, similarly configured to most rigs he’d consider, and much cheaper than said rigs because I’m selling it used.

I have doubts that Pat will come around mostly due to parental influence.  Pish posh.  Now what I really need to consider is if I want it badly enough to get it before PAX or if I can wait until after Leopard is released.  Looking over the features, I’m actually not terribly excited for Leopard anymore.  The things I really like are the new Finder with Quick View and Stacks on the Dock.  Other than that though…

Philos 31 still hasn’t posted their discussion times.  I am thoroughly annoyed.  I guess I should start thinking of another GE I could take.  I also need to prod Adam more and get him to decide on some classes to take next quarter.  Also decide on a major.

Blarf.  Decisions, decisions.  So troublesome.  The new MacBooks are really shiny.  They call to me through the Apple Store website.  I wonder if I can get student discount at one of the local stores.  That would be ideal so I could pay with a fat wad of cash and have it immediately rather than having to wait for it to be shipped.  Cash is also off the record, so I could buy myself some time to think about how to spin it to Dad.  Bah, it’d probably be easier to try to spin it to him first and see how well I can convince him.  He’s really not going to go for it.  I can tell because I have a hard time convincing myself to go for it.

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So I took a crack at setting up a schedule for next quarter with the intent of switching to the Ling/CS major.  The classes I’d like to take are Linguistics 20, Program in Computing 10A, and Philosophy 31, with the possibility of taking another GE class (perhaps Art History 52B).

I went to the class planner and was plugging in the classes.  Ling 20 and PIC 10A worked nicely.  Ling 20 would be in the afternoon on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, while PIC 10A would be at 11 every day.  I ran into issues when scheduling Philosophy 31 though.  For some reason, Phil 31 hasn’t posted full schedules for all of its discussion sections.  Two of the sections haven’t been assigned a day yet and one of the sessions overlaps with the lecture period.  The remaining section I can’t do because it interferes with PIC 10A.

I’m hoping that the Philosophy department gets their act together and posts a complete schedule before my enrollment time.  If they don’t, I’ll probably just take Art History 52B, which sounds like an interesting class.  My schedule will be very bottom-heavy, with most of my classes clustered in the afternoon.  I like that more than morning classes, I’ve found.

Apple released more details about Leopard today.  Oh man, am I excited.  The new desktop enhancements look pretty awesome.  I really like the stacks feature added to the dock.  It sort of makes me actually like the dock.  The transparent menu bar is pretty nice too, although a little superfluous.  One day, someone’s going to make a UI that’s entirely transparent, rather than just semi-transparent.  And everyone will love it.

The new Finder is amazing as well.  Cover Flow seems a little superfluous in Finder, seeing as icon view already shows you previews of documents and it’s just a click away to launch Quick View and see the detailed preview.

Quick View is pretty much the most amazing thing ever.  The document previews are pretty nice, especially seeing as they don’t incur an application launch.

Now I’m somewhat apprehensive about buying a MacBook Pro this summer.  Leopard’s supposed to be released in October.  That’s just about four months away.  If I buy the MacBook now, it’ll have Tiger installed and I’d have to pay for the upgrade to Leopard in October.  That’s not ideal.  I’d rather have Leopard installed right from the get-go.

On the other hand, I did want to have the MacBook for the trip up to Seattle.  Seattle is in August.  That’s before October.  So if that’s to be the case, I’d need to buy it before the launch of Leopard.

Argh.  I’m hoping someone will respond to my listings on Craigslist and offer to buy my laptop from me.  I’d rather get some money for it rather than just sending it in to Dell to be recycled.  I’m also hoping that it’ll be easy to convince Dad to let me buy the MacBook when my current laptop is only a year old.  I don’t think it will be too easy.  I already played a lot of my trump cards to get this Dell.  My Toshiba that I had before the Dell was only two years old when I ditched it.  I don’t want Dad to think I ditch new tech that quickly.  And I feel bad about dumping a nice laptop like this without much reason.

So frustrating.  I think Dad might go for it if I told him I was going to sell this one rather than just have it lay around.  Though I also think he’d want me to sell this one first before going to buy the MacBook.  Augh so frustrating.  I want to get home so I can actually ask him about it.

I wonder if I could play a birthday card.  My gift this year was only $100.  That sounds sort of petty.  I could cash next year’s birthday in.  That might be viable.  Still, the major obstacle is convincing the parents to let me abandon this Dell.  My best bet is to find a home for it.

Oh Lords of Craigslit, deliver me!

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Did some more research into the Linguistics and Computer Science major, and it looks pretty cool.  The major pre-req’s are just Ling 20 and the PIC 10 series.  I also need to have the equivalent of level 6 in any foreign language.  Technically, I could have that done in two terms, as I tested into French V when I took the French placement test during orientation.  I think I would rather start over with Chinese though.

The PIC 10 series looks pretty interesting.  PIC teaches mainly in C++, although they do have one series that teaches in Java.  What I find interesting is that the classes on Java give a lot of focus to the Java EE and stuff like that, while the C++ classes focus on desktop programming.

For the major itself, there are just 12 classes.  That means I can have it done in one year, which is cool.  The language req will take a while though.  But I think I’d have fun with it as I was planning on taking Chinese anyway.  This way it’ll actually go towards something rather than just being for kicks.

Registration for fall quarter is on the 26th.  I need to decide by then.  I’ll see what Dad thinks.  I’m sure he’ll just say to do what I like because it’s my choice and all.

To convince myself, I’ve been looking into careers for “computational linguistics” as the field seems to be called.  As I expected, there’s not really much.  There seems to be a lot of possible work in developing machine translators and speech recognition software.  That seems somewhat interesting, but I’m not really sure.

We come down to the age-old question.  Do I choose a major that’s practical, or do I choose one that I’ll have fun with?  I would definitely have fun with Ling/CS.  But pharmacy would definitely be more practical.  I’m entirely unsure.  I don’t particularly want to teach.

Augh..  Infuriating.

I think I will change.  I just hope that I can put together a schedule that’d work.  I want to take Ling 20, PIC 10A, and maybe Philosophy 31, which is the one odd pre-req.

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Went to Jimmy Kimmel again with Yvonne et al.  This time, the musical
guest was Plain White T’s.  It was an indoor concert too, so we were
considerably more comfortable.  The celebrity guests were Andy Garcia
of Ocean’s 13 fame and Josh Flitter of Nancy Drew fame.  The highlight of the night was that during the concert we got to stand pretty much right up against the stage.

They played Hey There Delilah and then Hate.  It was pretty good.  I liked Hate a lot.  It’s probably one of my favorite songs by PWT’s.

Other news, uneventful.  I’m still looking to find a way to scrounge up around $2.5k and buy a MacBook Pro.  I’m pretty much ruling out finding ways to do it over the summer.  So I’m going to look for a job during the school year and make some money that way.  I kind of want to buy the MBP this summer, though, which means that I’m probably going to have to shell out the cash upfront.  I’m not so keen on that.

In other news, Adam tipped me off to a north campus major in Linguistics and Computer Science.  Sounds perfect to me.  I’m going to definitely look into it.  I haven’t taken too many classes that can only apply to biochem, and the ones that I have taken satisfy various GE’s.  So it’s still easy for me to change my major.  I’m going to have to be adamant about it, though.  There won’t be much turning back after.

Battlestar Galactica is pretty interesting.  I like the art direction.  It reminds me a lot of a more high-tech Firefly.

Bad news on the home front.  Dad might not be able to get down to pick me up.  I may have to find some way to squeeze in with Uncle Willy.  That’s annoying.

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Last meeting of the DDR club so, accordingly, we went out to dinner instead of playing DDR.  We play DDR less and less in that club, it’s sort of weird.

Anyway, we were all pretty set on going for Asian food, so we chose Noodle Planet, which is a little pan-Asian food restaurant down in Westwood.  As the name suggests, they specialized in noodle dishes, which made up almost half of the menu.  The last section in the menu was titled “Non-noodle Dishes,” or something to the same effect.

I wasn’t too keen on noodles, although I did seriously consider a bowl of pho.  I was more hungry than I thought noodles could provide for, so I opted for a plate of curry chicken instead.  I haven’t had curry in so long, it was so delicious.  I was pretty hungry so I also ordered beef satay, which was also very delicious.

Not much else happened today.  I was walking around near Ackerman today because my chem lab got out super early, what with it being 10th week and there being no more experiments to do, and saw a bunch of tables set up for handing out yearbooks.  I remembered that Dad had decided to buy yearbooks for all four of my years with the special Freshman Discount, so I went over and picked up my copy.

Bruinlife, our yearbook, is massive.  It’s this enormous black tome that’s just about the size of my physics textbook, packed with all of these articles and stories about all the notable things that happened throughout the year.  There are the requisite club and organization pictures, but I was surprised to find that most of the paper in the book is actually taken up by articles written about important stuff during the year by the yearbook staff.  It’s markedly different from SHP yearbooks.  There aren’t any polls or cartoons or stupid stuff like that.  It’s really professional.  Even the binding is professional.

Looking forward, I have just over a week left before I get to go back home.  Dad’s coming down Thursday night, likely with Mom, and is going to stay over in a hotel for the night so we can leave super early on Friday morning.  I guess that’s a little easier logistically and we will probably manage to beat most the traffic and not get caught in rush hour that way.  I’d still rather have left on Thursday evening instead, if only to get home sooner.

It also looks like we’re taking Adam’s body back with us.  Uncle Willy and Auntie Betty aren’t coming down with Dad as he had originally thought, so we have the room.

In other news, Apple finally released the upgrade to the MacBook Pro that I’d been waiting for.  Gone are the stupid ATI Radeon graphics cards, replaced by glorious NVIDIA GeForce 8600 cards.  8600!  My Dell only has a 6200!  I’m so excited for these things.  It’s a shame that every Apple product ever created costs a small fortune.  Even with the student discount, the high-end 15” MacBook Pro costs a tall $2,299.00.  Granted, it’s specifications are a little better than my Dell’s, with twice the harddrive space, a faster processor with twice the cores, and a DVD burner to boot.  The screen is smaller, but the resolution is the same at 1440×900.  I bought my Dell for about $2.1k, if I remember correctly.

So, I’m sort of poking around to sell my Dell to someone for about $1-1.5k.  If I figure that I’m getting $750 this summer from the Music@Menlo internship, that leaves $1.6k left in the cost.  If I find someone who’s willing to buy my Dell from me for $1k, I can foot the $600 difference.  To be honest, I can foot the entire price if I dip into my savings.  However, I sort of like to put that little pot on hold.  That holds money that I tend to consider non-existent.  Technically, half of it shouldn’t even still be in there.  I’ve promised so much of that to my parents for buying me various tech things over the years (most recently, the Dell) that I don’t know how much I actually still have.  I’ve been accruing interest pretty quickly, though, so what used to be a mere $7k, is now actually $8k at my last check.  That’s rainy-day money, though, so I don’t like to consider it when I’m thinking of my liquid assets.

One thing that I don’t particularly like about this summer is that the Music@Menlo internship is placed right smack dab in the middle of break.  There’s three weeks on one side and five weeks on the other.  That’s not enough time to pick up another job that’s worth my while, but it’s also a little too much time for me to just sit around and do nothing.  For the latter period, I’m wondering if I can get Chuckee to hook me up at the EA testing site.  They apparently pay pretty good at $11/hr.  Considering a full-time employment, that’s $440/wk.  I don’t know if they’d take me for just a month, though.

We’re going to a Plain White T’s concert on Friday at Jimmy Kimmel.  I’m excited.

My chem lab final is on Thursday.  I’m not excited.

It’s so close to summer, I can smell the freedom and taste the sun.

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