What A Wave Must Be

Have been looking over my major and minor options lately trying to make a final decision on what my degree is going to be.  I’m still swinging back and forth between a minor in Chinese and a major in Chinese.  I know I’ll probably want to do one or the other because I’m going to be taking up the Chinese 6 for Linguistics and then Chinese 50 for my history GE, so I might as well take the rest of the classes.  I’m just not sure how many more classes I want to, and more importantly can, take.

I have also been putting serious thought into declaring a Theater minor.  The minor is only 8 classes, which is pretty small.  And I think I’d really enjoy it.  You get to choose from a couple different “tracks” of study, including a design track and a directing track.  The lower division classes fill art GEs too, which is cool.

The most ambitious degree I could take would be a double major in Linguistics and Computer Science and Chinese with a minor in Theater.  I think I would most certainly die if I did that, though.  I’m thinking it’s probably going to either be a double major in Linguistics and Computer Science and Chinese, or a major in Linguistics and Computer Science with a minor in either Chinese or Theater.

Adam referred me to this guy at Symantec who is apparently looking for applicants to a paid internship program over the next year as a software Q&A engineer.  I sent an e-mail to the guy with my resume and am waiting to hear back about it.  If I do get the job, I will very likely end up living down here in LA for the summer and probably doing summer school while working.  That’d be pretty cool as I could get a lot of class work done while simultaneously making money.

I’m still contemplating whether I want to live in the dorms again or if I want to try to get one of the university apartments.  Some of the arrangements look pretty nice, but the ones that I’d want to live in are pretty expensive.  I think I’ll probably just go with getting a double again.  Maybe up in Rieber if I can manage it.

Have been collecting the necessary apps for my MacBook Pro.  iWork only costs $39 at the student store, so I may pick that up instead of Office 2008.  Office would arguably be more powerful, though.  It’s been getting bad ratings on the Apple store, however, so I’m not really sure.  Numbers apparently sucks; Excel is supposedly a mere shadow of its Windows counterpart, but it at least has equations and graphing support that Numbers lacks.  Do I really need that though?  This is always my question.

Sometimes I feel like time is moving too fast and I want to slow it down.  Sometimes I feel like time is moving too slowly and I want to speed it up.  Isn’t it funny how we always want what we don’t have and never like it when we get it?

I’m starting to get the feeling that I need to be a lot more independent for some reason.  I’m not sure why, but it’s been sort of kicking the back of my mind of late.

My goal with this MacBook is to keep that weird patch of white discoloration from appearing on the left wristrest.  I’m going to try to do this by not resting my wrists on the wristrests at all.  I may also potentially buy some sort of cover for them.

Not much else to report.  Life has been boring for the most part.  Par for the course.

So I decided that I did really want the new MacBook and that the best deal I was going to get was at the student store and went down there today and picked up the low-end 15”, as planned.Overall, I am pleased with it.  I like the small form factor and the aesthetic, which were the main things that I wanted out of the device.  I’m still going to keep my Dell around for the foreseeable future as I do still need some things on it.  I’m going to have to figure out whether I can use the versions of XP offered on MSDNAA to properly dual-boot this thing.  I may not end up doing that and just end up keeping the Dell around for use as a Windows machine.Things:

1. Figure out how to control the sensitivity of the backlight dimmer.
2. Decide if iWork is worth trying out or if I should just go straight for Office.
3. Finish transferring all my media.  Again.

Went to see Cloverfield the other night with Pat and Evan at the Fox.  I thought it was an alright movie.  My opinion may be slightly biased, though, as I felt violently sick pretty much the whole time because of the shaking camera.  I understand that the concept of the movie is supposed to be “found footage” and that it’s supposed to be filmed using a hand camera, but still.  There was so much shaking of the frame and shit, they should put a warning at the front of the movie for people who get motion sick.

I placed an order for the Tack Day Pack from Timbuk2.  It should be here by the end of the week I expect.  I’m eager to have a bag that can hold my laptop better.

Bought a copy of Minimal Perl the other day and have started reading it.  I am slowly beginning to understand Perl’s worth as a “universal glue” language.  Most of the book is dedicated to showing the reader why Perl is a better alternative to such standard UNIX utilities as grep, sed, and awk.  It is quite interesting.

Not much else to say.  We’re having midterms in PIC already.  Are we really that far into the quarter?

So apparently, being a student of the PIC department, I have access to a MSDNAA student license for Microsoft software.  That includes full versions of XP Professional and Vista Business, which I think is awesome.  They don’t offer Office or Expression Studio, though, which I’m sort of disappointed in.  Then again, it is the Developer Network, and those two packages aren’t particularly development related.

I figured out how to shell into the PIC department’s UNIX systems.  I have my account set up on their server now and I can get in and check my mail and stuff.  If I had some reason to actually use UNIX, I would use it.  I can’t really think of a good one, though, so I don’t see much use in the account.  It’s a pretty full-featured system, having Perl, Python, and Ruby installed.  There’s no PHP, though, which is a shame.  I’m actually not sure if it’s really UNIX or if it may be Linux.  I did manage to use nano on it, which I thought was a Linux thing.

Being able to get a free copy of XP or Vista makes me seriously consider getting a MacBook again.  It would be very easy for me to dual boot with this, so I would have no fear of bricking any of my hardware or limiting myself.  They sell VMWare Fusion in the student store too, so I can get a copy of that at some kind of discount.

I’ve been debating the 15” and 17” models of late.  After spending some time with the display models in the student store, I think I’ve decided that the 15” is the one for me.  The 17” seems unnecessarily large, and doesn’t offer very many spec upgrades for it’s $300-higher price.

Timbuk2 has really cool bags.  I’m really liking the Track and Underground backpacks.  I wish they let you choose custom colors on all of the bags rather than just the messengers.  At least they off Black/Grey/Black on all of the bags.

Argh, now I’m all obsessed.  Dad’s supposed to be coming down on the fourth, so maybe I’ll ask him about it then.  My credit limit is still not high enough to foot purchasing a new computer.

C++ is probably the most infuriating language ever.  Maybe if I went to class every so often, I’d be able to figure out why my program runs a couple of times with almost-right output, a bunch of times with what looks like bad output caused by variables having random values assigned from random memory, and once with the correct output, with me only making what I thought was an insignificant syntax change in one line.  I really wish UCLA taught in a sensible language, like Java or C# or something.  Anything but C++.

I’m very strongly considering applying for a job in the computer labs.  I think I could get it and it would be an OK job that I wouldn’t mind.

OK, I am definitely going to go with this MacBook idea.  I’ll ask Dad if I can get it next time I see him.  I’ll probably try to get the Timbuk2 bag too.

I’m sort of wondering if the mail works still.  I was supposed to get new contacts a while ago last quarter but never got them.  I’m wondering what’s going on.  It may have just been that that was during finals week of last quarter, so the mail may not have been working at the time.  Evan’s been getting packages just fine, so I think it should be fine.

Blarf.

Went on the Hooligan Board & Staff retreat over the weekend.  We went to the beach and had a bonfire, and then went back to the Hooligan House for a little party.  Kat, Kat, Kelvin, and I all ended up sleeping over as pretty much everyone else was much too drunk to drive us back to campus.

The bonfire was overall enjoyable, although I still do not favor being out at night someplace as cold as the beach in winter.  When we got to the beach, all the pits had already been claimed so we ended up waiting in between two pits with the plan to ninja one of them when the people left.  We cooked hamburgers and such on a little gas grill Sohail bought for the occasion and huddled around a little mantle lantern until we finally got our pit.

Lyle led us in some bonding exercises that were really sort of pointless.  This was compounded by the fact that he and Tamara had forgotten to bring the papers describing how to facilitate the activities so they were sort of just running on memory.

After the beach, we drove back to the Hooligan House and started up the party.  I tried a margarita, but other than that stayed dry for the night.  I am proud to say that I can hold more alcohol than at least one person on this planet, as Kelvin was already red after one margarita.  I’m not sure if that’s actually something I want to be proud about, but it was a small victory for me.

I passed the night taking pictures of everyone dancing and such.  I managed to catch some real gems, and had a good laugh.

The next morning we went out to Denny’s for breakfast and then came back to campus.

That night, I went out with Adam, Pat, Donna, and Yvonne to Noodle Planet for dinner.  I had some ramen which was not nearly as good or filling as I was hoping for.  The noodles were rather thin and did not taste very good, and there was way too little pork.  The soup was not good either, and had too little miso flavor.  I deeply regretted not getting yakisoba or something else like that.

We went back to Donna and Yvonne’s room and watched some movies: Mean Girls at Donna and Yvonne’s request, Sin City at Pat’s, and then Rent to fill out the night.  We played a lot of Bang! too.  I’m seriously considering buying a copy of Bang! to keep at home so we can play it during the summer.

The new Wii game No More Heroes looks pretty awesome.  I’m definitely going to have to go get a copy of it when it comes out tomorrow.

I find that I have a lot of random knowledge about network architecture and I’m not entirely sure why.  However, I do often find myself reading about random things on Wiki like computer architecture, kernel design, network infrastructure, and other such things.  I think it’s some subconscious pursuit of a life as a sysad, which is a job that I wouldn’t mind having at all.

There is apparently a project that’s looking into ways to make the Zune compatible with other music players, notably WMP11, Winamp, and iTunes.  iTunes support is still shoddy, but WMP11 and Winamp support are both currently supported, which is awesome.  The fix is somewhat ad hoc, though, as you have to reapply it every time you want to sync music to the Zune.  It also seems a little sketchy as it involves terminating the Zune software process mid-sync, which I feel like could potentially do some serious damage to the Zune itself.  Not something I really want.

I would like it if someone could figure out a way to either hack the hardware interface to allow other programs to talk to the Zune directly, or find a way to let Last.fm scrobble from the Zune software.  That’s really the only thing that I don’t like about the Zune software.  I have an established history on Last.fm from all my listening prior to getting a Zune and I want to be able to keep that.  I hope Microsoft wises up and adds a plugin architecture to the Zune software.

Dead on Arrival is right every time.  I really didn’t like Cobra Starship’s new album at first.  But now it’s pretty much my favorite album.

I sort of want to get a case for my Zune, but I don’t know which one is good.  There are some from Incipio that I really like.  I also like the one from Microsoft, although I’ve heard some bad things about it.  The one thing that I don’t like about all of these cases is that they aren’t very pocket-friendly.

I’ve been trying to choose an editor for a while now.  I’m not really sure why I want to “choose” one, but it feels like something I should do.  My choices include, of course, vim and emacs, with the addition of nano, because I like simplicity, and gedit, because I like GUIs.

My first forays into command-line-based editors was with nano, because it was recommended as very simple and intuitive.  I found that to be true.  Nano gave me a simple interface with the full complement of basic operations that you would expect on a text editor.  I wrote a couple of basic shell scripts in it and had fun.

I usually end up using gedit when I’m in Linux just because I like GUIs and really miss being able to use the mouse to move around a file.  Of course, I do realize that by not using the mouse and using commands from the keyboard you realize a huge increase in productivity because you don’t have to take your hands off the keys.  I’m a little spoiled, though, being as I have always been able to use a GUI and have always had IDEs and such at hand.

I still don’t know enough about vim or emacs to make a good comparison.  I really want to find someway to work the command line into my daily life so I can become more familiar with it.

I get a kick whenever I see a website designed using tables or image maps; or, worse, IFrames.  It reminds me of the days I used to make designs like that, back in Web 1.5.  Of course, image maps and tables do have their place in proper design (sorry, IFrames have no place in a good web design), just so long as you’re not using them to create massive, graphics-intensive websites.  Tables are used for presentation of data that lends itself to a tabular format.  Image maps are for use when you want to create hot areas on an image to highlight certain features.  If you want to use IFrames, you should really look into doing something with AHAH or AJAX for your loading needs; but first, rethink your design.

I want to popularize a movement to replace emphatic use of “God” with “Bono”.  The two are almost the same, and the followers of the second won’t kill you for taking a sacred name in vain.

I should email Mark or something about updating the DDR website.  I should also get on making my mock up for the Hooligan front page.  Bono, I haven’t designed a website in a while.

I moved back to Firefox 2 from the Firefox 3 Beta today.  I was starting to miss my mouse gestures and decided that I wanted to have those more than I wanted to have the cool location bar.

I’m interested in trying out Yahoo! Mail, after Yahoo!’s announcement that they’re going to start supporting OpenID at the end of the month.  I like the look and feel of the Mail interface a lot, and do like it more than Gmail’s sparse layout.

There’s also the idea that Dad already uses Yahoo! so it’d be easier for him to contact me if I had Y!Mail open all the time, thus being logged into chat all the time.

Finally got to get my hands on Rock Band at the SCA party.  The drums are really fun and singing is harder than it seems.  Guitar will always be guitar.

Other lessons learned: I was right, I really don’t like drinking.  Don’t let Malik talk to you about literature or philosophy.

The only reason I do not foresee switching to Y!Mail is that it cannot pull mail from a POP server over SSL.  Which is sort of stupid seeing as most POP servers use SSL to ensure security during transmission.  It is very crucial to me that I be able to do that as my UCLA e-mail and my Gmail are both secured over SSL.

Stupid incompatibilities.  Yahoo! better get on their asses and implement that soon.