Archive for April 2008
Wow. It’s been a bit. I apologize.
As is usually the case when i don’t blog for a long stretch of time, my only excuse is that I’ve had way too much other stuff to worry about. I really shouldn’t be spending time blogging at the moment now, either, as I have a ton of other work to do. But oh well.
This quarter has been shaping up to be rough, as I had expected. A four-class schedule is pretty rough, and I have a lot of work to do as a result. The main offender in this regard is CS 33, where I have to turn in rather complex projects every week. We’re getting into assembly programming with the current project, so the work has been intense.
My other classes have been relatively the same as always. PIC is still really easy, though I like it a lot more now ’cause we’re studying GUI programming and are actually using C# to do it, which I think is awesome, mainly because I’ve been wanting to take a programming class using C# for a while. Wittman’s treatment of the language is very simplistic and sort of naive, though, which means that I still feel like I know more about and have a tighter grasp on the langauge, from what little I know from my own reading and investigations, than he does.
Chinese progresses as normal. We’ve moved on to the second book in the series, and we’re starting to get larger and larger vocabulary lists every week. I think it’s cool though because I actually find that I have somewhat good speaking capability, when restricted to topics that I have vocabulary for. I’ve been thinking about whether or not I want to continue taking Chinese up to level 6 next year or if I want to switch to taking Japanese instead and get level 3 in both. I think learning Japanese would be fun, and I’d have a lot of fun talking with Adam in it. On the other hand, I do really want to be really proficient in Chinese, which is a goal that I don’t think I can achieve unless I go up to level 6.
Phonology has been fun. I like the TA a lot. He’s the kind of guy who appears to be really stiff at first glance but is actually really funny and kind of a dork up close. He always goes on about how he is on caffeine withdrawal during section and tends to ramble off about the history and background of certain phonological features or practices. I think it’s funny. Our professor is pretty cool too, though he could do with some speech classes as he tends to mumble a lot and go off on random tangents when we consider sample data in lecture.
We got back into playing Rock Band, so I’ve been doing the solo tours on all the instruments to increase my skill to Hard level. I’m still not really good enough to consider myself a Hard player at all, though I can do songs in the first two tiers of Hard on guitar and drums. As far as vox goes, I can only sing the first two tiers in Medium, and can’t even touch Hard.
I went out to Gamestop and bought a wireless guitar but was horribly disappointed when I got back to the room and turned it on to find that the tilt sensor in the guitar didn’t work. I’ve called EA and am getting a replacement sent out to me. Sadly, they are only doing replacements for the wireless guitar via the standard method which requires that you ship your guitar to them before they ship the replacement to you, as opposed to the express method where you are sent the replacement first and then return your guitar after. The agent I talked to said that this was to prevent people from sending wired guitars in as replacements for wireless guitars, though I don’t really see the problem. EA puts a hold on your credit card for the value of the guitar and S&H when you do the express method that’s only released when they confirm that they have received your guitar. So, if you send them a wired one after getting a wireless one, EA should just charge it to your card. Then it’s just like you bought the wireless one and threw the wired one away.
Donna, Yvonne, Evan and I went to the LA Times Festival of Books this morning. I bought a bunch of Neal Stephenson books and also a copy of Flatland, a book I’ve been wanting to read for a while ever since KMo read us excerpts in Honors Geometry. This Japanese bookstore I went to once when I was in Little Tokyo called Kinokuniya had a booth at the Festival too, which I thought was cool. They had a lot of awesome stuff, including Voltron (!) and Transformers vs. G.I. Joe (!!) omnibuses. I resisted the pull of the Voltron comics, but could not resist a Kingdom Hearts artbook. I bought it and regret nothing.
I’ve been sort of interested in getting a domain name again and have been shopping around. Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame recently got the domain ma.tt. The .tt TLD is owned by Trinidad and Tobago, but they allow any to register domains under their TLD. I only wish I could get a similar domain name. Sadly, the .is TLD, owned by Iceland, is restricted to registrants who have a physical presence in Iceland. So no chr.is for me. .er, owned by Eritrea, seems to not have much information on how to actual register a domain, so it’s pretty much out, so no christoph.er either. Nigeria’s TLD, .ng, is closed like .is, so no fu.ng. That last one is a shame, as I would have liked chris.fu.ng a lot.
I was going to write about what I did in Hong Kong over spring break, but I actually think that’d be sort of boring, so I won’t. Suffice it to say that it was fun and I saw a lot of family members I dind’t even know existed. Going to Hong Kong always makes me want to move to the city.
We switched phone carriers, at last. We’re now on AT&T. And I got an iPhone. That is all.
I like the new WordPress administration interface. I think it’s a lot nicer and more streamlined than the old one. I’m still waiting for Shuttle to be implemented. Maybe this is on the road to that?
I’m still meaning to photoblog more. Must get on that.
When we say goodbye… that disappearing smile… it’s not really like me, is it?
