madpwnage

Been steadily working on my big summer project at work since I got back from Vegas. This is essentially a rewrite of what I did two years ago (an all-purpose customer management and provisioning site for the company I work for), only this time I have a much better handle on the whole process of building something from the ground up and using some of the more recent tools to get the job done. I’ll spare the details of how this project came to be required and what I’ve had to do to get ready for it, but I will say that the status quo had devolved into a very dangerous game of Jenga ever since the original project was completed and rapidly went from “it would be nice if we could…” to “we need to do this ASAP” in terms of the severity of things.

I’m planning a trip out to San Francisco in August. Why? Officially, business. Earlier this year, pretty much after I came to the conclusion that I really can handle academics, I got curious about grad school. Now, I’ve been wanting to get back out to the west coast for the longest time - we lived in Monterey for a short time in the mid-80s, and the closest I’ve gotten to going back is a couple of trips to Las Vegas in the last couple of years - and I’m using grad school as my excuse to make it happen. I’ll be scouting San Francisco State while I’m out there and if I like what I see I’ll take things from there. But since I’m going all the way out there, I’ll make it worth the trip - going to check out Japantown for sure, probably Alcatraz Island and the Golden Gate Bridge, and maybe take in a Giants game. It should be a good time.

Put a new desktop together on Tuesday, my first in almost five years. This thing isn’t top of the line but it’s within striking distance - so I should get five out of it as well.

Current specs:
Antec Sonata 550 case (w/ 550w modular power supply)
ASUS M4A78 Pro Mainboard
AMD Phenom II x4 810
4GB RAM (DDR2 800)
80GB drive (OS), 500GB drive (storage)
Windows 7 64-bit RC

That alone ran me about $500, and I’m figuring on spending another $500 on further parts over the course of the summer. The storage drive is in questionable health after a year in a flaky external enclosure, I don’t have a proper video card (using an onboard Geforce 8300 adapter with 512MB of RAM diverted from the 4GB), and I’d like to get a TV tuner and double up on RAM. That’ll put me up to 8GB of RAM and 2 TB drives mirrored together to replace the single 500GB drive holding all my music/etc.. The possibility of changing out processors in a couple months is also there as well. By the time I’m done adding bells and whistles this thing is going to kick some ass.

Spent most of the week shaking the desktop down. It only took an hour to go from parts to a complete PC, mostly because there were no expansion cards and the case was extremely install-friendly. I found out the hard way that connecting a gigabit ethernet adapter straight into a jack that’s carrying power over ethernet is risky business, so right off the bat I blew out the onboard network adapter and ended up having to scrounge up a replacement. There were also some questionable issues between Office 2007 and Visual Studio 2008 - for some reason installing Office totally broke the design view in Visual Studio. Now, I don’t need that feature to do my work, but the problem would lead to the rest of the program hanging, so it still put my work to a standstill. Finally after work today, I blew everything out and did a fresh install of the OS and the apps (this time without Office). The whole process took just shy of two hours and now this thing’s ready to go.

A little late in posting, but here it is - results from the spring semester classes:
International Relations: A-
History of Pre-modern China: A
Japanese (both sections): A+

I said the goal was to do better, and technically I did.

The goal for fall semester? You guessed it - do better.

Made it through the second round of tests last week. Still don’t have the results on one of them 8 days later, but I’m confident I did pretty good on it. There are four weeks of class left, then finals is after that. I’ve also been hitting the gym really hard the last two weeks, and the results are coming in slowly but surely.

After finals wrap up, I go straight home for an Opeth concert on the 8th of May, then fly out to Las Vegas on the 14th for some much-needed R&R. Although today is the last day of spring break, I really only had about 2 days out of 11 where I truly did nothing - the rest were spent getting up at 6am, working, and occasionally doing random stuff until obscenely late hours.

In the meantime, I have six weeks left of school. There is plenty to work on, and with my Playstation 3 resting comfortably back at home there is plenty of time to do everything. I’m going to start hitting the gym much harder over the next few weeks and try to push myself down as close to 220 as possible for the trip to Vegas. Right now I’m checking in at around 236-238, which itself is 10 pounds lighter than where I was at the beginning of the semester. Funny story, apparently the scale I bought last year to start tracking my weight is no good. It’s one of those digital scales with no way to calibrate, and it’s reading 8-15 pounds lighter than every other scale I’ve set foot on. I was certainly able to track weight loss with it, but the difference means that at the start of 2008 I may have weighed as much as 310 pounds. Still, there is a 70 pound difference between then and now, I’ve lost six inches off my waist, and I’ve gone from XXL shirts being nearly too small down to XL being about 5 pounds away from a perfect fit.

Every once in awhile a game comes along that challenges what you know about gaming. This can be on any front – storyline, gameplay, presentation, or any combination of the three – and it leaves such a lasting impression that you can easily see yourself playing it again a decade down the road, long after homogenized imitators on newer, faster, and shinier consoles take over the spotlight. With its fresh approach to the strategy RPG paradigm and compelling narrative, Valkyria Chronicles is one such game that we will hopefully look back on with such esteem. It’s different in ways that make sense. It’s a powerful blend of emotional storytelling, high-stakes combat, and next-gen presentation. It’s a work of art.
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1. Telltale scuffmarks on their clothes
2. Unexplained scrapes, bruises, or broken bones
3. Unreliable or unexplained absences from work or school
4. Calluses on the palm, knuckle, and fingertips
5. Fondness for the color red

Been a little busy the last month and change, but things are going extremely well.

More later, maybe.

I need to flesh my study abroad plans out soon. I’ve already missed the priority deadline for the application process for Tokyo this fall, but I purposely didn’t apply because my overall GPA could be counted on less than 2 fingers. (As of right now, a 3.868 GPA for the fall semester has boosted my overall GPA to a full 2.0, and once I get the two bad semesters bankrupted I’ll be sitting somewhere around 3.4.) That’s not to say Tokyo is completely out of the picture - the absolute deadline is March 1 - but that does mean I need to start looking at contingency plans in case there isn’t any room left. Looking at things now I see two possibilities (among others):

1) Go in the fall of 2010 instead. No big deal.
Advantage: I get all the way through the 300 level Japanese classes and go over a little bit more prepared.
Disadvantage: In a sandbox for 12 weeks, taking classes in English, and staying in a dorm that is by several accounts a couple steps above squalid. I get the feeling it’s the kind of program where you’re a glorified tourist who takes classes in between sightseeing.

2) Scrap Tokyo and go to Sapporo instead in the spring of 2010.
Advantage: It’s a 9 month program, and Sapporo is closer to Nebraska in terms of weather, except the temperatures don’t go near to the extremes in Sapporo as they do here at home.
Disadvantage: The 9 months are April to December. This means I can’t take spring 2010 classes at UNL because I won’t finish them, rendering me idle for three full months. I could, however, spend that time working.

Right now I’m leaning toward the latter, but we’ll see.

Results from this semester’s classes that actually count toward my GPA:
World History: A-
Philosophy: A-
History of Rock: A
Japanese: A+ (both sections)

Straight A’s, but not a 4.0 GPA due to the A- grades being worth slightly less. The school assigns 4 quality points per hour to an A or A+ and 3.67 to an A-. Since all of my classes were 3 hours, that gives me 58 quality points out of 60 possible, which works out to a 3.86 GPA. Enough for the Dean’s List, but not without room for improvement.

The goal next semester is to do better.