In the fall, my schedule has to have Friday afternoons open for HP Football. In both the fall and spring, my classes aim to be centered around late morning and early afternoon and be as evenly balanced throughout the week as possible. This semester specifically, I had to have the blocks of time available to go do my classroom observation requirement for my education class. Each one of my schedules has certain requirements I aim to meet for various purposes, and I generally am able to accomplish such requirements without too much hassle.
The reason that I thought about this was that Mr. McDonald is interested in having me come back to help with a second server migration. Well, my only free blocks of time are in the mornings, and if I had tried to plan for this also back when I was making my schedule, I’m not sure I would have been able to make a schedule that nicely fit to all three purposes. We’ll see how much time I end up being able to help, but if everything doesn’t get done before the end of this semester, then possibly in the spring I can plan more accordingly.
Personal - Dallas
Yes, all my stuff is out at UTD now, and as soon as I started my computer up, I immediately missed my dual monitors. All is well though; I found a new wallpaper to use and haven’t had a situation where I drastically desired it yet, but my guess is that that first moment isn’t too far off.
I’ve taken care of everything UTD related except picking up one more scholarship check (which hasn’t made its way into my account yet), so life should begin to be smooth sailing. This is, of course, assuming that my Shuttle works when I plug it in tomorrow to set it up as my desktop at my house. Once I get it plugged in, the first thing I’m doing? Installing and playing Bioshock.
Personal - Dallas
Tonight my dad and I finished making all of our reservations (hotel and airline) for my birthday trip to Vegas. We leave on the 19th and come back the 22nd which gives me two full days of Vegas goodness plus the afternoon of the 19th (the 22nd we have a noon flight, so pretty much all of the morning will be packing, checking out, and getting to the airport). We haven’t quite decided all the entertainment and shows we’ll be going to yet, but some of the hotels don’t even know that far in advance what they’re going on to have on those nights. These reservations will probably be made gradually over the next couple of months.
Now that this has been planned, I get to set my sights on convincing my parents into a trip to Australia (hopefully at the start of next summer and planned early enough so I can use it as a negotiating point with any potential internship start dates). That trip will definitely include some scuba diving, but beyond that I need to start doing research into exactly what I’d want to do there. It’s so far away that we’d probably take a Hawaii-like week long trip, and going sightseeing around Sydney can only entertain you for so many hours out of the day (or, in my case, the week).
On my homework note, I actually did start doing something today. My “name tent” for my education class has to be decorated on the inside explaining who we are without using any words, so I channeled my inner artist that’s normally kept locked up in a closet and let him come out and play a little. It’s by no means done, but I have until Friday to do that.
Personal - Dallas
My dad finally mentioned something about the streaming TV setup that our new HTPC is supposed to be the centerpiece of, something that took him much longer to do than I expected considering it hasn’t been working (as far as he was concerned) since I built it. This brought up the ethernet cable drop idea plus the fact that I need to work on a way to solve the temperature issue when the HTPC is on for extended periods of time, so I know where some of my spare time will be devoted for the next couple of weeks/months/years.
There was no movie or anything all that special today, so I just stayed home and rested on my first Saturday of the new school year. I have some homework that I’ll try and convince myself to do tomorrow, but I already fear the procrastination genes inside of me will win out. I’d like to develop a fairly efficient schedule for getting my homework done since there are going to be some big games coming out before too long. Bioshock is getting near perfect reviews and comes out this next week, so that will hopefully engross me for the forseeable future.
Personal - Dallas
I quote from my post last night, “I will be going out to UTD tonight to spend the night” — my friends and fellow readers, I must apologize, for this was a lie. Pretty much right after I posted that I went downstairs to leave, but me having a headache combined with the fact it was raining meant that I got the green light to stay home last night. After that decision had been made, I found out that the power had been continually going out at my apartment, so that made staying at home all the nicer. Because of how I felt though, I went to sleep almost immediately. I can’t really recall the last time I went to sleep before 10:30, but I’m pretty sure it hasn’t been all that recent.
My portable hard drive arrived today in one of those packages that you have to fight to retrieve the product you paid good money for. I still haven’t found any (free) backup software that I’m really happy with, so that’s an ongoing search in conjunction with the inevitable cleaning up of my whole My Docs folder hierarchy. It’s not a very pretty thing to look at in its current state.
As I claimed I would, I watched Disney Channel for about 4 hours straight and can provide my review of HSM2. My verdict? Good, not awesome, and it “suffers” from an obviously bigger budget making some things noticeably more polished in this version. Also, the weird studio song recording dubbed over the actual singing to produce a lip syncing effect stood out a bunch to me in a couple places. My score: 7.5/10.
Personal - Dallas
Last night at the “funeral” (basically, party) we played some Wii and Gamecube games. One person brought their Wii, someone else brought Mario Party 8 (so much more fun with 4 real people playing), and because everyone was in the mood for a little Smash Bros., I ran back to my house and got Melee. When I got that, however, I also picked up WarioWare: Smooth Moves and took that along. Unfortunately it’s one of those games where you have to unlock the multiplayer mode, so we ended up just playing through parts of the single player mode by passing the controller around.
I’ve played WarioWare from the beginning, so I knew to an extent what to expect. Sure, Smooth Moves made my laugh a couple times at how weird it could be, but I generally kept it together. Take a room full of people who don’t even know what the game is about and make them play it, and you have a recipe for absolute, complete hilarity. If you ever need a good party game with friends, this series is a winner.
School today was fine, and my day tomorrow is even more compressed than I was thinking it was. My class doesn’t start until 9:30 (I was thinking 9:00), and my Collegium V meeting is at 1:00 (I was thinking 2:00). I will be going out to UTD tonight to spend the night, but I’ll only really be taking out clothes for tomorrow and my laptop. Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be coming back to my house and most likely in front of the TV watching Disney Channel all evening. Yes, I fully intend on watching High School Musical 2.
Personal - Dallas
I’m making this post early because in about 20 minutes I’ll be leaving to go over to a friend’s house with no guarantee that I’ll have another chance to make a post before midnight rolls around. Yes, even though I have school tomorrow, I could still conceivably get home after midnight and still have over 12 hours to spare before my first class. That’s college for ya.
The reason I will be potentially unable to make a post is because we’re having a “machinima funeral”. When I was called to be informed of this earlier I was as clueless as most of you reading this right now are. The short version is that Microsoft released a set of “guidelines” saying what you can and cannot do with their games, and unfortunately the guidelines they set are basically believed to have the effect of killing off all Halo related machinima.
Something I forgot to say yesterday was that I went to go see Underdog. It wasn’t horrible, but it’s not a movie that I’m going to get on DVD or probably even rent. Possibly it might be worth watching once it its the HBO type channels, but all in all it was just a very average movie (by my standards). My score: 6/10.
Personal - Dallas
Seeing as how tomorrow is my last day of summer and I have no big plans made, I am free to decide how I want to spend it. There will probably be some TV watching, more than likely a tiny bit of game playing will be incorporated, and there might even be a trip to the mall around lunch time that involves me spending money at Gamestop. Nothing UTD related though, nor anything connected to my ex-internship. One day of summer all to myself. That’s what tomorrow is, and tomorrow night we’ll see where it went.
Personal - Dallas
About halfway through today I realized that everything felt really strange. I shouldn’t be in my car right now, I’m supposed to be at Rockwell Collins. Wait, no… I’m done there. So why am I in my car right now? Ah yes, summer. An infinite string of Saturdays (with a couple Sundays thrown in for good measure) until school.
I did have a couple moments over the summer (especially towards the beginning of June) where stores would he having start of summer/end of school sales, and my mind would continually argue that these marketing departments were insane. Hello, it’s not summer!! If it was summer, I wouldn’t be going to schoo… Oh, I guess it is summer.
I ordered my portable hard drive today from Amazon, so once it arrives I get to have the joy of figuring out exactly how I want to sync everything between my various computers. It’s 160 GB so I could theoretically sync almost my entire My Docs folder, but hopefully whatever software it comes with (or that I end up finding/buying/writing) allows me a finer grain of control.
Personal - Dallas
Tomorrow: I’m going to HP at 9:00 to meet with one of my ex-teachers, I’m meeting my grandparents at 10:45 to go downtown and have lunch, then I’m going back to HP afterwards to talk with the trainers about football. Tuesday: I’m meeting my grandparents for lunch around 11:00 and then going to see a movie. Wednesday: Well… I don’t have any plans for Wednesday yet, but I bet I’ll make some soon enough!!
I played some GW and C&C3 today, and most of my free time this week will probably be spent on one of those two games or with WoW. As fart as my Wii goes, I still don’t have any big games to hook me into playing it, but hopefully that’ll change as I actually start to increase my library. Now that I actually have one, the last thing I want is for it to sit under my TV going unplayed.
Personal - Dallas