We had lunch at our church today, and it never seems to fail that more people always show up on these specific Sundays than usually do. Granted, a few of these are people that come for Sunday School and just stay for the next service, and we actually didn’t have nearly as many today as we sometimes have had. My mom doesn’t really like them all that much because it’s more than just a little work for her to get stuff ready beforehand, help out during the actual lunch, and then assist with all the cleaning that takes place afterwards. I, on the other hand, am assigned various tasks while people are eating but get left alone for the most part during the cleanup since I carry stuff out to my grandparents’ car at the very end.
UTD’s spring schedules will go online a week from tomorrow, and then a week after that I can register for my classes. I doubt that I’ll be able to have something as nice as I’ve had this semester since I pretty much need to take Linear Algebra, and historically that has occurred either on MW nights or MWF right in the middle of the afternoon (and if I don’t have any morning classes on Friday, that plan sucks). My ongoing thought has been that I would either do it online or at a community college around here, but the fact that I need to take a 4 credit class along with having to do it online from a place like the University of Iowa to meet that requirement means that I’ll likely just end up biting the bullet and taking it at UTD.
Personal - Dallas
Typically I wait until Sunday to do all of my homework due at the first part of the upcoming week, but I went ahead and finished my entire Programming Languages assignment in about an hour (which included getting the environment all set up). For 5 problems, I don’t think that’s too bad. I still have a Data Structures assignment due a week from Monday and then research that I need to do for my education class on Friday, but aside from that, I have very little outside work assigned at the moment that’s due in the near future.
I almost went to go see a movie with my grandparents today, but after my mom woke me up at 8:30 as she was leaving and I didn’t fully get out of bed until 11:15, I decided to pass on that. I did watch Transformers with my parents tonight though, and they both agreed that it was a little light in the story department but still very entertaining. With the (first) sequel coming out in the summer of 2009, it looks like Transformers will be around for at least a little while longer.
Personal - Dallas
…but definitely a correct way to end it. In the battle of 6-0 unbeaten teams, Pearce scored on the very first play with a ~70 yard QB keeper run. In typical HP fashion though, we showed them that early celebration isn’t a great idea with a 45-20 win. That most likely will make us win district, but Pearce still has to almost lose every one of their remaining games for us not to go D2 in the playoffs. On one hand us going D2 would be good since those are the smaller schools; on the other hand it’s an extra game to play during the playoffs.
I also got a glimpse at the HP baseball schedule tonight and have been able to start planning my spring break based on HP’s games. Regardless of what my ultimate decision is with UTD baseball, I will still likely only do anything with HP around my spring break and then towards the end of district when I’m finishing up with school. Due to the addition of two “study days” before our final exams in the spring, my last exam could potentially be as last as May 7th. Compared to some schools that’s not all that late, but it should be two days earlier on the 5th. I seriously doubt all that many people are going to use those days for studying, and for me it’ll likely just be two more days in which I can potentially forget stuff. I’ll still be taking all of my stuff home when I would have otherwise, so I guess overall it’s not that big of a deal.
Personal - Dallas
Remember Okami, that other wolf game that I played right before Twilight Princess? Yeah, well it looks like I might just be playing it again before too long…on a different console, that is. Okami, to the great delight of many gamers (myself included) has been confirmed for the Wii. Something would have to be horribly, horribly screwed up to not make me buy this game again if for no other reason than to show my support for it and hopefully get Capcom to invest in making an Okami 2.
The HP JV team lost tonight 14-17, but it sure didn’t look like it was going to end that close when at halftime Coppell was up 17-0. I’m going to be up at the stadium tomorrow at 6:00 for our undefeated matchup with Pearce. Considering that we’d have to beat them and then they’d likely have to lose at least 2 more of their final 3 games to not make the playoffs, I forsee Division 2 in HP’s future in 4 weeks.
Personal - Dallas
After many weeks longer than it should have taken me to play it (and almost opting not to play it at all today), I have officially completed Bioshock. I was right in stating that I was extremely close to the end, but it took me much longer than it should have due to needing/wanting to track down all of the Little Sisters in the final level. Really the only fault I can claim with it is that once you actually beat the final boss, everything is relatively anticlimactic. As far as the story of the game goes the ending works, but with games that have a similar epic presence, I guess I’m just used to a very elaborate ending cinematic. Overall though, it absolutely deserves all the GOTY awards that it’s bound to win. If you haven’t already had a chance to play it, would you kindly go out and buy it right now??
As for the rest of this post, I got nothing. Nothing happened today noteworthy of repeating here, and rather than starting up another game tonight, I’ll probably go take a shower and then start working on some homework. I have a Programming Languages assignment due next week and then a Data Structures assignment due on the 29th, so I’m sure I can find something to keep me occupied.
Personal - Dallas
My internal calendar was apparently turned off last night or something because my tomorrow and Thursday mornings are not free, just as how they haven’t been free for the past two weeks. I guess that leaves tomorrow afternoon as my sole Bioshock time for the week since this morning was virtually entirely spent studying for my test. A test that was much easier than it should have been, actually, which historically has not been a good thing for me. I spent all morning studying though, no wonder it was easy!! No, I spent all morning looking at notes since I really had no clue what types of questions the test was going to have.
Even tomorrow afternoon isn’t completely free for me because I’m meeting with my group from my education class at 4:00. Ideally that will take all of 15-30 minutes, but in all reality, who knows. We’re meeting to go over our lesson plan idea and show off the visuals we’ve created, so the less work we still have to do will probably translate into a shorter amount of time that we spend there.
Personal - Dallas
I think about studying for it, then I forget, then I remember, then I forget again. That’s pretty much been the pattern for my Digital Logic test which I have tomorrow, and unlike my other test I was doing this with, this one I do need to review everything at least once for since it’s probably my least favorite and least easy class. I don’t necessarily want to say “most difficult” because I don’t think I’ve made a grade below 90 in there. This is also mainly new material unlike the first test was, so hopefully my procrastination on studying won’t have a negative impact (although if I keep forgetting, is it still procrastination?).
No noteworthy game progress has been made, but hopefully between a combination of Wednesday morning, Wednesday afternoon, and Thursday morning I can finally move Bioshock into the completed pile. With the amount of time I spend at home and other factors that keep me away from here, maybe I should rethink which computer I keep in which location for future semesters. The spring will probably be better since I won’t have football, and then hopefully by the start of school next fall I’ll have my new computer.
Personal - Dallas
The Cowboys fell pretty hard today against the Partiots, losing their first game of the season 48-27. That puts them at 5-1 while HP still remains undefeated at 6-0. Both are still undefeated in their district/division though which is where it really matters for playoffs, so no reason to be too concerned yet.
Aside from watching the game today, all I really did was some homework and play in a few WoW battlegrounds. I have a test Tuesday which I’ll study tomorrow night for, but aside from that my upcoming week is pretty easy on the school front. There is a group project due Friday in my education class; we’re meeting on Wednesday at 4:00 to coordinate the near final version, but there’s not a ton of work involved for it.
Personal - Dallas
Sleep.
I don’t really know why, but I’ve been tired for most of the afternoon. As a solution to this situation, I believe that I’m going to go take my shower and fall asleep relatively soon instead of the typical midnight or later bedtime I adhere to on the weekends (or now, really most days). All I really did today was sit around, play games, and watch the pool people fix our pool. Oh yeah…
Yesterday I was doing routine maintenance on our pool when all of a sudden the fountain just died (but I knew for a fact that the pump was still supposed to be on). I raced back to turn off the pump, and through my highly qualified troubleshooting (read: looking at a gauge and turning the system on and off), I determined that the pump wasn’t holding pressure like it should. This happened once last year due to the fault of a cracked O-ring, so I was happy for two reasons: 1) I had a good idea of what it was, and 2) that idea meant that I didn’t break it. We put in a call to our home warranty people and were told that the pool people would contact us Monday morning. Not ideal since we couldn’t run the pool pump all weekend, but nothing catastrophic would happen before then.
Well, this morning they called and wanted to know if we would like an appointment before noon today. When the guy got out here he actually determined that it was a crack in a (very old) lid that was letting air in and therefore not allowing the pump to prime itself. Once replaced, the pool started working fine again. Now, no part of this story involved me exerting myself in any way, so I doubt it’s the reason for me being tired, but including it here provided me an easy way to make this post longer.
Personal - Dallas
I started playing Portal today, and even though I’m at the next to last “level” after just a little over an hour of playing, it is one of the greatest games that I can think of. The humor is even greater than the trailer everyone loved (“If at first you don’t succeed… You fail.”) and the portal gun is super fun to play around with. I think that maybe if you combined that with the gravity gun, people might just have to play it non-stop.
I did a CD case consolidation in my mom’s car today as an extension of sorting and ripping some additional CDs that were in various places upstairs. I’m slowly but surely working towards my ultimate media goal. This is, in case you’re wondering, to have all of our CDs, DVDs, recorded/downloaded shows, etc. all on the file server out in our garage. We can then, therefore, have access to all of it from any computer not only in our house but when we’re on vacation, I’m out at UTD, and so on. The media aggregation part of it is going well, so my next step is to find either software or scripts that will allow the remote (web) interface. I’d like to say that if I can’t find anything that I would go ahead and write my own, but I seriously doubt that it’ll come to that.
Personal - Dallas