Remember yesterday’s post about wanting the energy at Texas Stadium to linger until our game tonight? I’d like to strike that from the record. For the first time in a very long time, we were not in the Cowboys’ locker room or on the home sideline. However, that didn’t seem to be an issue at all in our 36-13 win over South Oak Cliff. We already know that we play again next Friday at Texas Stadium at the same time; the question of against who will be answered in the West Mesquite-Red Oak game tomorrow.
I was up at UTD for a maximum of 15 minutes today in order to turn in my take home exam and pay my rent. I then ate lunch at Genghis before heading up to HP around 12:15. So, there was a little time for me to rest this morning, but as you can see, it wasn’t much. Sleep? Yes, please.
Personal - Dallas
The Cowboys won tonight at Texas Stadium against the Green Bay Packers (yes, Thursday night game), improving their record to 11-1. Hopefully some of that energy will carry over until tomorrow when we play there as it would be very nice for us to beat South Oak Cliff. Why do I think that the energy will help us and not them? Well, out of all the times I’ve been there (I can only count 3 of the top of my head, but it sure seems like 4 or 5), we’ve always been in the Cowboys’ locker room. Why that is, I’m not sure, but I’m not going to complain about it.
I’m done with my take home exam for my education class, so all that I have left to do is make my presentation for Monday afternoon. Not going to happen tomorrow for obvious reasons, but I’ll probably get it done Saturday so that I can just relax and practice it a little on Sunday afternoon. Hopefully then the only thing I’ll have to worry about until Vegas is a couple more playoff games for HP. :)
Personal - Dallas
I’ve been making my index card for my Programming Languages exam tomorrow, and in order to fit all the stuff on there that I want to, I’ve just kept shrinking the size of the font. I started off at 8, currently I’m down to 6, and if I want to fit once more section on, I may drop it down to even 5 or 4. I’m pretty sure that I’ve made an index card like this for a class at HP where I used a size 4 font, and while it was extremely tiny, it was still legible.
Tomorrow really marks my last “real” exam I have to worry about, as Friday should just be turning in a sheet of paper, and Monday is giving a presentation. Not to say that I don’t have work to do for those two classes, but neither are the sit down for an hour and take a test type exam. Next semester I already know (or rather, can accurately predict) that my Advanced CGD class won’t have a final exam, but all of my others have the potential to.
Personal - Dallas
Today my exam was at 2:00, tomorrow and Thursday they’re at 11:00, and then on Friday it’s at 9:30. Luckily the weekend then comes, as I’m not sure I could deal with an exam much earlier than that. In reality, I don’t expect to have to do much on Friday; it should just be show up and turn in the take home exam. Can we even have class on the final exam day? Pretty sure the answer there is “no”.
I bought a new backpack today for the first time since I believe the start of my freshman year, although it could have been as far back as before my senior year at HP. The fact that I’ve moved onto talking about backpacks should indicate that I have nothing else to really talk about. Rather than see what topic I end up moving onto next, perhaps now is just a good time to stop writing and go get ready to go to sleep.
Personal - Dallas
I beat Super Mario Galaxy this afternoon, but just went for the minimum 60 stars so that I could say that I’ve beaten it rather than aiming for a higher total. It has 120 like Super Mario 64 (and Sunshine?), but collecting all those would probably take at a minimum another week or two because of the scaling difficulty in the later galaxies.
After finishing Galaxy, I started Lego Star Wars. I had heard very good things about the first one when it initially came out, didn’t pick up the second for whatever reason, and now this version is both of those games combined together with the features from the second added into the levels from the first. I haven’t really been using the motion sensing all that much as I’ve been finding it easier to just hit B, and I haven’t fallen in love with the game yet either. It’s entertaining, but it also looks like it’s one of those games where there is a shorter campaign and lots of extra stuff to do. Good for a quick playthrough, bad for me probably ever seeing a significant part of what the game has to offer.
My first exam (Digital Logic) is at 2:00 tomorrow, and it’s even an open book/note one. My exams Wednesday and Thursday will require slightly more reviewing, Friday is a take home exam that I should start on tomorrow, and then Monday is a presentation that I have yet to create. Nothing really hard or even all that time consuming; I just need to make sure that I pace myself well over the next week. After that, what needs pacing??
Personal - Dallas
Earlier this month it was announced that the phone I was looking forward to, the Neo1973, would not support the 850 MHz band, all but eliminating it from consideration for being my next phone. This left the iPhone as being the sole remaining phone currently on the market that I’d be interested in getting, and I could even get it for $100 cheaper than retail ($300 vs. $400) through my dad’s company. I had pretty much made up my mind to get one in January, but then this morning my mom and I heard some phone-related commercial on the radio, and she asked if I wanted a new phone for Christmas. So, I will now be getting an iPhone for Christmas which solves not only my phone upgrade quandary but also my MP3 player upgrade question (my music library only hits 4 GB, half of what the iPhone can hold).
No longer being faced with the prospect of dropping $300 on a phone (or in the case of the Neo1973, $450), I decided that I would take some of my remaining internship money and basically go Christmas shopping for myself. On my list so far are a few games that I would have asked for (FF12: Revenant Wings and God of War 2 to name the two biggest) and a Nokia N800. My last post about the N800 spoke about a planned new model that would be coming out that I hoped would drop the price on the N800. Well, the N810 did come out (although not with WiMax in this version), and it did drop the N800’s price down to the $250 range. Granted, an N800 plus an iPhone may be overkill in that type of device form factor category, but one’s primary purpose is a phone/media player and the other is basically a handheld computer.
I also still have my Xbox 360 and PS3 purchases to make, the former of which will probably come first, but maybe not before Christmas like I had been thinking. By the end of next year, probably definitely on both. Right now it’s more about the games than anything else, and neither system has come out with that “must have” game for me.
Personal - Dallas
When we lost in the first playoff round my senior year at HP, we had gone to eat at Luby’s right before. After the loss, I was informed that the losses in the playoffs the previous two years had also come right after the team had eaten at Luby’s. This made Coach Allen (supposedly) say that the team would never eat at Luby’s before a game again. Yeah, well guess where we ate yesterday??
In the opening two drives of the game, neither team scored. We got the ball for our second drive and then managed to fumble it on the first play. This set up Kilgore for an easy touchdown, and the Luby’s Curse seemed to already be in effect. Well, it kinda ran it’s course before the touchdown was even over, as we blocked the extra point and Kilgore didn’t score again for the rest of the game. HP 38, Kilgore 6 was the final, so next week we play at Texas Stadium on Friday night against South Oak Cliff.
Some of today was spent doing homework, some watching TV, and some playing video games. I finally got around to picking up my preorder of Geometry Wars: Galaxies today, and I went ahead and tried it out. Very little in the instruction department, but it’s also not that hard of a game: shoot stuff, and avoid getting hit by the stuff you’re supposed to be shooting. Pretty addicting, actually.
Personal - Dallas
The temperature in Tyler tonight, that is. The bad part of that is that the temperature it’s supposed to stay constant at is around 43 degrees. Maybe I won’t actually freeze by butt off tonight, but I bet that it’s going to feel like it after I’ve been outside for a while.
I have on a long sleeve shirt, the football team shirt I wear to every game, and pants, and I’m taking along the Under Armour fleece from baseball and my heavy HP sweatshirt. Hopefully all that will be enough to keep be somewhat warm. If not, I hear Goob popsicles are supposed to be kinda good.
Personal - Dallas
Ahhh… holidays. I get a little taste today and tomorrow, six weekdays of either just one class or exam, and then over a full month off. I’m considering this to be my shortened, much colder summer vacation since the evil internship stole my real one away. Not to say that I don’t plan on being busy over the month of December, but being busy with things that I want to be doing is 180 degrees different than what happened this past summer.
Chances are I’ll aim for an early post tomorrow. Since the game is at night in Tyler, I don’t believe that I’ll get home until after midnight, and I don’t feel like letting my streak break just because of that. This gives me about 12 hours to come up with something original to post about since so much is going to happen in between now and then. Better get to thinking…
Personal - Dallas
I have nothing big to talk about that I haven’t already mentioned this week, so I decided to check back in the archives to see what I was talking about a year ago. Oh, there was definitely some stuff to talk about then.
This past Saturday was when our church flooded. My mom was elsewhere, so I ended up going over there myself to help “clean” (kinda hard to do that when everything is just soaking wet). After that was over, I went to go see Casino Royale and The Tempest at HP. A year ago yesterday was when I got my new phone after having had my previous one for I think around two years. Considering that I’m already looking at potential upgrades in the next few months, this one’s lifetime may end up being shorter.
Then we have Friday. I believe it can best be summed up in one word: “Shreveport”. To recap, we didn’t want to agree to play Texarkana at Tyler, we flipped a coin, lost, and then proceeded to go to Louisiana to lose. Well, this year we’re not playing Texarkana and we are playing at Tyler on Friday. It’s still going to be freeze to death weather, but I’ll take freezing in Tyler over nice weather in Shreveport.
Personal - Dallas