The walking tour was pretty good this morning; it was much more about the history of USC and some of the building rather than pointing out where everything was. After that was over, I went back to the hotel and got ready to check out. I had set up AA to notify my about my gate a few hours before my flight, but then I also got another notification that my flight was going to be delayed until 3:00 (for no apparent reason). When I got to the airport I went up to the ticket counter to try to get on an earlier flight, and they were able to get me on one in coach (rather than first class) that was leaving in just about 30 minutes. Luckily security was a breeze, so I made it to the gate right as they were starting to board.
Once back in Dallas, I still headed straight to HP for the game tonight. We were playing Poteet, the team that knocked us out of the playoffs last year, so we were looking for a little revenge. Unfortunately, that revenge didn’t happen in a 0-2 loss that put us at 1-1 in district. There’s an away district game on Friday, and then on Saturday we go to Rangers Ballpark to play in the afternoon. That will mark the end of my spring break, and then I have no more holidays until school is over in just under two months from now.
Personal - Dallas
LA, 8:50 PM: It’s probably for the better that I didn’t have a pedometer with me as I don’t really want to know how far I walked today. If I had to guess, I’d put it at at least 2 miles, possibly even 3-4. Primarily this is due to my hotel being at the opposite side of the campus from where most of the buildings were that I needed to go to, and I made basically two giant loops through the campus today (one in the morning, another in the afternoon). When I go on the walking (oh, joy) tour tomorrow, I’ll probably already know where a bunch of stuff is. At least I won’t get turned around nearly as easily as I’m prone to when walking around an unfamiliar environment.
There was a noticeable difference in between how much each program wanted to talk with me. The Interactive Media program had faculty that was very happy to speak with me, answer questions, and even tell me what was going on later in the day so that I could go see some classes in the afternoon. The CS program, however, was close to the exact opposite. The email response I got contained little more than just a building and room number to go to, the head person told me to just go speak to students in the lab, and that I could read about the program online. I’m not saying that I don’t think they cared that I wanted to learn more about the program, but it was just a very apparent difference in how each program responded to my request for more information. I’ll still apply to both and this will probably have a virtually minuscule impact on my final decision (assuming I get accepted into both), but my curiosity just makes me wonder why each program acted like they did.
Los Angeles, Personal - Dallas
LA, 4:30 PM: Alex is currently interning with a company called Illumination Entertainment, a production company involved with the upcoming movie Horton Hears a Who! On Wednesday we were talking, and he informed me that he received an invitation to an advance screening of the movie on the 20th Century Fox lot. He was allowed to bring family/friends, so I went with him. The screening was earlier this afternoon, and the whole experience was really cool. We didn’t get to see that much of the lot, but I did take a couple of pictures on my phone of semi-interesting stuff that we walked by. The movie itself was also extremely good and funny, something that I wasn’t sure I’d be saying since the studio behind it (Blue Sky Studios) also did the Ice Age movies and Robots — good movies, but I didn’t particularly love any of them. This is the first movie that I’ve ever seen before it was actually released, and by extension this is also my first score I’ve given to an as of yet unreleased movie: 9/10.
I’m about to go walk across the street and wander around the USC campus so that I can hopefully get a good enough map in my head of where the various building are that I need to visit tomorrow. I also just thought and changed the time zone offset for the blog so that I wouldn’t go a week or more with posts timestamped off by an hour. My body thinks that it’s a cross between 4:30 and 5:30 right now, so I’m fairly well adjusted to the time zone change already. Coming back on Tuesday I have half a week to fix my internal clock, so that shouldn’t be too much of a problem either.
Los Angeles, Personal - Dallas
LA, 9:57 PM: Expect this post to be expanded past the midnight deadline as I just spent 30 minutes on the phone with Radisson tech support attempting to get the internet connection fixed in my room.
Ok, so here’s what went down. I checked into my room shortly after getting here, and then Alex and I went over to his apartment for a couple hours to do basically nothing (but that nothing was more than the nothing that could have been done here in my hotel room). When I came back to my hotel, it was around 9:20 (so 11:20 blog time). I spent a few minutes resting, and then I pulled out my laptop to make a post. The way this hotel works is that some floors are actually student housing, so every room has two ethernet cables: one for the hotel’s internet, and one for the USC network. Well, the physical port on the wall for the hotel internet wasn’t working in my room, so I could only ever get as far as being prompted for a USC username and password.
After spending close to 30 minutes on the phone with Raddison tech support (so by this time it’s getting perilously close to 10:00/midnight), an engineer came up to my room and determined that what I thought was actually the case. Nothing could be done about it until Monday, so they ended up just moving me into a different room. As far as I’m concerned, I got my post in for yesterday, the streak is still alive, and if you don’t like it, you can go create your own blog and rant about it.
By the way, I’ve had tomorrow’s post title planned out since I think Wednesday, and it’ll be based on something happening tomorrow that should be really, really cool.
Los Angeles, Personal - Dallas
The weather gods’ second snowstorm of the week once again screwed around with my schedule, and they actually got me pretty good this time. I went up to HP in the morning, expecting to find out that the game has been canceled, but the players hadn’t heard anything by the time school started. At the start of 2nd period, the people doing the announcements said that all of the baseball players needed to be released at the end of 4th for the games (yes, plural) today at 2:00 and 4:00. Well, dang it, weather gods. I specifically scheduled my interview at UTD today to be in the afternoon so that it wouldn’t conflict with the baseball game. I then spent about 15 minutes calling various people and rearranging my schedule so that my interview was at 11:30 instead of 4:00, and I could therefore be at HP for the afternoon games. Whatever the new schedule is, it’s not very tournament-like, but we won 10-0 and 4-1 regardless with two more games scheduled for tomorrow (only the first of which I’ll be at, but I was expecting to miss a game tomorrow anyway).
My initial plan for tomorrow was to make an early post since I’m not sure what all will be going down once I land in LA. Considering that I’m leaving my house at 10:00 in the morning tomorrow, a post would really just consist of anything that happened in my dreams while I was sleeping. Therefore, expect a mobile post tomorrow unless I’m back in my hotel room by 10:00 (Pacific) where there will be hopefully free internet access.
Personal - Dallas
On occasions, I have some TAG outbursts. Those are very promptly followed be my grabbing my TAG self, beating it with a blunt object, and locking it back in it’s box where it should stay for all eternity but never seems to. So yes, as I was leaving my Linear Algebra problem section today, it was sleeting on me. The TAG portion of me was apparently controlling my brain at that moment because I came up with the idea that the sky was ice peeing on me. I believe this requires a /sigh, an in depth examination of my mental state, and probably a visit to a therapist. I’ll give you the /sigh, but that’s as far as I’ll go of my own free will.
After all the repeat hype about today, the result was still less than stellar overall. Yes, there was snow. Yes, there was more snow than Tuesday. No, there wasn’t an insane amount of snow and likely nothing will be closed tomorrow. The baseball games did get cancele, however, and I’ll figure out the status of tomorrow’s games when I go up to HP in the morning to work with Mr. Barrows (for a possible grand total of 2 hours if we do play at 11:00). If we don’t play tomorrow, then who knows what Saturday will be like. All I know is that I have a 4:05 flight out of DFW, so any game starting much later than 11:00 I won’t be around for.
Personal - Dallas
For no apparent reason during the baseball game tonight, I started to get a really bad headache. (Get the pun in the title?) Once I got back to my apartment and took two ibuprofen along with a hot shower it started to go away, but even now it’s still a noticeable headache. I have no idea why it happened, but it definitely doesn’t need to happen ever again.
Tomorrow’s games are up in the air pending the weather, but until a firm decision is made otherwise, they’re still on. I’ll be heading to HP right after my Linear Algebra quiz and then heading over to someone’s house in between games so that I don’t spend 30 minutes driving back and forth to my house to only be there for about an hour. It’s very likely going to be cold and miserable, and a part of me almost wishes that the games would get canceled; having that happen would drastically mess with the structure of the tournament, so it’s probably for the better if they’re not.
Personal - Dallas
After a whole lot of hyping, that was extremely anticlimactic. When I got up this morning, there was no snow anywhere on the ground besides the grass, virtually nothing was closed or delayed, and it got up into the 50s today. I don’t know what kind of sick game this is that the weather gods are playing, but obviously they can’t make up their mind on what they want to do. This pattern apparently isn’t over yet though since the high tomorrow is 63 before dropping to 45 on Thursday. Of course, once I leave for LA the the temperatures are going to be consistently in the 60s.
My (planned) schedule for tomorrow is working on my OS homework in the morning, going to my classes, and then working more on the game project before HP’s baseball game tomorrow night. Of course, who knows what else could happen during the day, but hopefully whatever might won’t require all that much of my attention. Preferably that’d be forever, but I’d settle for just the rest of this week.
Personal - Dallas
So, weather gods, you thought you could make me miserable today? You thought you could punish me for enjoying the weather that you provided over the weekend? You were wrong!! You were so preoccupied with trying to make my experience today as miserable as possible that you forgot the game could get postponed due to your actions!
*cough* Well, now that that’s out of my system, my day ended up just being a short, normal school day. Aside from my two classes, I’ve been at home all day, and I got approval to spend tonight at home on the off chance that there was going to be a significant amount of snow accumulation overnight (which it doesn’t look like is going to happen now). That means that tomorrow probably won’t be a snow day, but you never know what those feisty weather gods may have up their sleeve. The game getting postponed now means that I have a game on Wednesday in addition to the tournament games on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Four days of baseball in a row might be a record, but it should still only be a maximum of six games (for the team, only five for me).
Personal - Dallas
The weather gods got quite angry that I enjoyed the weather outside yesterday, so apparently some spiting was in order. Tomorrow, the day of my next baseball game, the temperature will be in the 30s outside with rain, wind, and possibly even some snow. Next time I might be better off keeping my mouth shut and just not commenting on the weather at all, lest I be punished for it in a similar fashion.
Aside from miserable baseball weather, this week appears to be becoming pretty typical. I am going to be meeting with one of my game group members during our class time on Tuesday, so the only real anomaly in my week is not having my first class tomorrow morning. With just one thing due (OS HW), this looks to be the perfect week to slide into my not-so-much-of-a-break spring break.
Personal - Dallas