For the rest of the week, I have no HW left in any of my classes. This is awesome for tomorrow because it means that for once I’ll be able to do nothing but rest on a Wednesday night. Ok, well, I guess I technically ould have rested any Wednesday night in the past with a slightly more aggressive HW schedule, but still, no HW is different than just getting it done early.
I’m not even going to venture a guess where I’ll be Thursday evening, but suffice to say that it will either be HP or Greenville. It should be obvious which one I’m pulling for, and I also think that’s the way things seem to be leaning right now. So, no homework tomorrow, nice football schedule this week, and then a weekend. Oh yeah, I’m liking how the rest of this week is laid out.
Personal - Dallas
All day today Google Groups has been having a pretty serious issue of not being able to upload files successfully. This is a pretty big problem since the proposals for our final project are due in my Gaming Narratives class by midnight and virtually no one has been able to upload their files. Granted, we ended up working around the issue by sending them as email attachments to the group (more on this in a sec), but still, an upload form isn’t something which is that hard to get right. Come on, Google, we all know you’re more competent than that.
Speaking of emailing stuff to the group, UTD’s email servers just about screwed me over in that regard. Apparently the email the servers were tagging my outgoing messages with was not the one I was expecting it to be, so all of my attempted emails to the group were being dropped. Eventually I was able to find a way to change it, but seriously UTD, why must you make life so difficult?
Personal - Dallas
Tomorrow by midnight the proposal for our game idea is due in my Gaming Narratives class, and of course the idea that I’ve come up with is my most genius one ever. Considering that I’ll be spending the rest of the semester working on it, it better be a really good one. I don’t want to have to think up stuff for a game that I’m not going to enjoy working on. That would just be totally un-awesome.
As for everything else this week, my test on Tuesday is the only thing worth mentioning. Normal football schedule, normal class schedule, normal life for the most part. The little surprises that seem to pop up every now and then do make things interesting but not always in a good way. In that situation, I’ll take boring over interesting any day.
Personal - Dallas
Andrew decided that he’d try and actually maintain a blog again (he has some pretty serious catching up to do in order to reach my levels of bloggingness), and he decided to make a post today about he’s in love with a program Dropbox. Basically, it’s a program that allows you to synchronize your files back and forth between computers as well as have access to them onilne. While this is a very good thing to have and I’ve thought about setting something up that for a while, I decided that I wouldn’t go the Dropbox route but instead go with the Microsoft Live solution called Live Mesh. Basically, it does the exact same thing Dropbox does but with the added ability of being able to remote desktop into your computers along with having the files available online. I might not be the biggest MS Live fan in the world, but I’m completely willing to drink the kool-aid in certain situations.
After the review class that lasted about an hour (and really wasn’t all that helpful), I went to go see Eagle Eye. Unlike Tropic Thunder, this was a movie that I thought from the previews I would enjoy. As it turns out, I did! So amazing that my initial thoughts about a movie might turn out to be right. My score: 8.5/10.
Personal - Dallas
I’m not going to let the fact rest that I have school tomorrow due to the illogical thinking of my teacher, but one again, since it’s a review class, I will in fact go and be there for as long as it goes on. Well, probably not past 12:30, but that would be two and a half hours anyway. Getting me to go to UTD on a Saturday is one thing, getting me to stay there for an insanely long period of time for something not entertaining in the slightest is something completely different.
So, funny story: I went to UTD today (yeah, on my “Saturday”) to meet with a Microsoft recruiter about the game event in the spring. We talked for a few minutes and then asked me to send my resume onto him. I had discovered a mere couple hours earlier (courtesy of checking my spam folder) that Microsoft had actually already responded to a resume I sent them a few weeks ago and wanted to set up an interview with me in a couple weeks. Alas, since I’m graduating in May I can’t interview for an internship position. I can, however, interview for a full-time job. You’d think by now that I’d learn it never really pays to think/plan that far ahead into the future.
Personal - Dallas
Only being up 21-7 at halftime against a team that was 1-9 last year and 0-3 to start off this year, I think we forgot that we were supposed to completely murder Newman Smith. All ended up well, however, and HP finally got on board with everyone else’s ideas about how the game should be going and won 52-14. That’s the kind of score that we were supposed to see.
Tomorrow is basically my Saturday since I actually have a class to go to on the real Saturday, although apparently the length is going to be determined just by “how many questions we have”. If I was extremely confident in my knowledge in that class I probably wouldn’t go at all, but since it involves proofs and other fun things such as that, I’ll play it safe and actually go. After all, the last thing I’d want is to not go and then do poorly on the test. I mean, I have a 3.97 to keep up; I can’t just do “ok” on anything for the next two semesters. Screw you, GPA gods, for not making an A+ worth more than 4.0.
Personal - Dallas
With all of my homework done for tomorrow, I’m about to start watching Speed Racer before I go to sleep. Neither of my parents really want to see it, so it’s a movie that I pretty much have to watch on my own. If I wasn’t going to watch it I’d probably be playing WoW, so my usefulness amount pretty much remains the same either way.
Tomorrow is a 10 to 10 day because my first class starts at 10 and I won’t get any real time to rest until the game is over tomorrow night (probably well past 10 when you take into account unloading the van and everything, but then that just breaks that “10 to 10″ part). I expect to be quite tired tomorrow night, so fortunately Friday is one of those days with an infinitely flexible schedule for me. If I want to sleep until noon I can, and that’s what makes my schedule this semester so insanely awesome.
Personal - Dallas
One of the things that I need to do before sending off a bunch of my grad school application is setting up a portfolio website that shows off some of my work from the past couple years. This involves getting a site made with an appropriate design that I can manage and maintain enough to keep it semi-current. This also involves the process of getting the underlying software running and all that fun stuff. Maybe one of those weekend projects I seem to enjoy so much.
Speaking of, our new server is up and running, but now I get the joy of transferring most of the data from the old one to the new over a 100 Mbps network connection (which effectively means 10 MB/s). The old hard drive is formatted with a Linux partition rather than one Windows can read, so I unfortunately have few other choices besides doing it this way. The good part about it though is that since neither computer is used on a regular basis, having the transfer going on doesn’t really slow anything else down.
Personal - Dallas
Perhaps it’s a good thing that the HP game is on Thursday this week, as Saturday I actually get to go to UTD for a “makeup” class in Advanced Algorithms (even though we haven’t missed any classes yet). That starts at 10:00, so being able to go to sleep at a reasonable time on Friday without being completely exhausted will be a nice thing. Granted, I think there are many ways our teacher could have addressed the fact that he’s going to be missing a couple classes later on in the semester without having us have to show up for a class on Saturday (which is questionable if he even can), but since it’s basically going to serve as an exam review, I guess I shouldn’t really be complaining too loudly. Maybe only at volume level 4 or so.
Up until then, however, my week is boringly normal. Usual classes tomorrow, Wednesday, and Thursday; no gigantic assignments due either. From a quick mental run through of my classes I don’t think there’s any week where I have a ton of tests this semester. Once again, not complaining about that. Not complaining at all.
Personal - Dallas
I finished making my application checklists this afternoon while I went around and accessed (or attempted to) all of the applications. A few things to note: Stanford’s online app system was down, so I have to go back tomorrow in order to create my profile there. USC’s application only provides one blank for a program to apply to, so since there are two different ones I’m interested in there, I’m most likely going to be in contact with them sometime this week about what to do. Carnegie Mellon has no centralized application system, but instead directs people to the individual program/school websites. The Entertainment Technology Center prefers a completely paper-based application procedure, the only one of the four school like that. Finally, the Guildhall at SMU can’t code a website to save it’s life, but I think everything should be in order there.
Overall, the grad school application process seems a lot less well defined than undergrad does. Maybe that’s because they expect grad applicants to not need as much “hand holding”, maybe I just have a skewed view since the only school I actually applied to was UTD. Either way, I’m definitely glad that I’m starting now so that whatever happens down the road, a time crunch hopefully shouldn’t be in the cards.
Personal - Dallas