I’m not the only one that was having difficulty with a couple of the problems on the Machine Learning homework, so our teacher extended to due date to Friday from Wednesday. We also have 4 “late days” that we can use throughout the semester to turn in an assignment up to 2 days late without any penalty, and seeing as how this is the next to last assignment, he encouraged us to use some if we hadn’t already. That effectively means that this HW isn’t due until Sunday night. I’m not sure if I’ll have a flash a brilliance between now and then, but an extra 4 days from the original due date sure can’t hurt.
Tomorrow is actually going to be my last day of school this week. Why, you ask? Well, I hinted at something last week but gave very few details. I’ll still be light on the specifics for now in order to leave you guessing if you don’t already know, but suffice to say that this is a two day school week for me. I’ll just think of this week as the Thanksgiving break that I should have rather than those measly two days that UTD really gives us off.
Personal - Dallas
Ignoring my education class that I may or may not drop before the semester starts, my schedule for next semester is very manageable. My longest day(s) is/are 2:45 long, and I never have more than 2 classes on any one day. Beyond that, all my classes are between 12:30 and 3:45. I don’t get a 4 day weekend like I do right now, but I’ll take about a 72 hour one.
Tomorrow will continue to be a HW day, but the fact that I only have two assignments due this week, both of which I’ve made significant progress on, means that it will likely be a day of fun rather than work. I like days of fun, they’re pretty…oh, I don’t know. Fun?
Personal - Dallas
So, I got around to buying my ethernet cable today, one of the 50′ variety. In order to not have bunches and bunches of cable bundled up somewhere, I found a way to route it to the switch in my room where it’s only ever out in the open once (goes across the floor between my bedroom and bathroom). I moved a small rug to cover most of it up, but we’ll see how that plan works out for the time being.
Tomorrow will be a typical Sunday/HW day for me, at least that’s what I’m planning on. I might also play around with doing DVD to file conversions to put on the server since that’s not actually useful beyond me being able to watch them on my computer. Figuring out the best way to do it might be hard, but then it’s a lot of downtime of letting it convert which would be a perfect counterpart for my non-computer based homework.
Personal - Dallas
While we were playing ultimate today (and I actually wasn’t completely sucking), Jack asked me why I didn’t play sports while I was at HP. Well, while I do have a small amount of athletic ability, I’ve never really worked on being able to exert said athletic ability for sustained durations. Sure, I could work on that (and likely should for various reasons), but working on that by working out every day really isn’t high on my priority list.
Since I’m planning on being cheap, tomorrow I need to go to Fry’s and get a very long ethernet cable to run from my room to my 360 which is now connected to our HDTV. That’s really the only downside to having it out there because at least right now I can actually see the text on all of my games rather than just half. Text is important; it tells you what to do, what people are saying, and other minor details like that.
Personal - Dallas
Well, I was right about tonight’s game being a close one. In fact, it was so close that we went into overtime at 31-31. The game ended at 38-31, but as the title indicates, not in HP’s favor. This marks the first regular season loss for HP since the first game of my senior year.
There was actually less on the line tonight than I originally thought. At 9-1 we didn’t win the district championship, but Heath is a school going into the D2 bracket while we’re going D1. This meant that regardless of tonight, we’re set to play McKinney next Friday in Plano (well, technically Murphy I think, but Plano ISD. A loss tonight may not mean much, but starting next week the stakes most definitely get raised.
Personal - Dallas
Tomorrow we play Rockwall Heath in our battle for the district championship but not for a playoff spot. All it should impact is the title and then our playoff seeding. I don’t know which seeding we’d rather have based on who we’d be going up against, but I know that we’ll be playing to win. I’m not sure that I could tell you the last time we weren’t our district’s champion, and we’re still on our regular season winning streak even if we did have two close games recently (and very likely another one tomorrow).
This weekend I’m going to be creating a couple “websites” for homework rather than one of my typical reaons for making one. They’re actually going to end up being fairly fake and used for presenations in my education classes rather than ever being uploaded anywhere. The ideas I have for my presentation are just much better suited for being web based than a Powerpoint, and my teacher has no real issue with me doing it that way either. I’m all for Powerpoint presentations generally, but if it’s not the best thing to use, no reason to force a technology to do something that it doesn’t want to.
Personal - Dallas
Come on, any question about it? I didn’t think so. Now presenting, President Obama.
Now, in the rest of all the important stuff going on, I’m actually not going with that online screenplay writing solution I mentioned yesterday for the sole fact that the copy/paste into Word does not preserve any of the formatting. I found a standalone program that will allow me to do that, so it shall be what gets used instead. If I’m going to go to the trouble to have it formatted all nicely in the first place, it’s definitely getting carried over to the actual document that I turn in. If not, what’s the point?
Personal - Dallas
For our game document, we have to include three scenes with the dialogue written out. While not required, we were told that we could write it in standard screenplay format and were given a PDF that we could use as a template to work from. Well, as I found out from that short assignment, Microsoft Word was not designed with that in mind. Writing things in screenplay format in Word is an exercise not only in frustration and button clicking, but also in spending more time formatting the thing than you actually spend writing it.
Therefore, I did the requisite Google searching and found an online service that is especially designed for doing screenplay writing. This also has the benefit of me being able to work on it from UTD as easily as I could from my house, a nice option to pass the two hours or so I’ll have between my classes tomorrow. Yeah, I could just use the syncing setup that I have working or even the remote desktoping that comes along with it, but if I can put it up in the cloud to begin with, life is just easier.
Personal - Dallas
Church, lunch, homework, dinner, WoW. That’s basically been my entire day, so boring yet so standard. Now, my fourth day of my weekend (aka tomorrow), there will probably be more of the same with school substituted for church and the order rearranged appropriately. I guess you could technically just call it my 3.5th day, but one class at 5:30 isn’t that bad when I get the entire rest of the day off.
For whatever reason UTD doesn’t think that tomorrow is good enough to let us start registering, so I can’t actually do that until Tuesday. Three of my classes I can do by myself online, one is all set to be done by the CV admin assistant, and the last (which I may end up dropping) I have to go by the TDC in order to be able to register. Yes, there are still some things that I actually have to go do in person. Come on, UTD, get with the 21st century.
Personal - Dallas
I should most likely be home by midnight. There’s actually a decent chance I might even be home by 11:00. However, the only sure way of getting a post in today is to make one now, so that’s exactly what I’m doing (obviously). With all the the stuff I have going on that could break my posting streak, I’m not about to let a game of glow in the dark ultimate frisbee be the culprit.
Tonight is another one of the wonderful DST switches that loves to cause me problems with my posting times, and this one happens to be the unfriendly of the two. Last time when I posted about it I thought about changing the setting before I made my Sunday post, so we’ll see if this holds true again. Then again, it’s not that unfriendly because it is the one that lets me get an extra hour of sleep. Yeah, I think I’ll make that trade.
Personal - Dallas