For the entirety of this school year, I haven’t been making use of my whiteboards to track my school assignments nearly as much as I did when I stayed in my apartment on campus. After realizing that between now and the middle of May I have four projects due (one in each of my classes), I decided that writing down their due dates so that I didn’t have to continually reference my assignment sheets would probably be a good idea. Fortunately they’re generally spread out (with the first being due a week from tomorrow), so even with procrastination there won’t be a massive crunch where I have four things due.
I finished Half-Blood Prince about 30 minutes ago, and I’ll at least start on Deathly Hallows before I go to sleep. It’s still entirely possible that I could finish it before my class (the first time through I read the full thing in 12 hours, and it would theoretically take me shorter my second time), but I think I value sleep more than finishing an optional book for an optional class period. Both games this week are away (and are two of our three farthest places to travel), so at least for Thursday I’ll probably be starting Wicked on the bus ride to Royse City tomorrow.
Personal - Dallas
I’ve mentioned Wikipedia chains in the past before, but today I went on one that probably has one of the most random starting and ending points of any chain I can remember. I started on the home page and clicked on the article for “onomatopoeia”, and then who knows how much later, I ended up at the article for the Toei Asakusa railway line in Japan. Someone needs to write a Firefox extension that lets people track and share their Wikipedia chains so that people can find out who can find the most random ones.
I’m not even quite halfway through Half-Blood Prince yet, so I don’t see myself finishing it and Deathly Hallows by my class on Tuesday. While it was a nice effort, things like Wikipedia are just too much of a distraction in order to read that much in a single weekend. I should be able to finish this book though, and one book is at least better than none.
Personal - Dallas
After finally getting a decent workflow established, I’ve gotten on a roll as far as baseball videos go. The home run derby was this morning (in the semi-rain), and then in the afternoon Crayton came over and we worked on creating the video for it. Crayton didn’t stay until the entire thing was done, so he’s probably coming back tomorrow in order to pick up the final rendered video. I’ve actually rendered it three times so far, each one making changes that only my perfectionist mind would be bothered by. At close to 40 minutes each render, this has had me doing many other things besides being on my computer for the evening.
My HP class on Tuesday is an optional one where we’re going to be talking about the last two books which weren’t assigned for the class. Completely independently of the awesome trailer that was just released for the new movie, I had thought about rereading both the 6th and 7th books this weekend so that they would be fresh in my mind. Losing all of this afternoon to video work has greatly decreased the chances of this happening. Seeing as how it probably takes me a good 9+ hours to read each book, it’s possible that I could finish both by Tuesday, but I’d basically have no other life between now and then.
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While we did have a ton of rain this morning, our awesome field allowed us to still get in a game today. That game, against RL Turner, wasn’t so much a game as it was us just having batting practice. They did manage to get one hit, but we managed to get 17 runs. The game that was going to be tomorrow got cancelled because the other team had to reschedule one of their games, so we just have a breakfast and then a home run derby.
After all that, I then went over to Jack’s house (where I currently am) for a Halo party. I haven’t gotten any better at Halo in the time that I haven’t played it, but I’ve at least managed to not be the worst person for the whole night long. Granted, there are many other games besides Halo that I’d rather be playing at a party like this, but my options were either coming here or playing WoW.
Oh, I also made very significant progress with the video editing situation last night. I finally realized that the files were converting fine, but it was the project settings in Premiere that was making my life much harder than it needed to be. One custom profile later, and Premiere is handling my videos with no problem at all (excluding the weird no sound issue that I have an easy workaround for).
Personal - Dallas
Since I haven’t had any other reason to pull my hair out in utter frustration tonight, I thought I might do some HP video work. I don’t konw whether to blame Adobe, Creative, or the video gods (although I’m pretty sure Creative is to blame regardless), but I have to be able to find a better way to make all of this work. If I have to download five different programs and run the video files through each of them in order to get the proper output I will, but I will ultimately win this video battle, mark my words.
The next 40 hours or so of my life will be dominated by baseball, but fortunately it’s not interfering with anything else that I’d rather be doing. Sure, I have projects to work on, but who really wants to start off their weekend with school work. After all, isn’t that what Sunday is for?
Personal - Dallas
One role that Andrew continually has me play for him is that of “domain name searcher”. He gives me a site idea (which may or may not be good), and idea that he has for a name, and then it’s my job to come up with a domain for him. It’s a role that I have quite a bit of experience in, and he’s now tasked me with coming up with a slogan for one of his sites. If my Microsoft thing falls through, I guess I have an idea for what I can fall back on.
Andrew has also been running me through a WoW instance, and when he suggested that this be the topic I write on for today (since I had nothing better), he also asked me to write tutorials for one of his sites. This has been tried before by both of us with massive failure as the result, so I’m not sure how well it will work this time either. That is, of course, assuming I want to do it.
Personal - Dallas
I’m not going to complain too much since a win is nice, but only winning by 1-0 doesn’t do much to help our average that we win games by. We need to come back on Friday and have a 20-0 blowout in order to offset this. The amusing part is, when you look at the team we’re playing on Friday, that’s an entirely possible scenario.
I was also corrected by Garrett over the weekend about my statement that only thr top three teams make the playoffs. While I’m virtually certain that’s how it’s been in years past, this year at least the top four teams get in. Since we’re currently sitting at fourth with the head-to-head over Pearce (currently fifth), as long as we keep winning, we’ll be fine. The first time around we split these remaining games 2-2 though, so we need to work on improving that record for this attempt.
Personal - Dallas
I had a test in Computer Networks today, and what do I have left for the rest of the week? Ah, you guess so well, my loyal and slightly odd stalkers readers. That’s right, nothing!! For the first time in who knows how long (I could check my post history, but I don’t actually care that much), I actually get to just rest for a full week. No projects due, no homework, and no away baseball games even. With all this free time, I might just have to do some crazy things like play WoW or watch TV.
Tomorrow morning will be my first taste of weekly server maintenance since I reactivated WoW, so I’ll have to find another way to entertain myself once I wake up. I’m sure you could come up with quite a long list of various things that I should be doing, but chances are that I won’t get anywhere near that list. Maybe I’ll finally get around to doing more baseball videos so I can have another one done by this weekend. That would at least be a semi-productful use of the morning.
Personal - Dallas
I was looking back at my posts from April 2008, and I now realize that I’m much happier with what’s going on this year as opposed to approximately 365 days ago. Back then I had both my Flash game development class and Linear Algebra (with its way too long tests), two classes that I can’t really say I miss that much. Compare that to now when I have my Harry Potter class and only two classes that even have tests this semester. I think I’ll stay in the present, thank you very much.
One odd thing I noticed was that last April was also a time that I returned to WoW after having taken about a two month long break. Granted, my break this time was slightly longer (and also involved me deactivating my account for a while), but it must be something about the spring that just puts me in a WoW mood. A year ago I was leveling my main character up to 70; this year I’m working on doing things with all of my alts (even though my main isn’t to 80 yet).
Personal - Dallas
Knowing seemed like it could be a really cool movie. I’m a fan of the whole sci-fi, far out theories genre of movies (Da Vinci Code, National Treature, etc.), so I went into this movie assuming that I’d like it. It started off decently, but it never actually got better like you would expect a movie to. I sat there, waiting to be hooked, and it just never came. To top it all off, I actually started contemplating in the middle of the movie how it ranked in relation to The Village. When I get to that point, you know I’m not going to be speaking of a movie favorably. I went back into the archives to see what score I gave The Village (which I never did), but I’m pretty sure that Knowing would be higher than whatever I would have given it. My score: 4/10.
After I saw that, I went over to Jess’ house and stayed for about five hours or so. In the time I was there, I saw (parts of) three more movies (the end of Iron Man, the first part of Pirates of the Caribbean, and then technically all of Transporter 3 but I wasn’t paying attention the whole time). Basically, today was just a very movie-centric day for me. Luckily my homework load is much lighter for the near future, so I don’t have much else to worry about this weekend.
Personal - Dallas