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Llast night I managed to repair my old MP3 player, the one that also acts like a USB drive. So I can hook it up to my PS2 again. Which means I can take pictures of my Gran Turismo 4 cars once again. Of course the first subject is the Pontiac Solstice, which I finally won after I'd broken the USB drive. The only reason I'm not taking pictures of cars all day is that I'm on my way back to Michigan - I'm in Portland's airport right now.
Winter term is finally over for me. I've finished my finals, graded my last exam and reported my lab grades, there are no more stupid loose ends keeping this term alive. It seems like by the time I get used to all this I'm going to graduate. I'm already a third done. Certainly better than having to hang around for the better part of a decade though.
I had intended to celebrate by playing PlayStation all night, but I got sidetracked watching Top Gear. That's how much I love the show, although it's also true that I could use some fresh games for the PS2. Quite the lineup of games in the months ahead - Kingdom Hearts II comes out over break, with the Half-Life 2 expansion the month after that (if it's on time - which it won't be), and Ace Combat Zero the month after that. Gobeski says it must be a conspiracy to fail me out of grad school. If there were a new Katamari Damacy or Command & Conquer game as well, I might be inclined to agree. As is, I'm still surviving.
Oh yeah, and Duke lost. Good times.
My thumbs are sore. I turned in my ethics term paper this morning and I've been playing Gran Turismo 4 since then. It took maybe an hour, but I finally beat Jeremy Clarkson's lap time on Laguna Seca with a stock NSX-R, by nearly a second. I then tried to attempt one of the few races I haven't beaten yet, but I had forgotten how infuriating that game can be. I also don't have much thumb stamina for that game, always having to mash down as hard as possible on the brakes...stupid pressure senstitive buttons. I think I'm going to put that game away for now and look at some quantum.
Being the only sober person on St. Patrick's Day, I have some time on my hands. I finally got around to typing up all my quotes from Dr. Stetz. It was no small feat. So go check out my updated quote board.
Today was pretty good with the exception of my being vaguely unsettled all day. It was the last day of classes for the term, so that was good, and spring break is finally just a week away. I still think it is stupidly late. That makes me a hair short of a third of the way through my Master's degree, and 40% done with my classes. So I'm making progress, slowly. But I am starting to wonder what I'll be like on the flip side and if that's really what I should be shooting for. Some in-flight corrections may be in order.
I am also suffering from the engineering bug because I've just been saturated with physics not-practical stuff all term. If I were still at MSU I could just run off and take another civil engineering class to satisfy my need for balance, but finding time for it here would be much more difficult.
Michigan State got beaten in the NCAA tourney in the first round, which is very sad. March Madness is gone already. Now all I can hope for is that Duke and UNC will get beaten. (UNC because they beat us last year and I had to deal with those bastards while working on the SOAR telescope at MSU.)
Tomorrow I should start writing my HEP doomsday term paper for ethics. My presentation earlier this week about my topic went well. So well that it's probably hyped up to a level I can't possibly meet. Ah well.
For some reason I am still not big on video games at the moment. I played a little R&C3 earlier but put it away after quickly tiring of it. I tried to find a new book to read (I tore through Catch-22), but I couldn't find anything in Borders worth getting. I've kind of overdosed on Top Gear at the moment because I've been compiling a personal cheat sheet for the good episodes. And I'm too exhausted today to bother going out. So I have been trying to find things to do today to unwind. Hence the Dr. Stetz quotes. He's a funny guy.
Today was the last day of proper E&M lecture, which promptly meandered into the fields of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. I would have minded except that this particular excursion was a discussion about how lasers work, and it's a scientific fact that lasers are frickin' awesome. I'm a physics major. I know science. So we had a nice talk about population inversion and neon energy levels. And during all this laser talk I remembered that I have a Class 3A laser module sitting in a funky box that I haven't done anything with because both my soldering iron and DMM broke.
I am in a cantankerous mood because everybody else's spring breaks have come and gone and we're still slogging away here with another week to go. It doesn't help that I've been rereading Catch-22. Fortunately, most of my duties for the rest of the term are TA-related, which I enjoy. I only have one more big assignment to take on before finals, my research ethics term paper. I think I'm going to be the only person in the class that isn't taking one of the three suggested topics, even though the prof was hoping everybody would pick something different. Most research ethics stuff is boring, especially in physics, so I'm going to be talking about the possibility of destroying the world with particle accelerators. I haven't decided which side to take yet. I know the chance of catastrophe is incredibly remote, but I also can't resist slamming high energy physics.
Two more weeks and I'll be home in MI for spring break. I have a couple big homeworks due Monday and an ethics term paper to write before then, but fortunately no real major projects are left. We changed gears in quantum and we're doing basic perturbation theory now as a prep for what we'll be doing all next term. It's more interesting that what we were doing before. We're apparently almost done with EM waves in E&M, which is odd because we have barely done anything with it. That whole class has been rather silly and pointless.
The prospective grad students finally came through and it was a little weird being in the opposite position of what I went through last year. I went to the dinner (free food) but not the Q&A session or the Newport trip.
I finished reading Fire in the Valley, an epic tome about the history of the personal computer. My favorite chapter was about the start of the PC vs. Mac rivalry, because I like to see Macs get an ass-kicking. Unfortunately, despite the book's size it doesn't seem epic enough. A lot of time was spent talking about the Altair and then the book covers less and less specifics as more and more happens. There was no real connection for me to what I already know about computers. Even at the end of the book it seems like a "computer" is still some sort of newfangled toy. The book is also out of date already - it ends in 1997 when Microsoft just got sued over IE, it didn't even get to Windows 98. The book is also kind of badly organized, with chapters broken into many sub-chapters consisting of only a few pages, even though they mostly talk about the same thing. I can't stand when authors do that.
One of the big things about the early days of computers was the whole magazine scene. A lot of computer stuff was just advertised in the back of the magazines, and the articles talked about exactly what hardware can do and how to program it. I would say that modern magazines are not like this at all, but I recently found an interesting magazine called Make that tells you how to make stuff like windpower towers and a pulsejet-in-a-jar, and there are ads for circuitboards and stuff. One of the neat little things in the magazine was a way to make origami envelopes, which is pretty cool.
I haven't been playing any games since I got fed up with Black & White 2 and uninstalled it, which is just as well because it's been busy recently. Some tempting release dates are coming up though - Kingdom Hearts II, Ace Combat Zero and the Half-Life 2 expansion should all come out later in the spring. It's about time some good games got released.
Meet the Subaru Tribeca. The picture doesn't do justice to its true hideousness. Those headlights look like they've been ripped off from the Porsche Cayenne, which was already a horrible mockery of the front of a Porsche 911. Then to up the ante, Subaru added its atrocious new snout. The angled bits at the back look like it's trying to parody the fins on old Cadillacs. Perhaps it isn't the ugliest car in the world, but someone drives one of these monstrosities around campus and it makes me cringe every time I see it.
My computer is finally kind of needing a reformat after nine months (I'm pretty sure that's some kind of personal record), but I'm not sure what to do about that. I could do a normal reformat easy, but I have a couple problems that wouldn't fix. I basically want to repartition, but I don't have anywhere near enough space to move things off the drive first for a clean repartition and repartitioning with data on the drive is a Very Bad Thing (PartitionMagic is the devil). Unfortunately I can't really upgrade my drive, as it seems 90% of notebook HDDs are 40GB whereas mine is already twice that. I saw an article about a 200GB perpendicular-bit notebook HDD that I would absolutely love, but it's not coming out for another year yet and will probably cost a gazillion dollars.
The weather right now is fantastic - a little cloudy, breezy, around 60 degrees. I was actually here in Corvallis exactly a year ago for grad school visitation, so this weather is partly what sold me on coming way the hell out here. Exactly a year ago today was the Newport trip. I'd certainly rather be out there than here in the apartment, but I have a bit of work to get done today.
This week is the last full week of labs, the term is finally winding down. I do have a couple major things to finish before the end of the term, but they're at least pretty well spaced out. I'm very much looking forward to coming home for spring break in just a couple weeks and then having a changeup of classes for spring quarter.
I found something new that is epic about Black & White 2 - the size of the save files. The game used nearly 2GB for autosave crap, thus filling my data drive. I threw it all out and kept my manual saves, but they apparently don't work any more and give me memory read errors. I was just about to beat the game too.
There are other problems I forgot to mention too, like how the patch is 109MB and invalidates previous saved files, or how it is such a resource hog it causes pre-rendered opening videos to lag on my machine, or how it takes like five minutes to quit the game because it's unloading so much garbage. I seriously don't appreciate BW2's lack of respect for machine resources.
So for those of you keeping track, CivIV is bland and unexciting, whereas BW2 is an OK game to play but will utterly kill your computer. Screw this crap, I am going back to Generals: Zero Hour until somebody makes a new game that's actually decent.
I made it to another weekend somehow. February finally died, thankfully. Only three more weeks left in the term. Apparently the PSM seminar for spring term has been scheduled for one of the worst possible time slots, so there's yet another minor PSM uprising in the works. It also sounded like my 3-credit business class for next term will be scheduled all on one night per week, so that's not entirely cool.
I put up reviews of Civilization IV and Black & White 2. It's very odd - those games seem to be diametric opposites of each other. The one game is exactly what the other is not. CivIV has a lean two CD's, while BW2 has an epic 4. CivIV has a novel for a manual, while BW2 has a pamphlet. CivIV has skirmishes and multiplayer modes but not single player story, while BW2 has - you guessed it - single player story but no skirmish or multiplayer. CivIV has ridiculously simplistic graphics, while BW2 causes biblically slow framerates with its rendered beauty.
Another update I intend to make is to compile all the quotes from my EM class. Dr. Stetz is very amusing. Those quotes are what make that class not a total waste so far, although we are finally getting in EM waves which I have been waiting two whole terms for and is the only thing I want out of EM.
Pandora actually scored a hit for me the other day. It's amazing at how Pandora can pick up on all the 'genes' of a song and yet usually completely misunderstands the feeling of the song. It did give me one new song that I've been listening to endlessly - 68 times so far, according to iTunes.
Speaking of new things, this webcomic is AWESOME.
