i fail at sleeping

So it's like quarter to 4 AM and I'm still up. I had a plan to go to bed an hour earlier each night until I got rid of my jet lag, but it's not working. I keep getting distracted when I should go to bed. I've been reading a bunch of books lately like Slaughterhouse-Five, Flatland, Sphereland, lots of interesting stuff. Tonight I was watching a clip of Top Gear and got sucked in by one of the songs, so I hunted it down, found the entire album it came off of, and found some other albums while I was at it, and now it's 4 AM. Damn. The one song in particular I found is classical / electronica from a movie that is supposedly set in the 1800's or something, so it kind of has a steampunk edge to it as well which I like. I do have to say that Top Gear is a very good source of new music for me, my old sources have been dried up for a while and I was sad. Also, I found that a good way to find mp3's online is to do a Google search for "Index of /mp3", it pulls up a lot of random stuff.

I've also been playing Generals again. I beat all 36 missions from Generals and Zero Hour, which is intense when you do it all at once. I've gotten pretty good, even the really hard missions didn't go too badly. I still have every intention of playing FFVIII, except I don't have a memory card here and Final Fantasy with no mem card is asking for trouble.

Tomorrow I should work on finishing Christmas shopping. I have half of it done. Thursday night is the Hard Lessons / Nice Device concert, but I haven't gotten around to making those plans yet. But it's happening. Two weeks from today (technically) I go back to Oregon. Bleh.

There were a couple other things I wanted to note, but coherency is not my strong point at 4 AM.

Yeah, I think I should sleep now.

the seasoned traveller

Yeah, I'm home. Travelling home wasn't too bad, except I finished Snow Crash early in the long and boring flight from Phoenix to Detroit. I did figure out how to get wireless internet in the airports at Portland and Phoenix, and I found out I actually know my way around those airports from previous trips. My flight back in three weeks has a stop in Las Vegas, which I haven't been to yet.

So far haven't had much time to sit and relax since I've been home. I'm still adjusted to West Coast time, so I'm not getting enough sleep. Tomorrow is a family Christmas with my mom's side of the family. I am looking forward to seeing family again, though not the inevitable explanations of what the hell I've been up to in the past few months. I can't quite account for it all myself. Between sleep and being in shock from last term I'm kind of wandering around in a stupor, disconnected from reality. But hey, that's what break is for. Hopefully normal operations will resume next week.

Grad school is just a blur. Being at home is definitely better than being out there. I just want to get my damned degree and come back for good. I am still reading my radar book, and it is in the post-WWII part where basic research resumes and all these graduate students do spectacular things for their theses. Yeah, that's not me. Basically I have to survive the rest of this year, and then next year I start getting classes that actually relate to what I want to do, and then I'm off and running.

Went out shopping a bit today. I'm getting a new cell phone for Christmas because the one I have sucks, but it'll all be worked out so I'll have the same number and whatnot.

top five

None of you care, but it's getting posted anyway.

Top 5 most influential songs to me:

- Children by Robert Miles, first song I heard on the radio and went mad hunting down, leading to the first CD I ever bought.

- Enervate on Paul Oakenfold's Tranceport, first Oakenfold song I heard and not the last.

- Piledriver by Amoebaassassin

- Offshore by Chicane

- In The End by Linkin Park

preflight

So yeah. I'm flying back to Michigan tomorrow. I am packing now because I put it off until the last minute. I was going to be finished, except by packing my small suitcase inside my larger one (because I don't have a lot to take home) it was more than 50 lb. per bag, which is over their arbitrary limit. Now I have to treat them separately, and I don't have anything to put in the big one. I should fill it with weights. How do you like that, Southwest Airlines? Because of your nonsense limit, you have to do twice as much work.

I am looking forward to being home for the holidays, but not to the travel it requires. Seriously, I have to get up at 5:30 AM tomorrow - a killer for a semi-nocturnal person like me - and I won't get home until midnight. A whole day gone! At least I bought a new book that will keep me distracted - Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, a major cyberpunk novel that I haven't gotten around to reading until now.

I think I forgot and slept through a biodiesel meeting this morning. Oops. I know I still have to do some website work for them, but it'll be easy when I get the time to sit down and do it. I am thinking about moving some of my volunteer time over to Solar Creek though, it's more in line with what I want to be doing.

Concert update: the planets have aligned or something, for The Hard Lessons and The Nice Device will be playing together on Dec. 22 in Ann Arbor. Expect me to be there.

forged

I love Sound Forge. I've been using it more to tear out bits of songs that I don't like, because I like listening to the good stuff looped twenty times in a row. I hate it when a song has a pointless intro or an awful bridge. The song 'In My Head' from the Matrix Revolutions soundtrack got a particularly brutal treatment the other day. Currently I am working on The Hard Lessons. I stripped the audio out of a video I took from their concert in Portland, and I'm adjusting levels with an equalizer so it sounds somewhat decent. The song is a version of "Milk and Sugar" with some interesting new stuff in the bridge. And now it's on my iPod.

The Hard Lessons are doing a New Year's Eve show in Detroit, by the way.

end of fall term

Well, that's that. I finished my first term of grad school, so I'm 1/5 done with all of my grad school classes. As expected, I have no life and I'm broke. Big surprise. My existence has much less variety than undergrad - it basically consists of schoolwork, food, sleep, and some video games to keep me sane.

The work wasn't really as I expected though, I was hoping to have only a few hard things to focus work on but I'm being pulled in more directions than in undergrad. I thought I would just have to put in hard work and I could get everything done, but instead I am overwhelmed, I literally do not have enough time to finish everything and have to pick and choose what to complete. Maybe that's how the real world is, but it's still BS.

I got a B+ in quantum. I was really hoping for an A. I think I'm going to vow to get an A in Quantum Mechanics II. Next term should not be nearly as bad now that I am familiar with how grad school works. I didn't think the QM final was too bad, but I got 78/100 on it. Oksana graded hard. Oh well. Grad school is binary.

The most amusing part of the QM final was that someone wrote on the board 'Find Bound States and Energy Spectrum' and drew something that started out as a normal QM potential and turned into Super Mario Bros, with pipes and a castle and everything. Obviously the underground pipes represent solutions for E <>

I finished grading exams. My iPod played the perfect song when I finished - "Who Will Grade Your Work?" by Piled Higher and Deeper (yes the webcomic), a song about being a TA.

Now I am screwing around in iTunes before going back to FFX. I've set myself some iTunes challenges. Right now I'm trying to make a list of the top five most personally influential songs. Not my current favorite songs, but the songs that changed everything when I first heard them. I know about three or four without question, but #5 is a tricky one to decide. Try it yourself. iTunes makes this sort of endeavor much easier because I can sift through every song I own quickly and efficiently.

I'm also thinking about top five songs from soundtracks. I set a bunch aside, but when you come across one that is absolutely on the list the others just don't compare. The Indiana Jones theme without a question is in the top five, and probably Back to the Future as well. And as for top five video game songs, well there's a lot to thing about there too. I'd say FF7 is going to have a song in there , and the Katamari Damacy theme definitely.

I have been wearing my Black Mesa hoodie nearly continuously since I made it. I had to dress up nice for my comm speech because I needed every edge to pass it, but pretty much all the time other than that. I like my Black Mesa hoodie.

the battle of comm

The Battle of Comm will be won or lost on Monday. At 6PM I have to turn in a term paper and give a big presentation. Term paper: 4.5 pages so far, I made pretty good progress on Sunday. Presentation: nonexistent. I have to come up with it tomorrow, probably by mashing together the paper and the PSM presentation. My grade in there may or may not be precarious, I can't afford to lose the 30% this final project is worth. I don't care what I get in that stupid class as long as I pass and don't have to take it again. Grad school is binary. You pass or you don't, no one cares what you get.

Although I should have been working on comm stuff all day, I did find the time to add the Black Mesa logo to the spiffy thermal hoodie I bought yesterday (via iron-on transfer paper, thanks for the iron mom & dad), thus making it approximately a million times cooler and sealing its fate as my lazing about hoodie. So I'll be wearing it all winter break. Which can't come soon enough. I just want time to work on my own silly projects like ironing weird stuff onto shirts.

ambience

Classes are over. Monday I have to turn in a major paper and give a big presentation, neither of which I have started yet. I also have to work on biodiesel website stuff in order to write the paper.

I did buy a new thermos today though. (I broke the old one on Thursday.)

I have been playing a little bit of FFX. I am still astonished by the number of cutscenes. The game would be like a quarter as long if they dropped them. I have m4d Blitzball skillz from summer 2004, so I actually beat the Luca tournament. However, the game I really want to replay right now is FFVIII.

I updated my ancient versions of ACID and Sound Forge (2.0 -> 5.0 and 4.5 -> 8.0b, respectively) and I'm playing around a bit with music making again. I haven't done this since the Great Hard Drive Partition Failure of 2002 (caused by the unfathomable evil that is PartitionMagic) in which I lost, among other things, all of my ACID project files and loops.

So far I am only collecting samples I find randomly (like the first couple bars of the Baywatch theme). The first new track is apparently going to be ambient techno based on what I've thrown in so far. This project is more for Xmas break though. I might even try to learn some FruityLoops, but that's definitely for some other time.

Anyway, it's 2AM so I should go to bed. I am not productive when I am being nocturnal.

Edit: Hey, post #200.

random notes

I had to go to Student Network Services today to work out some insurance stuff, because they threatened to put a hold on my account. While I was there I saw a magazine with BT on the cover, so I swiped it. I like BT. Apparently he has 8TB of data storage in his home studio. That's way more than even what I put in for that astro prof last year for all his astronomical (literally and figuratively) images. It is an issue of 'Keyboard' magazine, so they talked about all of his hardware and I have no idea what they are saying.

I did make-up labs today for people that didn't finish certain labs, so I had people working on several of eight different setups at once. Fortunately everything worked. One of my students left their calculator behind though, and the TA that came after me was an ass and wouldn't take responsibility for it in case the student came back, so I had to take it with me and email the student. I have to drop it off in the physics office tomorrow morning. It's a TI-89 Titanium, and I have no damn clue how it works. An 83 just isn't good enough for people anymore? For me, it's TI-30X Solar for life! My trusty physics sidearm.

This morning I found a link to massive (like 500GB) hard drives that were like giant Lego blocks. I was amused. I don't remember at all where I found that though. Jim and I think it would be even cooler if you had hundreds of little brick flash drives you could piece together to act like one big hard drive, and you could make Lego sculptures out of them.

I have also been cruising ytmnd.com, I am amused at its randomness. My favorites:

http://katametroiddamaci.ytmnd.com/
http://joneskatamari.ytmnd.com/

Man, now I want to play some KD/WLK. Which reminds me, Vincent still has my copy of KD...

I joined a forum for identifying songs from Top Gear episodes (they don't publish a playlist). It's an interesting source of new music, and trying to remember obscure songs I have heard before can be fun. iTunes is great for that kind of surfing through my entire music collection. When it's working. iTunes + iPod have been acting up a bit and it's been getting on my nerves.

I made some good headway on tomorrow's quantum HW, but I'm just going to finish it tomorrow morning. as usual. read some more of my new book and go to bed. I am reading The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought. It is worded a little fancifully, they use the word 'modern' pretty loosely, and has lots of those little historical details I don't particularly care about (like Voltaire's stock exchange transactions), but I think it still brings up some interesting points. The next chapter is Adam Smith so I am looking forward to that.

turkey break

Somehow I made it to Thanksgiving break. Unfortunately, my brain seems to have mistaken it for winter break and has wandered off somewhere. I know there are things I should probably be working on, but I have spent the past few days playing The Sims 2, watching entire series of Top Gear and generally spacing out. I've also been reading a book about Alfred Loomis, but the middle section reads entirely too much like my very good book on radar.

I didn't go anywhere for Thanksgiving. At least it has been quiet around here. There's only one other car in my parking lot, and I haven't heard my idiot neighbor in a few days.

I gave my biodiesel presentation for my PSM seminar on Wednesday. It was marred by the fact that I was only borderline coherent and I was the third of three presentations on very similar material. On the feedback forms someone said if I had such similar material I should have gone first. Brilliant. You don't have do be a physics major to know we can't all go first.

I tried signing up for winter term classes today, but fully half of them I could not get into for various reasons. Outstanding.

A day or two ago I finally got a packet from the American Solar Energy Society. I've been so busy running around doing other crap I'd almost forgotten that I want to go into solar power. I wish something I did in school would relate to that. I'm going to have to put together my program of study this week so Dr. Warren can check it out. I have to put together what the PSM people want me to do, what the physics department wants me to do, and what I want to do.