Captain Bad Habits is very lazy

I've been here almost a week, and as I predicted, I haven't done jack that resembles progress on the program I was going to write. All I did was come up with ideas for two others, both of which would be easier. Now that I'm in college, however, gosh it would be nice to have some extra money, so I better get working. ...tomorrow

Went to the osteopath today, and the gist of what he said was, "Your back is messed up." And it is. Apparently the scoliosis I found out about this summer is rather more severe than I had thought, and also he thinks my concave chest has also damaged my back. So my skeletal structure is apparently teh suck. I will probably have to do exercises that will help my scoliosis. Fortunately the osteopath says he wouldn't advise surgery for my collapsed sternum yet. However, he did, with a bit of pushing and pulling and twisting, temporarily fix my back. One good thing.

My sleep schedule still isn't right - I keep waking up very early in the morning and then going back to sleep at about 8 or 9, and sleeping till noon. I'm constantly tired but for some reason my body doesn't want to stay asleep. Blaaaah.

My best Rubik's Cube time so far is 2:31. All I want is to get it below 2 minutes, just once, then I'll be happy. I also managed to solve a Sudoku on the highest difficulty level in my Dashboard widget in 3:53. I think that was a fluke, though - it was a really easy puzzle. My stupid solver written in C could have done it.

I've been playing UT on my desktop computer, and it seems I haven't lost my skillz in the long time during which I haven't played it. If you have UT and still play it and don't have the ChaosUT mod, you should definitely get it. It adds a bunch of new weapons, including a sniper rifle with rocket-powered bullets (the most ridiculously overpowered weapon in any game ever) and little proximity mines that have deranged smiley faces on them and hop around chasing people and laughing. There's also a multi-purpose shotgun that shoots explosive shells, which I call the Portable Explodamator. UT is teh best and ChaosUT makes it better.

POTATO

Tomorrow I still don't have anything to do, except go to the Town Hall to get my Belgian ID card renewed, so I'll have plenty of time to start working on those programs I was talking about. Hahahahahhahaha. Not. I am way too lazy to do such a thing.

Captain Bad Habits wants food

I'm very hungry right now and that's pretty much all that's on my mind. Dinner should be in like fifteen minutes, but I'm not sure if I can go that long without eating something - and in my current state, nothing is safe from being eaten.

I finally have my laptop back after blowing up the power adapter the day I got back. Not knowing that it doesn't require a transformer, I plugged it into a transformer rated for 55W. The power adapter requires 65W. The transformer died a horrible death, taking the power adapter with it. This resulted in me having to wait till today to get a new power adapter, and it costing 79 euros. I had my desktop (G4 tower) that I'd left at home, but it just wasn't the same to me anymore. I've moved on. I loved that machine - always have, still do and always will - but now because of its slow speed and small screen it's pretty much unusable.

I am currently running on 2 hours of sleep in the last 36 or so hours. This is because of a sleepover that I was at last night, at Jamie's house, with him and Jacob. We stayed up until 8 in the morning, watching Family Guy and talking like old friends who haven't talked much to each other in the past 6 months.

Still no email about being a CA for last semester's programming course. On a related note, what is wrong with this sentence (taken from an email sent by my advisor/teacher of that course)?

I heard from two students that you can now overload if you're GPA was above 3.0 last semester.

So what am I worried about? I don't want a job from a guy who doesn't know the difference between "you're" and "your" anyway. Geez.

I miss Carnegie Mellon's mad über fast Internet access. I'm connecting through the wireless router in my house, which is connected to the cable modem which is provided by a typically lame, sucky Belgian service provider.

I'm working to get my Rubik's Cube time under 2 minutes. I have managed it in the past, but now I'm stuck between 2 and 3 minutes. Part of it is because my cube is very stiff and has a tendency to lock up. It's a cheap piece of crap, so what can I expect.

No other significant news that I can think of. I think I am going to be as bored as almighty fuck for the next few weeks.

Captain Bad Habits is traveling

OK, I warned you. Here’s my long air-travel-inspired rant.

First of all, it’s really nice to hear accents again. I’ve heard people speaking honest-to-God French. I just heard someone walk by speaking in a posh upper-class British accent. I heard a weak Manchester accent elsewhere in Dulles (which is where I am right now, by the way). I didn’t realize I missed hearing French spoken, or British accents, but apparently I did. I’ll get my fill of accents and French in the three and a half weeks I’m home.

Right now I’m creeping people out by watching them as they walk by, and typing at the same time. They all give me funny looks and move swiftly onward. Airports are the I places to people-watch. Everyone here is thrown into a situation in which they’d really rather not be. I think you see people’s real natures come out as you watch them deal with it as best they can. Some people have never flown before, and it’s interesting to watch people deal with a new experience, which is at times kind of frightening.

I’m sitting on the floor in a hallway now, near the entrance to a duty-free shop. The reason I’m doing this is that this is the only place I could find an unoccupied power outlet. I’m charging my laptop now, and writing this as a way to pass the time. Unlike Pittsburgh’s airport (woo for Pittsburgh’s airport), Dulles doesn’t have free WiFi in the terminal. I’m writing this in Word and I’ll post it once I get Internet access again.

Here’s an unpleasant experience you might want to avoid: sitting on the floor in the hallway of an airport when a really, really fat person walks by right in front of you. You get a worm’s-eye view of a large mass blocking out all light. My question is: who even makes jeans that size? They must cost twice as much as normal jeans just because of all the extra material needed!

As of the time of writing, it seems I’ve been passed over for a position as a Course Assistant (CA) or consultant for 15-200, the programming course I took this semester, despite being second in my class. This is definitely not a good thing; I’d really like that position because it pays pretty well. As far as I know now, I’ll be needing to get a real job next semester, which is kind of a shame. However, while in Pittsburgh, I managed to check my grades online and I have a 4.0 GPA for the first semester (not that that was a major challenge). I have a feeling that’ll go all to hell once next semester starts, though. I hope I can deal with that.

A little kid and his mom passed by, arguing in French. I’m relieved to note that my near-fluency in French isn’t quite as far gone as I thought it was; I can understand them without having to translate in my head.

Speaking of French, I have to decide whether I’m willing to pay $82 to get two semesters’ worth of French credit. That is to say, should I take the AP French Language exam or just say the hell with it and take the classes, which will be easy? AP French Language would be an easy 5. Even if I went into the exam with a mild concussion, I could get a 4, which would get me one semester of credit. The third option, which actually makes the most sense, is to go to the Modern Languages department and say, “Guys, c’mon…I lived in a French-speaking country for 13 years, and I took the IB French A2 SL exam, which is WAY the hell harder than the AP French Language and is more equivalent to French Literature, if anything, and I got a 6. C’mon…isn’t that worth something? Pleeeeease?”

In a 40-minute flight from Pittsburgh, I completed four “Difficult” Sudoku puzzles. So if I can do one every ten minutes, I should be able to occupy myself for the entire flight to Brussels with 45 Difficult puzzles. I don’t think my book has that many, so I’ll move on to the Fiendish ones, which will take more time. Realistically, though, I’ll probably get bored after about ten puzzles.

A passer-by just swore in French. Holy crap, I’m almost home.

I’m running out of things to say, so I think I should wrap up this post before I start writing nonsense (not that nonsense is anything out of the ordinary). Probably when I get to Brussels, I’ll post this (it’ll be morning) without updating it, then sink into a coma due to exhaustion. After I wake up, I’ll post again with post-arrival impressions and developments (not that anyone will care). Also, boarding time is in 30 minutes, and my laptop tells me it’ll take 30 more minutes to reach full charge, so I better put it to sleep now. Bon voyage to myself.

Captain Bad Habits does not feel threatened by vampires

I just ate way too much garlic and red pepper. I made myself spicy spaghetti again tonight, and good God was it spicy. You see, on the first batch I momentarily forgot I was only making it for one person, so I put in an amount of red pepper appropriate for two people. Then I realized what I had done. I stared at it for about a minute. I stared it down, thinking, Can I do this? Am I tough enough to eat all that red pepper, though my lips and mouth may burn? Then I thought, Yes I can, and yes I am! I ate it. And it was spicy. And garlicky. I had put in excess garlic on purpose, 'cos I love garlic. I put in the additional pepper on the second batch of spaghetti too. Once I finished, I realized I had given myself indigestion. Whoops. I don't care, though. That was some damned good spaghetti.

So today, I did what I said yesterday I was going to do. I bought a Sudoku book for the plane and "Mastering Algorithms in C", an O'Reilly book. It's very good. Instead of being like "look, this is how an algorithm works", it's like, "look, this is how an algorithm works, this is exactly how we're going to implement it and here's code that does it." I wish more books were like that.

I mostly packed today. It took 40 seconds because all I had to do was throw my stuff in a suitcase. However, packing feels weird because I'm packing to go home, yet I'm not packing everything I own here. Normally, if I'm going home, I pack everything that's in the location where I'm packing. So it feels like I'm leaving home to go home. Which I suppose is true in a way.

So little has happened today that I can't really write a lengthy post. I'm leaving Pittsburgh tomorrow morning and arriving in Brussels early Saturday morning (Brussels time, which means very very early Saturday morning for most of the US). So I won't be posting until probably Saturday evening Brussels time, but that'll probably be a long post because air travel always makes me want to write a lot for some reason. So, four months after I arrived in Pittsburgh, farewell Pittsburgh. 'Night.

Captain Bad Habits is bored

Hi everybody. There isn't a lot going on around here, so I'm amusing myself by writing a blog post even though I've already posted today.

I made myself spicy spaghetti in the crappy little kitchen, which has gotten crappier since I last used it. First of all, the big pot I used to boil spaghetti last time has disappeared. I had to use a tiny little pot whose handle was coming off, with the result that I had to do two batches to have enough spaghetti. In the interest of rapidity, I didn't change the water for the second batch, and that was probably a bad idea. I let the water sit as I ate the second batch, and when I went to wash the pot, I discovered that a skin had formed on top. On top of water. Admittedly there was a lot of starch in that water, but what the hell. It literally looked like someone had put Saran Wrap over the surface of the water. That was disturbing. Another thing that kind of sucked was that the knife I used to chop garlic last time had disappeared. I had to use a plastic knife, and I had to use the bottom of a plastic plate as a cutting board. So much fun. Then, at the end, my reverence for whoever invented the dishwasher was renewed. Washing dishes by hand is such a pain in the ass.

I'm probably going to bed relatively early tonight, since for some reason I was awake early this morning.

If anyone is wondering what to get me for winter holidays (we are, after all, politically correct), I'd like a Burrowing Owl.

My roommate's friend hasn't shown up yet. I seem to recall my roommate saying he would be staying Thursday night, but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, since if he has somewhere to stay tonight, why can't he stay there tomorrow night too? Oh well.

OK, I'm so bored I can't even write blog posts anymore. I'm off to do something entertaining, by which I probably mean play stupid games. Later.

Don't forget about the Burrowing Owl. It would really make me happy if I had one.

Captain Bad Habits is the sole inhabitant of Deadville

I am currently living in Deadville, PA. Most everyone on campus is gone for the holidays. There may be a few random people sticking around, but there certainly aren't any in my hallway. Actually, at some point before I leave, one of my roommate's friends is supposed to stay a night in this room for a night, so there will actually be someone else around.

Anyway, today I beat another couple levels of Oni after suddenly and randomly waking up at about 8:40 for no reason. Actually, I went back to sleep till 11:20, then got up and played Oni. I haven't eaten anything today because the campus meal plan has shut down. I'm planning to make myself a large amount of spicy spaghetti tonight, in Morewood's grotty, sucky, depressing little kitchen. I actually scouted it out today and discovered that there are no knives meant for chopping stuff, which is kind of a problem since I need to chop garlic. I may have to make do with the plastic knives that are in there. *sigh* I'm going to make the same thing for myself on Thursday night, too.

Thursday, I plan to get up around 11, go to Panera in Squirrel Hill for lunch, and then hang out at Barnes & Noble for a while before coming back here to pack. Actually, instead of packing, I'll most likely end up playing Halo or Oni. Yay for me and my pseudo-ADD easily-distracted tendencies.

As I was saying... I started writing this post at 4:30 and now it's 6 because I got distracted by God knows what - I've already forgotten. Wow I wanna go home. I guess I'll do the next best thing and play StepMania until I get so hungry I can't stand it anymore and head off to the sucky kitchen to make myself some garlic with a bit of spaghetti thrown in for texture.

Captain Bad Habits is happy

I'm happy for two reasons. First, I got Oni to work natively on OS X! I just played the first three levels and it's still hell of fun. Between that and Halo I think I can keep myself entertained until Friday, when I leave.

Second, a judge somewhere in Pennsylvania ruled that teaching intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in public school science classrooms is unconstitutional because it essentially amounts to religion. That makes me happy.

owen.respectForThisCountry++;

I don't have a lot of other news because not a lot is going on. I got up at around 2 this afternoon, ate lunch, went to the grocery store to stock up on food for the time between when everything on campus closes and when I leave, then came back and played Halo and Oni.

I'm going to do some stuff like eat donuts and back up my HD now, so later.

Captain Bad Habits doesn't know why he's posting now

I honestly don't know why I'm writing this post now. I don't have anything to say. Let me think of some stuff.

Tomorrow is the last day of final exams, but I'm not affected since all my exams are already over. The day after is the day when everyone leaves campus because dorms close. However, I'm special so I don't leave till Friday (and I get to stay in my room, thankfully). I'll be all lonely on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday, so I'll probably sit in my room and play Halo or something.

I've developed the bad habit of reading each day's Questionable Content at 11:30 the night before. This means that I have nothing to read on Friday night. So sad.

I'm on an AC/DC kick right now, but I've recently discovered that Soundgarden kicks ass, and not just because Chris Cornell is the vocalist. It's sort of grunge-like, but it's grunge that I can put up with and even like. Conclusion: Soundgarden is one of the few good things, musically, that the '90s gave us. Some of the other things are:

• Tool
• Dream Theater
• Rage Against the Machine
• Audioslave
• S&M by Metallica

There's probably some other stuff, but I can't be bothered to think of it right now. Actually, come to think of it, not a few good bands arose or had their prime in the '90s, but that's kinda offset by the number of musical disasters that happened in the '90s, such as: Green Day. Also, Britney Spears and stuff like that. Not cool.

Less than a week till I get to eat real food. I can hardly wait.

Jacob and I planned to publish our webcomic, Wicky Wacky woo, on GeoCities, but it turns out the Yahoo ID "wickywackywoo" is ALREADY TAKEN. The first thing I did was ask Jacob if he'd registered it at some point in the past, but apparently he didn't. Now we've got a problem as far as web space is concerned, but I have a bigger concern on my mind: who in God's name would register the Yahoo ID "WICKYWACKYWOO"?????? This means that there's someone else in the world, apart from Jacob, who shares Jacob's sensibility of what makes a good name for a webcomic/Yahoo ID. And that is one of the scariest thoughts I've had in a long time.

In the title of a newspost not so long ago, the author of Sinfest included a reference ("her hair reminds me of a warm safe place") to "Sweet Child o' Mine", which is the second-best thing the 1980s produced. The best thing is, obviously, yours truly. *bows*

Why am I going on about music so much? I need to talk about something else. Ah, I know.

Here are some questions on data structures and algorithms, which Sam told me. They're from tests in a course that I'll be taking next semester.

1. How can you create a data structure that can add elements in O(log n) time and find the median of the objects in O(1) time?
2. Given a graph in the form of a list of edges, how can you find the graph's sink (if any) without going through and calculating the in- and out-degrees of each node? (a sink is a vertex which is pointed to by every other node, and which points to no other vertices; obviously a graph can have at most one sink)
3. How can you modify a binary search tree such that you can calculate the height of any subtree in O(1) time?

I know the answers to the first two, and Sam tried to explain the last one to me, but I wasn't paying much attention. The answers I do know are pretty elegant and awesome and the idea that I might have to think of stuff like that for myself is quite scary.

Well, I think I wrote a lot for thinking I didn't have anything to say. Now I really don't have anything to say. I'm off to play StepMania.

Captain Bad Habits can't make decisions

I can't decide whether I like Safari or Firefox better for browsing. I'm lazy so I can't be bothered to discuss their strengths and weaknesses now. I'm writing this post in Safari, which highlights one of Safari's weaknesses: sites like Blogger that have extra special features only for Gecko-based browsers are kind of sucky in Safari.

I'm feeling very lazy tonight so the rest of the post is going to be in bullet form again.

• I completely forgot there was a Steelers game today, and I missed it. They won 18-3, so I'm not too upset - games that are total pwnage aren't really much fun to watch, unless it's total pwnage against a major rival.
• Less than a week till I leave for Belgium. I bet my fat cat has already forgotten who I am.
• The electronic locks on the doors are almost out of batteries. This is bad since that means I should leave my door open when I leave the room so I can get back in; however, I can't leave my door open when I'm not in the room. I guess I'm confined to my room until they change the batteries. But I still have to go to the bathroom and stuff! *opens window*
• I think I have new inspiration for continuing to write one of the stories I have in progress right now (which I haven't made any progress on since summer), thanks to...Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which I just watched. Don't ask why that gives me inspiration, it just does. I'm weird like that.
• There is a crowd of weird people in the lounge on my floor, playing DDR. This place scares me occasionally.

Captain Bad Habits has finished his exams

And thus doesn't really have to worry about work habits until halfway through January. Except for the big programming project I really feel like I should at least take a stab at over break.

My Sudoku solver (the one I wrote in C) is better at Sudoku than me. And I wrote the damned thing, so I should be at least as good as it is. I feel stupid.

Had my last final today. The actual final-exam part of the psych exam was pretty easy; I'm pretty sure I got a mid-to-high-90s score. The fourth-test part was kinda harder and there was some stuff I didn't know because it was really boring and I figured meh, it'll be at most ten points. Well it was 20 points. Oops. I think I managed to make up some crap that might have been right, though. Also, I got a 96 on my term paper, so I think I've managed to scrape up an A on the semester.

My roommate's gone for the holidays.

I changed my sheets today. I don't even want to think about how long it's been since I last did so. My mom would definitely not be pleased.

I haven't made any new comics today. I'm falling down on the job, here. Hopefully Jacob's been busy, or we're not going to have enough material to launch our venture and keep it going with daily updates. And if we don't have daily updates, nobody will read our comic! ... uh, yeah.

I started reading "High Stakes, No Prisoners", which is a book by the guy who started the company that created FrontPage (which got bought out by MS). Turns out he's an arrogant asshat. At every opportunity he mentions that he's got a Ph.D in political science from MIT (OMGZLIEKWOAH) and seems to think that FrontPage is awesome and is the industry standard for WYSIWYG HTML editors. Umm...not so much. FrontPage is the ultimate suck. It's the industry standard for HOW TO MAKE A MERCILESSLY SUCKY PRODUCT, I'll give it that much.

I was reading about Burrowing Owls on Wikipedia. They're owls, and they fucking live in burrows. HOW COOL IS THAT? HOW COOL WOULD IT BE to just be walking along, and all of a sudden a fucking OWL POPS OUT OF THE FUCKING GROUND. If that happened to me, it would doubtless be the coolest thing that EVER happened to me. EVAR.

OK, definitely gonna stop that now.

I'm gonna stop now. There'll be plenty of time for posting in the next few days, since I have nearly seven days until I leave, and absolutely nothing to do in those days. So I'd better go off and do important things, because I have so many of those to do. Moreover, I'm not making sense, and when I stop making sense it's definitely time to stop posting.

Captain Bad Habits is gonna be a webcomic author

So, Jacob and I have big plans to become famous webcomic authors. When I go home we're going to co-author a webcomic called "Wicky Wacky woo". I've already created six comics to start off with. I even managed to make five of them have a sort of continuous storyline, amazingly enough. Here they are.







The last one, as you may have gathered, isn't part of the continuous storyline. There were some others that Jacob made, but you'll have to wait till we have webspace to see those. I think we're approaching an almost IndieTits-like brilliance, or as much brilliance as you can get from clip art. If you don't think these are funny, well then obviously you have a defective sense of humor.

My attention span actually ran out in the middle of writing this post, and I went and made a bunch more comics. I'm too lazy to post them now, but you'll definitely see them when Jacob and I get webspace and publish these. The world will change on that day. And not necessarily for the better.

Things are boring around here, now that everyone's studying and nobody wants to do anything. All I can do is sit around and read random websites and play Halo. I love Halo. There aren't many things that are more fun than throwing a grenade into a narrow tunnel full of headcrabs and nasty monsters and then listening to the resulting explosion with subwoofer cranked up and watching the monster fragments splatter everywhere. It's amazing. Shooting down aircraft with rockets is a lot of fun too.

OK, I'm done now. I should go make more comics.

Captain Bad Habits has finished half his finals

Had two finals today, Calc in 3D and Matrix Algebra. I might have gotten 100 on the Calc one, but I'm not getting my hopes that high. I definitely didn't get 100 on the Matrix one, but that's just because that's not the kind of thing I do. Matrix algebra hates me and won't let me do it perfectly.

I think under normal circumstances I would be more optimistic about having gotten 100 on the Calc exam, but last night I went to bed at 11:00 because the exam was at 8:30 this morning. However, due to a lack of sleepiness and copious amounts of disruptive rambunctiousness in the hallway, I didn't fall asleep until about 2:30. So I was running on about five hours of sleep as I took the calc exam. I knew how to do everything, but chances are I made a stupid mistake because of my precarious mental facilities. The same goes for the Matrix exam, even though I got about an hour of sleep, in the form of a nap, in the time between the two exams (I finished the calc exam an hour and a half early). I think the nap actually worked, since I felt more awake afterward. It probably averted some arithmetic errors on the Matrix exam, but there were some things I was unclear on conceptually. Good news is, now I can forget it all if I want. It seems weird that I can do that after just one semester, especially after having had to remember two years' worth of stuff for IB classes.

Related to the topic of webcomics (from last post), Jacob showed me a site where you can generate your own using clipart. This was the result of mine.


Jacob sent me three that he'd made, and they're kinda better than mine. In a bad way. Suffice it to say they were like mine except more messed up. When I go home for break, he and I are going to have a lot of fun making crappy clipart webcomics. If you'd like to try your hand, it's at Witty Comics, which is totally the wrong name for something like that.

Captain Bad Habits reviews webcomics

Before I tell you what webcomics I have on my "check regularly" list, I have some random news.

Classes are over. Yay. Right now it's 2:30 in the morning (I'll post this Saturday) and there are some guys sitting outside in the hallway discussing the origins of Christianity and Judaism. They're all somewhat liquored up, so this is fascinating to listen to. Apparently there are 24-hour quiet hours in effect until the end of exams, but that's all just a big fat joke. Other news: I finally started coding my bridge scoring program again. It's not working out so well. I have another idea incubating, and I might get started on that over the Christmas break. I won't have a lot of spare time next semester (I've been over this) so I'd best make as much progress on it now as I can. It'll be a really big, involved project if I put in all the features I'd like to. Not going to say what it is yet, but I probably will eventually.

Anyway, on to webcomic reviews.

1. Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques is, as I mentioned, my favorite webcomic right now. The art is fairly simplistic, but it's been getting a lot better lately. It's improved immeasurably since QC started - if you start reading from the beginning, which I recommend, don't be deterred by the crappy art. It gets way better, way fast. The writing is spectacular. Right now there are important developments in the story (there's a continuous story) and Jeph is handling it awesomely. Even when not much is happening in the story it's always hilarious. Occasionally there's a strip all about indie bands that just flies over my head, but that's forgivable since QC updates every weekday without fail. That reliability is actually one of the things I really like about it.
2. Megatokyo by Fred Gallagher used to be my favorite webcomic. I've read all 700+ past strips. It has a continuous storyline that is surreal in a way that manages to be both energetic and rather bleak at the same time. I'm really at a loss for how to describe it. It's set in a somewhat twisted version of the real Tokyo. A new chapter in the storyline started pretty recently, and it seems to be taking a new direction. The art is some of the best black-and-white art I've ever seen, and right now Gallagher is taking it to new heights of complexity. The writing isn't always amazing, but the storyline and overall tone are still awesome. Theoretically Megatokyo updates every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but there are a lot of missed comics and filler art days.
3. AppleGeeks by Mohammad Haque and Ananth Panagariya has the most incredible art I've ever seen in a webcomic, by far. It's in full color and incredibly detailed and full of life. Haque has mastery of several styles, all of which can work perfectly well in the comic. Panagariya does the writing, which can vary between serious and insane. It has a very lively sense of humor. But for me, the main attraction of AG is the art. It never fails to amaze me. AG updates every Monday and Thursday; missed comics are infrequent and filler art is very rare.
4. Sinfest by Tatsuya Ishida is probably the webcomic I've been reading for the longest time. It's got some impressive black-and-white art, which has improved slightly since the beginning. The writing is the main attraction of Sinfest, though. It's sometimes philosophical, talking about topics such as society and religion, and sometimes just plain ridiculous. There are some pretty deep characters (on par with the characters in QC and Megatokyo, both of which have impressively detailed and realistic characters), and even though Sinfest has no continous storyline, it remains a fairly character-driven webcomic. It updates every day with fairly high reliability, and sometimes on weekends.
5. Mac Hall by Ian McConville and Matt Boyd is just something I read when I think of it, because it updates so erratically and infrequently. It updates once a week, on a good week. The art style has undergone some dramatic changes since the beginning. It's gone from typical American comic strip-style, through something more manga-influenced and detailed, to what it currently is - atmospheric, digitally painted panels. In the middle of its history, the art was very impressive - almost at the level of AppleGeeks. Mac Hall has no continuous storyline, but its characters are quite detailed for what is in fact just a gag comic. The humor ranges from pathetic to astoundingly, brilliantly funny. A lot of the humor comes from total randomness. Like I said, updates with no discernible schedule, with lots of filler art.

That's pretty much it for webcomics I read regularly. Also worth mentioning, I suppose, are Penny Arcade (everybody knows Penny Arcade, I read it from time to time when I get really bored) and IndieTits (if I want to laugh at really stupid jokes). I've also started reading Scary-Go-Round from the beginning. At times it seems kinda funny, but I'm having trouble getting into it and I might give up pretty soon. Oh well.

So that's it. Not sure what the point of writing all that was. I just felt like writing. Also, if you need good webcomics to read, those are my recommendations.

Captain Bad Mood has random news

OK, random news:

• Still in quite a crappy mood. However, very sorry for being emo and whiny yesterday. I just needed to vent.
• The Pittsburgh Penguins (hockey team) lost 5-0 (which is really, really pathetic) to the Minnesota Wild last night, and I was there, watching them suck. Yes, I went to my first professional hockey game last night. It was quite fun. The Penguins really suck. They got heartily cheered just for making a shot on goal. However, they got heartier cheers for slamming opposing players into the boards, or for getting into fights (there were 2). The heroes of the night were the 2 Penguins who got penalized for fighting. Also something else that bothered me is that the Penguins' mascot is a penguin named Iceburgh. See, get it? 'Cos it's ice hockey, in Pittsburgh, and penguins live on icebergs, so it's like a double pun...ha ha, get it? Yeah it sucks.
• My Calc in 3D prof went all out on the last day. Here are some things he was heard to say: "Let's say there's some positive charge over here, and some negative charge over here. Now, if you walk into the room with a positive charge in your pocket, it'll feel a force. If you walk into the room with two positive charges in your pocket, they'll feel twice the force." Also: "Epsilon [the permittivity of free space] has units, but as a mathematician, I have license to ignore them...Good thing, too."
• Questionable Content is quite awesome lately. It's probably gained the title of Owen's Favorite Webcomic Right Now.
• My "KDKA Wins Fake Journalism Award" article made the top spot of the front page of this week's readme (the last readme of the semester). Sometime I'll post all of my readme articles online, in their original, unedited form.
• Apparently I haven't forgotten everything I learned in IB Physics. I managed to remember what makes two hanging metal spheres attract each other and then fly apart as soon as they touch, starting with both spheres uncharged. I don't even know why that's useful, and it's a tiny part of the syllabus, but at least I'm spared the horror of remembering nothing of the E&M syllabus, what with me taking a college-level E&M physics course next semester.
• Speaking of which, I got off the waitlist for that course, so now I have exactly the schedule I want. Yay, I guess.
• I'm now 3 minutes away from the end of my last class of the first semester of college. Goodbye.
  

Captain Bad Habits is in a mood worse than his habits

So the last day of classes is tomorrow. Ordinarily that should be cause for celebration, but for no reason I can fathom, I'm in a really bad mood. It might actually be exam stress for the first time in my life. Specifically, the Matrix Algebra exam is going to kill me. Here's the problem: I know the first two-thirds of the course decently well. However, that was all a while ago. The last third of the course has been miles over my head, as the last test so handily demonstrated. So the exam is going to be on stuff I knew but have forgotten due to the passage of time, and on stuff that I just plain don't know. Dream come true, let me tell you.

An additional cause for concern in that matter is that the stuff I know well, I only know well because I've seen it all before. The new stuff has gone in one ear and out the other. And here's the crown on it all: Matrix Algebra is supposed to be easy. I'm taking a 400-level math course, plus Great Theoretical Ideas in CS, next semester. I think I may be in serious trouble.

At times like this I just wish there was somebody in my life who wouldn't complain or resist if I beat them to within an inch of their life just 'cos I felt like it. I think the total lack of solitude for nearly 4 months has finally gotten to me. Here, there's just no place where I can get away from it all, nowhere I can go so nobody will bother me. This is the joy of having a roommate. In any other season I could find somewhere outside. Guess I've just timed it badly. At GYLC, I started to feel cramped after just 12 days of no solitude. It's a mark of how well I feel like I fit in at CMU that I haven't started to feel cramped until now, but it's also telling that absolutely everyone really gets on my nerves now. I cannot live without total solitude some of the time. Being alone in my room doesn't count, because there's still people making noise and stuff in the hallway.

Apparently, writing this post has actually helped me, 'cos at least now I know why I've been so messed up (I actually had a minor anxiety attack the other day, and I haven't felt right for at least a week). So here's the problem: I'm not good at learning stuff I don't already know, and I need to find total solitude on a college campus. Excellent. And I've managed to time it so that I have all that on my mind during exams. It just keeps getting better.

The only relief in sight is going home for Christmas. There I'll have as much solitude as I want, plus I'll get to see my best friends from high school. The whole "taking-hard-courses, gonna-die" thing will only be cleared up slightly by exams being over. So if I crack, it'll be around the time I come back here. Leaving total solitude, coming back to hundreds of people around all the time and some fucking hard classes. Most definitely not looking forward to that. Goddammit.

So I've made a bit of progress just by writing this. Sorry if you didn't want to read a lot of angry bitching and got all the way to here. I'm still in a bad mood, however.

Captain Bad Habits is teh LOSE

So, I was right. The Matrix Algebra test completely kicked my ass. Actually, it mainly came down to assuming one fact (all diagonalizable matrices are invertible; totally NOT true) that I used in two separate problems, consequently losing massive amounts of points on both those problems. Here's an interesting tip to keep in mind:
DIAGONALIZABLE MATRICES ARE NOT NECESSARILY INVERTIBLE, YOU STUPID FUCK. AAAAAARGHGHHHHHBy contrast, I scored perfectly on the Calc in 3D test. However, since I expected that, it was not a pleasant surprise, whereas the Matrix test was an unpleasant surprise, so they don't offset each other. I'm still pissed at myself.

So here's something totally unrelated to me that also pisses me off. I first read about it in this article, and the full newspost is here. (Note: MacDailyNews is an excellent source of pro-Mac propaganda, but it seems like they always use the same argument of "look, Windows machines have so many viruses and other assorted ass-pains", and a lot of times their zealotry is too extreme for me.) I personally have pearLyrics and use it all the time. Seriously, what is wrong with that? The argument that the information (song lyrics) is freely and publicly available on the Internet seems like it should hold up. The lyrics are also represented in the music itself. What's wrong with having them in written form? And the thing is, whatever company killed pearLyrics isn't going after lyrics websites. So what was even the point of that? The author of pearLyrics wasn't making any money off of it. All the information is still available, just a little less conveniently. All pearLyrics did was retrieve lyrics off of websites, which people can just do with normal web browsers. It seems like inconveniencing people for no good reason. Very sad.

I'm writing this in Calc in 3D as usual, and not paying attention to the lecture (which is on some hard stuff) at all, but I really don't even care anymore. Judging by what happened in Matrix Algebra, paying attention in lecture doesn't have any bearing on my test performance, so the hell with it.

In case you hadn't guessed, I'm really pissed about the Matrix thing.

Normally, something like this would cheer me up, but it doesn't. Now stop wasting your time by reading this and go have a better day than I'm having.

Captain Bad Habits is teh win

I aced the programming exam today. I finished within 10 minutes and then sat there for a while knowing I would feel bad if I left early. So I waited until someone else left, then I left. I've always had something against being the first to hand in a test/quiz/exam and leave.

I can hear someone down the hall listening to the S&M version of Enter Sandman. Good to hear someone has musical taste around here. I, however, am now going to listen to Dream Theater, as an expression of my excellent taste in music.

*puts on Hell's Kitchen off Falling Into Infinity*

Ahh, Dream Theater. What a shame I did not know of them sooner. And seriously, how did I ever live without a subwoofer?

I went swimming for nearly an hour today. Probably as a result of that, my back is in better shape than it's been since I got here.

In Monday's Calc in 3D lecture, I picked up a 36-201 (Statistical Reasoning and Practice) test off the floor; apparently someone had a spare and left it there. It makes me cry inside. The trouble is, to take some of the more advanced psych courses that I'll need to take if I do a psych minor (probably I'll need to take them anyway, to satisfy humanities requirements), I'll need to take some stats courses. This is teh suck. The stats I had in IB Higher and Further Math almost killed me. And this is college-level stats. *cries on the outside, as well as on the inside*

Now Hell's Kitchen is over and Lines in the Sand is on. How much does that part that goes "DUN DUN. dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-DUN DUN" rule? Answer: 80 billion.

You know what there's way too much of around here? Static electricity. It's very annoying.

I've almost completed writing a Sudoku solver in C. You have no idea how much of a relief it is to finally write something in C after working so much in Java lately.

OK, this post is kind of weird so I'm going to stop it now.

Captain Bad Habits is in the home stretch

I just completed the second-last Matrix Algebra homework of the semester. I've been looking at the last Calc in 3D homework of the semester, which is due Tuesday. I'll do it tomorrow and go to recitation for the last time on Thursday, to collect the test I did last Wednesday and all the back homeworks which I haven't collected because I never go to recitation.

The 15-200 in-class programming exam is Thursday. It will consist of writing one function that manipulates a linked list somehow, and another function that manipulates a tree. The thing is, the prof has already given us all the problems that might be on the exam. After that, I fail to see how anyone could fail to get a perfect score. It's graded based on whether or not it works for some sample inputs that are provided. If it returns the correct output for each of the sample inputs, and isn't hard-coded to do so, you get a perfect score. The code for each function is about 15 lines at most, so it's theoretically even possible to memorize all of the answers. If you really can't figure one out, you've been given plenty of time in advance, and there are plenty of people who have figured them all out.

The gist of the previous paragraph was that I think this in-class programming exam is a load of crap. Also, this week's (optional) programming assignment is to write a GUI for a program we wrote earlier in the semester. The thing is, if I do that, it'll be a Java GUI, and as I've already said, Java GUIs are the devil. I'm going to feel like such a whore for taking a TA job in that course next semester, but if that's what has to be done to earn money, so be it.

Psych prof canceled lecture tomorrow, so I'm free after 1:30. Woot.

All around me, people are starting to get concerned with final exams. People who've been slacking all semester are finally starting to get serious about their work. It all makes me feel kind of bad for not doing anything different at all. I've always been like this - exams have never bothered me, and my studying usually consists of, at most, giving my notes a cursory glance. Admittedly my studying for IB Physics and Chem was more intensive than that, but that was because Chem was reputed to be very difficult and I had to teach myself part of the Physics syllabus so I didn't have to do the History of Physics part of the exam. This may have to change next semester, since I'll be taking a lot of classes that won't be a breeze by any means. All my classes this semester are pretty breezy. 15-200 and Intro to Intelligence are jokes, while Calc in 3D has moderately hard material but easy tests. Matrix Algebra is actually probably my hardest class, and the last test was pwnage, which suggests the final exam may be similar pwnage. But I'm still not worried. However, next semester, I'll be taking Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science (apparently a grueling initiation ritual for CS majors here, meant to filter out all but the most dedicated), Fundamental Data Structures and Algorithms (shouldn't be too hard but I know some pretty smart people who are having trouble with it this semester), Physics II (I hate physics and suck at it), and Graph Theory (a 400-level course, covering some pretty esoteric math) plus Interpretation & Argument, which has no final but involves writing lots of bullshit.

So here's what my schedule looks like. As you can see I have plenty of free time in the afternoons of Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Guess what that'll give me time to do? Do TA stuff for 15-200! Also, do lots of homework! And possibly research, preferably paid! Seriously, a lot of my spare time next semester will need to be spent making money. I did not have a regular job this semester (only random experiments that I got paid for participating in) and will leave college with a horrendous quantity of loans unless I start earning money now. I definitely should have had a job this semester. I'll probably end up just getting a job being an office gofer on campus. Oh well, it's my own fault, really.

The Steelers lost a critical game today; 38 to 31 against the Bengals. Now the Steelers don't have a shot at being first in AFC North. Parts of the game were really sad; the Steelers fumbled the ball FOUR TIMES (losing it only once, though) and had it intercepted twice. However, they still gained more total yards than the Bengals. Roethlisberger passed for 386 yards, which is quite an accomplishment. Overall some good football went down today, but combined with the really stupid mistakes at critical times, it just wasn't enough.

OK, this post is plenty long enough now. I should go to bed now. 'Night.

Captain Bad Habits is disappointed/amused

I'm disappointed because I just got pwned by the Matrix Algebra test. That was probably the most pwnage that has ever been unleashed on me by a math test. Right now I'm in Calc in 3D, and I've been checking my answers in Mathematica (assuming I remember the numbers in the questions right) and realizing that I was quite wrong for a lot of the test. Oh well, my other grades have been good; maybe I'll still finish the semester with an A.

I'm amused because my Calc in 3D prof, as usual on Fridays, has gone mildly insane. He was talking about Stokes' Theorem, a consequence of which is that if you're integrating the curl of a vector field over a surface, as long as the boundary of the surface and the vector field stay the same, the surface can be anything and the integral will stay the same. To demonstrate this, he drew the boundary with a paraboloid inside it, then for comparison drew the same boundary, but the surface was this weird gingerbread-man-type-thing. "So you can integrate over any surface - even this... thing... and still get the same answer as long as the boundary stays the same." Then he got rather animated about how awesome the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus is. "The function in between can be ANYTHING! ANYTH... WHY does this work? WHY?? No matter WHAT that function does, as long as the endpoints are the same, the integral...is...WHY?? Let's prove it!" For a guy who normally has only one tone of voice, this is quite an outburst. I'm very amused.

OK, now he just ended the lecture by saying, "And here, Green's Theorem is a special case of Stokes' Theorem, and uh... have a good weekend." So I'm off now. Seeyas.