Songs I listen to a lot lately

• Eyes of a Stranger - Queensrÿche Because of this song alone, the singer of Queensrÿche, Geoff Tate, is now among my 5 favorite rock vocalists. In the first verse alone he showcases his huge range. It's also just a great progressive metal song, in the same vein as Dream Theatre.


• Ghost Rider - Rush Just a great Rush song, off their latest album. It's got a much more mainstream sound than their older work, but this is a good thing.


• Strange Deja Vu - Dream Theatre A relatively short song off "Scenes From a Memory". All of Dream Theatre's stuff is great, of course, but for some reason this song gets stuck in my head and I have to listen to it over and over.


• Gates of Babylon - Yngwie Malmsteen A hard-rocking song by Yngwie, as opposed to most of his classical-influenced displays of guitaristic pyrotechnics. Includes obligatory ridiculous guitar solo. I would just like to remind everyone that I saw Yngwie himself play this song - AND HE WAS TEN FEET AWAY FROM ME WHEN HE DID SO. Ahem.


• 914 - Liquid Tension Experiment Short song by LTE, little presence of guitar, incredible bass and keyboard work, strangely addictive.

City of Irony

I was out shopping today, and in the course of my travels I saw this delightfully ironic sign in front of a Catholic school:

[name of school] Catholic School
Congratulations!
Most Awards
Pgh. Regional Science Fair

I wish I'd had a camera with me.

Today I bought two books of Bloom County, one of the best comic strips ever, as well as an air mattress. I hate to admit it, but I also bought two polo shirts from Aéropostale. The only redeeming factor is that they were on sale, apparently because of flawed stitching. I would have thought the flawed stitching would make them extra valuable in today's fashion world, where clothes that look like they've been worn and badly treated for five years are the height of trendy. Ah well, I guess I'm just an ignoramus.

Oh! Big news! I'm writing this from the house! Granted, the Internet is rather unstable, only accessible downstairs and is being leeched off neighbors who are, from the network SSID, two houses down the road, but who cares? I can get on the Internet! All is right in the world!

I find myself with surprisingly little to say. Oh well.

Office hours

I happened upon my research advisor today (I had commandeered a couch in Wean Hall to relax on during the day) and he told me that he's secured me an office. Yay. This means I'll no longer have to sit in the basement of Hunt to do my daily pointless computering. Also, if I retain the office even just for a couple of days into the semester, I'll be able to use it as temporary storage for my stuff (since I get kicked out of the house on August 23 and we're not allowed back into dorms until the 24th). Maybe the people I'm subletting from will be nice and let me keep my stuff in the basement. If it turns out they don't and I don't have the office on that day, I'll be in somewhat of a bind.

I ran my first 15-211 recitation today. There was nothing that could have gone majorly wrong, and nothing did. A few people even laughed at the correct times.

I bought the sixth Dark Tower book by Stephen King and am reading it. At the rate I'm going, I'll be done in a few days. This is rather unfortunate, given the paucity of reading material I have with me this summer. Since my days now are spent doing not much other than lazing around, I'm going through books fairly rapidly. Perhaps the lazing-around thing will change once I get into my office (as in maybe that signals the onset of real work).

Since the meal plan ended, I haven't prepared any of the food I've eaten myself. This is a bad situation. Unless I change that, I might not come out ahead financially this summer and I might as well have spent the summer in Albany. I think, since I really don't have any desire to cook for myself (I know, I fail) I'll buy sandwich makings and make lunches for myself, and eat out for dinners. If this proves to still be too much of a drain on my finances...I'll eat sandwiches for dinner, too.

Today I was listening to music as I walked around, and I caught myself walking in step with "Paradise City" by GNR. I felt like rather an idiot.

I am going to leave now and stop spreading my random, trivial thoughts into the world. The world must be so sick of it by now.

Perls of wisdom

My software website now has a Perl script on it that keeps track of how many times each item is downloaded. I had been wanting to know that for ages.

I'm moved into the house now. I left a good chunk of my stuff down in the basement because I don't need it. I'm doing an experiment this summer: I'm going to unpack items only if I need them, so that I can see what I never use. And stuff that I never use, I'll try to take to Albany when I go there this summer (however, I am NOT spending the summer in Albany, just like I vowed). All of my stuff appears to be unharmed. The house still has a faint niff of old beer and cigarette smoke, so when I was in Squirrel Hill this evening getting dinner, I also bought air freshener.

I'm on the Internet by virtue of God knows what. Seriously, I have no idea how I'm on the Internet right now. I joined some random wireless network that I'm picking up, and it's getting me to the Internet.

The floor in here is made of wood, which makes it rather cold and echoey in here. I am a big fan of carpeted rooms. The shower has some very dodgy-looking stains in it, unfortunately.

Tomorrow I have nothing special to do; I was thinking I might go to South Hills Village, a mall which is a good distance away from here. What I should probably do is prepare for 211 recitation on Thursday, and write some code for my research project (I should have been doing that today, actually).

I am bored now so I shall play dumb games and procrastinate, instead of organizing my room or doing anything useful.

Spring 06 Report Card

                    Course                  Midterm  Final
Course  Section     Title           Units   Grade    Grade

 76101    AA  INTERPRETN & ARGMNT    9.00             A 


 33112    B   PHYSICS II SCI STDNT  12.00     A       A 


 21484    A   GRAPH THEORY           9.00     A       A 


 15211    H   FUND DATA STRUCT ALG  12.00     A       A 


 15251    B   THEORTCAL IDEAS CS I  12.00     A-      A 

So much for spring semester of freshman year supposedly having the lowest GPA.

Nomadic

At noon today, the door to my freshman year dorm room became locked to me forever. All of my possessions in Pittsburgh, except for a select few, are in a house on Forbes Avenue, where I'll be living for the summer. I hope my possessions do not get old beer spilled on them while they're there. This is a distinct possibility because of the house's current (until tomorrow, hopefully) inhabitants.

So currently, I'm a nomad. I don't have a place to call mine. Through the generosity of a friend I'll have a roof over my head tonight, and then tomorrow I should be able to move into the house.

I met with my research advisor today, to discuss the project and its implementation details. To summarize this project, it is like the bastard child of 15-211 and 15-212, on crack. I have to custom-design a bunch of data structures, and help refine an algorithm (this is the 211 part) that reads annotations in Java source code that pertain to ownership of objects and type safety (the 212 part). There are some really wild data structures and algorithms I have to use, hence the crack part.

I've been messing around with Perl. Perl is awesome. I am going to be on a writing-CGI-scripts-in-Perl kick for a week or so, in between writing ridiculous data structures and trying to think of ways to incorporate wacky changes into an already wacky algorithm.

Goddammit I'm spending altogether too much money on food. For the past few days it's been sort of justified, since I had little to no means of obtaining food other than going out to eat (since the only kitchen I had access to was the really crappy one in my dorm building, and cooking in there twice was enough for a lifetime). But once I move into the house (I've said this before, but I don't care) I'll have a kitchen, and hence no excuse not to cook. *sad*

So I've been wasting time in the library computer cluster since 3:30, and at some point this evening (hopefully not too late) I'll be able to go to the place I'm staying in tonight. I've been playing dumb games, writing Perl scripts and just generally doing things that are not useful to anyone, including myself. I'm getting hungry but I don't want to go out and eat until I can deposit my stuff somewhere (it's a pain to tote around). Well, I'd better stop writing and go back to doing things that aren't remotely useful to anyone.

Moving

I spent today moving most of my possessions here to a house up on Forbes that I'm subletting a bedroom in. My room is barer now than it was on the day everyone moved out (obviously) but I feel a lot better about it. I don't know what's changed - this room holds the memories of my freshman year of college, and I've always secretly been a nostalgic sort of person, but now I feel good about getting out of here. One thing that bothers me a bit is that I'll have no excuse to not cook for myself once I'm living in the house, and my frugality will make me feel bad every time I eat out.

I move into the house on Tuesday, but as of now it's currently wallowing under a layer of dirty laundry and empty booze bottles. The place smells like old beer. It's supposed to be cleaned up before I move in, but short of rerouting a river I don't see any way of cleaning the place well between now and Tuesday.

However, considering the buildup of dust and detritus in this room (a year's worth) I guess I can't really talk.

With my desk mostly empty, you can see the Wall of Bottles that I've been building all semester clearly. It has been joined by a more recent construct, the Gatorade Tower. I've taken pictures of both of these, but my camera cable is currently in the house (I'm not even sure which box it's in, oh well) so you won't get to see them till Tuesday at the earliest.

I need to get up early tomorrow so I can pack up my bedding and random last-minute crap before noon, which is when I get kicked out. So I should probably do something other than post now.

Musings

I hate The Da Vinci Code. It just makes me angry. First of all, the book just sucks. I suppose backing this up forces me to admit to being somewhat of a literary snob. I mean, I read Stephen King, so there goes my credibility among serious snobs, but come on, TDVC takes "airport fiction" (term courtesy of my 11th grade English teacher) to new and horrible levels. And people love it so much! I mean, I was in Barnes and Noble today, and I saw paperback editions of it for the first time. This is, I believe, a good couple of years after its original release. It is extremely popular for no reason I can see. Also, while I was in Squirrel Hill today I went by the cinema up there - three of the four screens are showing TDVC movie.

Speaking of the movie, when I was at the Waterfront yesterday, I passed by the cinema there (where I went to see "Thank You For Smoking", which I enjoyed) and in front of it was a group of protesters and a KDKA (of "CMU Porn Scandal" fame) news crew. I went closer to look, and found that the protesters were holding signs saying, "Jesus Christ is Our Lord and Savior - Protest the Da Vinci Code". I guess this is because of the whole "Christianity is a crock" message of TDVC.

Today I was mildly productive. I beat a couple episodes of N, wrote up the docs for the dynamic programming assignment in 15-211 (I think dynamic programming is awesome, so I'm very happy I got to be in charge of this assignment), did a bit of coding on my research project, and watched a bunch of Scrubs. I was going to go shopping for clothes and books, and possibly get a haircut, but I ended up being too lazy to do either of those. Oh well.

I had a bunch more to write about, but my attention span is so bad that I've procrastinated for hours while writing this post (I procrastinate from blogging, which is itself a form of procrastination...man, I'm terrible) and thus forgotten most of what I was going to say. Rest assured that it was very thought-provoking and entertaining.

I'm going to spend tomorrow packing and possibly moving, so I'd better get some sleep now.

Ends

Well, two things have ended: my freshman year of college and Scrubs season 5. I don't feel like writing about the former right now, so I'll talk about Scrubs.

Overall, fairly obviously, S5 is an improvement over S4. Sometimes it was the same and sometimes it descended into depths of suckiness that Scrubs should never approach, but when you average it all out, it's better than S4. It's only better than S4, though. The ranking of season quality still stands as follows, from best to worst: 2, 1, 3, 5, 4. The decision between S1 and S3 was a tough one, but the final result is because of this. Thankfully that rather unfortunate situation was remedied in S5 (one of the many reasons why S5 > S4).

As I was saying, S5 has had its ups and downs, like any other season. I'll start with the ups. First off is episode 20. All of it. For those who don't have as encyclopedic of a memory for Scrubs episodes as I do, this is the one where Jill (extremely hyper yet suicidal patient from 308 and 110) randomly meets Cox and JD and then dies, apparently of a cocaine overdose. It ends with what I have to say is John C. McGinley's finest moment on Scrubs. This is the serious episode of S5, and it ranks among the best of the serious episodes. Or maybe it is the best. I was speechless for a bit after watching it, and quite sad for a while. The wrenching moment at the end (a trademark of Scrubs serious eps) was definitely the best of them all. None of the other serious eps have had quite that strong of an effect on me. The amazing and underrated performance from Nicole Sullivan (who plays Jill) also sticks out in my mind.

Other ups of season 5...the arc of episodes involving Mrs. Wilk. The way the changing relationship between Cox and JD was handled. The Janitor's rant about finding a head in a storage room (you know he made that up on the spot, and come on..."we're in the middle of a city, what's a HAWK doing there?"). The name "Dudemeister" (it means Master of Dudes).

Downs of S5? Sure... JD and klutzy-girl buying a half-acre together and then building a deck on it and then...what the hell. Just stupid. The whole klutzy-girl thing. Floating-Head Doctor. Some of the incredibly lame jokes that went down. The déjà vu episode - an excuse to recycle jokes, and even that was badly done. An interesting thing I noticed is that the lame jokes are at their lamest right before the title sequence. The pre-title-sequence jokes were at their best in S2. Now they're worthless.

As for the rather insane plot development at the very end of the last episode, I think I can guess what the theme of the next season is. It's a very delicate theme, and it could go all kinds of wrong, which is rather worrying. I just hope the writers can handle what they've put themselves into.

Since it's very quiet, sad, depressing and lonely around here, and each minute seems to be taking an hour to pass, and there's nothing I want to do, I'm going to watch old Scrubs episodes to remind myself of the glory days. The new season is supposed to come on at the beginning of next year, if all goes well. Here's hoping it continues the upward trend of S5.

Almost over

I have one final left, that being 15-251. I'm not too worried about it; with my current grade in the class I can get a pretty low score on the final and still be fairly confident of an A. I should probably study at least a little, though (I'm procrastinating from studying right now, by writing this).

The ringing noise in my ear is finally subsiding, a good 4 days after I first acquired it. Either that, or I'm just getting used to it. It hasn't adversely affected my life or anything (it doesn't stop me from sleeping), but it is kind of annoying if I think about it and notice it.

Come to think of it, two major events this year that should be cause for jubilation have ended up with me getting permanently damaged in some way. The Steelers won the Super Bowl and I got a scar on my forehead. I went to see Yngwie Malmsteen in concert and I damaged my hearing.

My research advisor elaborated on what I'll be doing this summer. It's going to involve a lot of coding and messing with data structures, as well as refining an algorithm. I'll also be involved with more data structures and algorithms in the form of TAing 15-211. So this has a good chance to become the best summer ever (it has to beat out last summer, because of GYLC).

I have a sign hanging up over my desk. It says, scribbled in pencil: "YOU DO NOT WANT TO SPEND THE SUMMER IN ALBANY". I used it as a reminder to get stuff done, find something to do this summer. I am happy because I have achieved that goal in spectacular fashion.

So mature

About an hour ago, some guy came to my door with a piece of paper. He said that he was a brother of Beta Theta Pi. He said that there were plans in the offing to kick BTP off campus because they had had a food fight on their property. The piece of paper he had was a petition to the administration to let them stay. He asked if I would sign it.

I was kind of sleepy, so I just said no and closed the door. I wanted to ask why they thought they should be allowed to stay. Perhaps they need a refresher course on the idea of actions having consequences. A surprising number of people seem to have lost sight of that basic idea. I am not going to make a sweeping generalization about frat guys here. But seriously, a food fight? Come on, food fights are for elementary school.

On the other hand, though, as long as there was no property damage or too much inconvenience to people not involved, kicking them off campus entirely seems a little harsh. I have no idea if there was property damage or anything, so I'm not really sure whether they deserve it. Still, it just struck me as really stupid. I have low tolerance for stupid people, such as a bunch of college guys who decide it would be a good idea to have a food fight that may or may not have resulted in property damage.

Besides, if they get kicked off campus, that just creates more housing space for normal people, which I'm in full support of.

HOLYCRAPPINGCRAPS

So I went to see Yngwie Malmsteen in concert last night. That explains the title.

I am going to indulge in a bit of music snobbery here, by reviewing the two opening acts, Icarus Witch and Orange Sky.

Icarus Witch was nothing special. They're death/fantasy metal. I suppose they owe something to Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, two pioneers of heavy metal, but only in their general sound. They really have nothing that distinguishes them from any old death metal band. Their singer is able to scream freakishly high, which I thought was kind of cool. However, their music is totally unoriginal. They played six or so songs, and among those six songs there were only two different riffs. This is bad, especially in a heavily riff-based subgenre of metal. In summary, Icarus Witch sucks.

Orange Sky is rather more interesting. The band consists of four huge, dreadlocked Trinidadians. Dreadlocked people headbanging looks even cooler than just long-haired people headbanging. Their genre seems to be a fusion of power/death metal and reggae. There'll be a slow section with two guys singing about happy days in reggae rhythm, then they'll break into a crunching riff and ridiculous, almost Yngwie-style guitar solo. Once that's over, the riff will continue as one guy roars Iced Earth-style about happy days, backed by furious double bass drums. What's wrong with that? Nothing. This is a fusion that you might think should be relegated to the same circle of hell as rap metal, but I thought it turned out surprisingly well. The frontman is an excellent guitar player; I've rarely heard someone (even mainstream metal guitarists) make a guitar scream like that. However, the problem was that of the six or so songs they played, I only heard two different solos. They were technically impressive solos, but not at all appropriate for the songs they were in. In summary, Orange Sky is a good idea, but they need to come up with more varied material. I doubt their genre is one in which there's a lot of material already, so they should have plenty of room to explore.

Yngwie, of course, is just Yngwie. He is scary. And he was totally 10 feet away from me. He threw guitar picks in my general direction, causing furious scuffles as people dived to the floor to retrieve them. I think, unfortunately, I may have permanently damaged my hearing, as I still have a ringing noise in my left ear.

Update that I forgot to mention: in addition to Yngwie Malmsteen, I saw another famous person last night: Derek Sherinian. He's Yngwie's keyboardist on this tour. He is famous as a former keyboardist for Dream Theater, one of my favorite bands. So basically the whole time I was like HOLYCRAPPINGCRAPS

Finals report

15-211 = terrible.

Physics = eh, it's physics. No idea how certain an A in the class is.

Graph Theory = I should be doing it right now. But it's making me feel stupid.

Summer plans: doing research + TAing 211. Yay. And I got a place to live.

Yesterday: Jared Cohon, president of CMU, made me an omelet. And told me he enjoys readme.

I hate Java again

Today during WCAC, I was attempting to gain some experience making Java GUIs with Swing. This proved to be a maddening task. First of all, in the two development environments with which I'm most familiar (REALbasic and Xcode/Interface Builder), you do GUI layout with a GUI. As in, you drag and drop components, such as buttons, onto windows. Not so in Java. You do all layout in code. Second, Java documentation just sucks. I spent a good twenty minutes trying to figure out how to create a popup menu. This is a component, on a window, that looks like a button with an arrow on the right end. If you click on it, a menu of choices appears. Apple calls these popup menus. So I searched the Swing docs and located a class called JPopupMenu, which seemed promising. It did not deliver on said promise. Much frustration later, I located, through web search, a class in AWT called Choice, which did what I wanted. However, I learned that this was deprecated in favor of JComboBox, which did what I wanted. I had seen JComboBox earlier in my quest, but I didn't think it was going to be useful because what Apple calls ComboBoxes are something different. JComboBox can behave like an Apple popup menu if you want it to, but how was I supposed to know that from the name? In fact, in the Java documentation, it mentions that JComboBox can "also behave like a popup menu". Well then doesn't it seem logical that this functionality should go in JPopupMenu instead? RAAAAAAAARRRRRRGHHHHHHHHH

If you've stuck with me long enough to get through that long and probably uninteresting rant (unless you too have had experience making GUIs in Java), congratulations. I reward you with a hilarious joke.

Actually, I don't. That's the joke. Go away now.

Noooo

• I am sick. It feels like my throat is lined with sandpaper. The only relief for this is to drink insane quantities of water, and thus go to the bathroom very frequently. It's somewhat inconvenient.
  
• I am done with 15-251 homework forever.
• I missed a falcon-pwning today, but I saw the aftermath: pigeon feathers scattered on the ground. This reverse-made my day. As in, it did the opposite of make my day. I get a small amount of comfort from the fact that a pigeon was totally eaten by a falcon within about 100 yards of me, but that's totally negated by the fact that I didn't witness it.
  
• Just over a week until I go see Yngwie Malmsteen. Oh yes. Yngwie Malmsteen.
• I have to revise my WCAC paper and I am totally not going to be in the mood to do so before Friday, which is when it's due. Neither am I going to be in the mood to do Graph Theory homework, but I should because I am kind of scared of the final.
• Why is "Hell's Bells" by AC/DC so frigging awesome?
  
• I'm afraid that in my illness-addled state I'll say something stupid, so I shall sign off now. Whee alliteration.