Checksum Arcanius

I went to see the second Fantastic Four today with Kunlun, Alex, Alice, Jeremy, and Ian (I think). Although Kunlun and Alex liked it fairly well, the movie didn’t really work for me. Indeed, I have found that most movies where the whole world needs to be saved at the last minute don’t work as well for me as the smaller-scale, yet deeper struggles of similarly-themed, but almost always more successful movies.

— An Aside —

Take, for example, Star Trek: First Contact versus Star Trek: Nemesis. In the first, the earth is saved early in the movie, and the rest of the time they are trying to convince a drunkard to fly a rocket. Yet that movie, in my opinion, is far more compelling than Nemesis, where the world has to be saved at the last minute. Its just so trite that most movies that attempt it can’t help but to fail.

— Back —

Anyway, I would give FF: TRotSS (haha, trotss) a 2 out of 5. Don’t go out of your way to watch it unless you need mindless, predictable action and you tend to like this sort of cheesy action movie.

Recently, I have been thoroughly reevaluating my current summer plan. For a variety of reasons, including the hardware capstone topic & length, I am leaning more and more towards the software emphasis for my Computer Engineering degree. That would mean no more requirement for EE 233 (although I could still sign up for it if I wanted to). That would free up my summer mornings, possible for work. I could then sign up for my Bioengineering capstone and start it early with just a couple of credits — 6 in all I believe. The working hours would be better (early morning to noon or so), the school less intense (just one “real” class), and I would have my afternoons free to do CREE stuff, capstone stuff, and fun stuff. Plus my weekends would still be mine.

The more I think about it, the more it sounds like what I should do.

Thursday afternoon, my mom called me at work with a wonderful proposition: An evening afloat in a kayak on Lake Washington. I couldn’t say no, so we headed out to Kirkland and put the kayaks in around 7:30 until just after 9:00. Then I picked up Maria in Redmond and we dropped her off at her frat-turned-summer-house residence in the U-District.

This afternoon, I enjoyed a leisurely bike trip with Alice around Greenlake, through Ravena park, to Gasworks Park, and back. I just fixed up her bike (all it needed was a tube patch and air), so we thought we’d take it for a spin. It was a lot of fun, hopefully I’ll get the chance to do it again soon.

Better than I thought, but still probably not Dean’s list material. Oh well, the GPA is still on the up ‘n up.

Another rainy day means, of course, that I went on another hike. Just two days after hiking Mount Defiance, and just hours after returning from a DotA LAN Party, I headed to Alpental with Danielle and Josh from Frisbee and Danielle’s roommate Maiko. From there we headed up from the Snow Lake Trailhead. The hike was pretty low-key compared to Thursday’s outing, but it was still a lot of fun, and it looks like this is a crew that will be up for a lot of hikes this summer, so that is pretty exciting for me.

We left the U-district a little after 9, starting hiking around 10:30, peaked around noon, and then post-holed our way back down to source lake and then back to the car for an easy 3:30 return to the U-district.

After a few days back at work, I took the day off to finish off the Spring quarter right — with a Bioengineering Juniors (now Seniors!) barbeque after Dave’s Birthday Hike with Larry and Greg. The hike was great — we officially conquered Mount Defiance. The last I went on was Mount Si back during spring break, and it rained on us pretty hard that day. Thursday, it didn’t rain quite as hard, but it was still wet. Nevertheless, we all had a great time winding our way across and sometimes straight up the mountain. We took the main trail up (until it was covered entirely by snow, when we started improvising and going straight up), but Larry and Dave knew about a semi-secret older trail that followed the stream from the lake down the mountain. We found it and took it, and the experience was nothing short of incredible. The padded ground cover on the more forested, less traveled trail was nice for coming down as well. Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of the second half of the trip because my camera batteries died on the way up (way to not change them Ryan!)

As far as timing, we left Sunset Elementary just after 6:00 am, started hiking not too long after 7:00, peaked around 10:30, and were out not long after 1:00. I managed to make it to the barbecue afterwards, but I was spent and fell sound asleep not long after 9:00 that night.

Intentions don’t count in this game.