Checksum Arcanius

Today, I played too much Counterstrike. I am very tired. Goodnight.

Using: Mozilla Lightningdragon

I�m up to about 92% better now; I still have a lingering cough, but physically I�m fine otherwise. I had fun at tennis, although I arrived a little late, then talked to the woman from Poland to help her with her English, something I do maybe twice a month. Next came math (gradients!) and then I spent the next four hours in the darkroom. I now have enough pictures, I think, to turn in tomorrow. It�s just a matter of selection and touch-up at this point. Dust is still my nemesis, but I have developed some fairly good anti-dusting techniques that seem to be working. First I take a brush and quite violently chip away any deposited dust from the negative, then I brush away the finer dust, then I spay the thing with canned air all the way back to the enlarger. It works about 75% of the time. The other 25% of the time, I scream. And then repeat the process.

Tomorrow is going to be a busy day. I have school, which will consist of just a Math and turning in my assignment (I don�t know if I need to stick around), then work, and then right after work I�m headed off to see Lord of the Rings at the Cinerama. After that three-and-a-half hour marathon, I will return home, then sleep, then go to tennis where hopefully I will have figured out who, besides Michael Change, served underhand in a major tournament.

I�m still sick. I made it up to about 85% recovered and I�ve just hovered there ever since. Its very annoying, and not at all usual. I want to be well again!

I�ve started to recover my counterstrike skillz. I started out 6-12 today, but then went on to get to 30-18, meaning that I was, for that period, 24-6! That�s pretty good methinks.

I got to talk to big Scott for the first time in a long time. This is why I miss him:

Scott: yooooooooooooooooooooo
Me: hi there’
Scott: hey
Scott: wazzup in Ryan land?
Me: um
Me: I want my teeth to have that after-dentist feeling, so i amusing my leatherman on them
Scott: cool
Me: also, I enjoy photography, but not photography teachers so much
Scott: did you know that the amount of integers (positive and negative) is the same amount as just the positive odd integers? Is that messed up or what?

Tomorrow, bright and early, I get to call all around to try to secure two sprockets, a 32 tooth with a hub and a 45 tooth plate, both #25. We need them by noon on Tuesday, so we�ll probally be paying more in shipping than for the actual sprockets. It�ll be interesting. Then comes math and we find out if I get to continue playing counterstrike. Then I get to spend the rest of the day in the photo lab. Wahoo.

I think I aced the calculus midterm. In celebration, I played Counterstrike. The ban will return, though, I suppose, if I don�t end up getting the grade I expected. Nevertheless, it was nice to get back into the game� My skills aren�t nearly as refined as they were when they left, but the instincts are still mostly good, and I�m hovering around 1:1 ratio-wise.

I visited the robotics �team� at the school today during testing. All of one student was there� Hopefully we get a better showing at the practice competition tomorrow. The arm still pops chain quite easily at half power, and its painfully slow, my fault. But the autonomous code is buggy as all-get out � Larry and Dave�s fault. There is plenty of blame to go around. J We�ll see how we are compared to other teams, and hopefully we�ll keep working on the robot for a few more days instead of packing it up tomorrow.

I saw Secondhand Lions � the idea was decent, but it was pretty overacted. The flashbacks were fun, but the touchy-feely parts of the movie were so forced it lost significance for me. Can�t suggest it too much, unless you�re into that kind of movie�

Adam: i drank red bull today
Adam: it didnt give me wings much less energey
Adam: have you ever had red bull?
Ryan: never
Adam: do you know what it is
Ryan: I have a friend who drinks them before he goes snowboarding
Ryan: he seems to think they helpo
Adam: lol
Adam: i drank a 24 ounce uh… something
Adam: it didnt do anything to me
Ryan: I’ll add your lack of energy experience to my repository of dubiously useful information

You know you’re too old when someone asks “do you know what it is” is reference to Red Bull…

Time for more CS or sleep, whichever comes first�

I am in terrible shape. I went for a run — or rather, tried to go for a run — and it ended up being a glorified jog down and a walk back up the hill. It didn’t help that I am still a little sick (75% recovered, but not yet whole), and I was coughing by the time I got to the bottom of the hill, but still, I have a long ways to go before I get back to the condition I was in September of 2001. I think it is worth the effort, though. All the better to play ultimate with, which I will be doing a lot of when I start at the UW (hopefully on both playing and starting).

I had a plan to study for Math when I got home today. I somehow ended up getting almost none of the plan accomplished. Instead, I very efficiently wasted time until I finally started watching Donnie Darko (which is not a waste of time) for the second time in 24 hours. If language and a very mysterious plot don’t turn you off, then take some time to watch it.

This got me to talking to a friend about my early exposure to movies:
Me: I used to not like movies much
Me: I didn’t see them very often; when I did, they were generally bad experiences
Friend: serious?
Me: I once saw two movies in the same day: Bevis and Butthead Do America and Mars Attacks
Me: B&B was the superior movie
Me: which is really kind of sick
Friend: I saw Mars Attacks, thought it was really dumb
Me: yup

Which brings me back to the original topic, I’m not so good at studying, because I’m not so good at staying on task, especially when I’m around a computer (and thus the wandering of topics and the hour it takes me to write this one page.

While on the jog/walk, I took a shortcut back through the woods. While not exactly scary, since I was in Bellevue’s Lakemont area, it did get me to thinking about some of the topics covered in John Eldredge’s book “Wild at Heart,” which I have been slowly reading (thanks to Heidi for the excellent gift!). That is, part of my heart does long for danger, to prove to myself that I can overcome difficulty. My experience in this arena is limited. Hikes and camping trips touch in the area, but they have always been so controlled, so planned. The road trip was a good step in the right direction, but it was too limited also. My calculus class doesn’t look like it’ll be the one since once again I’ve found a way to not care about studying when it really counts. A midnight hike around Salt Lake’s foothills with Clifton was a good experience, as was the climb to the top of a peak as a thunderstorm approached and my brother called me off during my Spring term down at BYU. It hasn’t been enough. Of course, I should finish the book too.

Using: Mozilla Lightningemu and Mozilla Superbug

I am sick and I feel terrible. I think I picked something up at the concert; I haven’t felt up to snuff sense. Also, I had trouble getting to sleep; I’m attributing this to a lithium dependence — although having no schedule also contributed. And the lack of sleep contributed to me getting sick. It’s all one vicious circle. It did get me to thinking about things, however — because of scientific advance, I who know very little of the biological sciences that can be known, know far more already than almost everyone just 50 years ago, and certainly more than everyone a hundred years ago. The same goes for most scientific topic — physics, chemistry, economics (although this country is woefully economically illiterate). I’m not sure it works with astronomy, where those proposing new theories seem to have gone off the deep end– seriously, how much more convincing is the big bang theory (“boom and it was all there”) than the creation theory (“boom x 7 days and it was all there”)? Seriously, more than any other division of science — but not exclusive of the other sciences by any means — astronomy has become the religion of disproving the need for a creator. Where I am right now, I don’t claim to know either way — but at least I know that I don’t know. As the old saying goes, “It is better to remain silent and thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” Which is not to say that I don’t encourage scientific thought and theorizing. As I stated early, the scientific method has brought the quality of life forward leaps and bounds. It has done far more that can be seen by the average person than any other philosophy or religion. But that doesn’t mean that blind speculation that happens to match with some results is a legitimate theory either.

Arcanius steps off soapbox…

Today was another late start, but not nearly as bad as before. I fixed a program on my mom’s computer at her office (its great having the password of the IT guy there… oh wait, I am the IT guy there), and then I went to IS to watch the Robot drive around. We already broke the arm (its too powerful, I guess that’s my fault)… but the ball-picker upper and dumper thing worked pretty well once when we turned off one of the motors. We later removed that motor and assembly to save weight, and will test tomorrow whether the new system works. After testing, we returned to Larrys where new pillow blocks were constructed for better turning and Dave, Tim and I built a goal grabber. Larry then started working on fixing the arm. Saturday we get to test the thing out on as close to a real field as we will see before the real competition. That is the date we are shooting to be complete by. I still think we should use the next five days we have to tweak things, but people are getting pretty tired of the hectic schedule.

I’m off to sleep off this sickness and dream of lightweight mechanisms to lift a 130 pound robot five feet into the air.

Adobe Premiere Pro 7.0 Finally finished downloading (two different copies!) Between the two, I was able to get it installed. The first time I ran it, it took about two hours to load (ok, two minutes) before promptly crashing. I deleted the video that seems to cause the problems, and will encode to a more stable format until XviD figures itself out.

I read an explanation of the Telecine conversion that takes place to get movies (shot at 24 frames per second) to display properly in NTSC video (29.97 fps)� Its pretty crazy the steps they go though� also makes it a pain the butt to copy DVDs (I need to do this for a legitimate purpose too). If anyone wants to give me any tips, feel free.

It was a beautiful day, sunny and cool, crisp air but warm enough from the sunlight. It was the first day I needed to wear sunglasses in a long time. So I put on my sunglasses, only to find that one of the two screws holding the lens in had fallen out. No worries, I have another identical pair of sunglasses stored in another location, which I haven�t used in a while. I pulled them out to find that they had lost the exact same screw� How does this happen? And does anyone have some black very short #2 or so hardware I could use to fix the sunglasses?

It looks like Microsoft�s Automatic Windows security update installer just froze� wouldn�t it be great if someone hacked into that, and had it install viruses on every windows machine in the world� that�s world domination right there. Oh wait, Microsoft already does that�

I turned in my photos for assignment 2 today. I feel really good about it � I also learned about painting on developer today while I was helping Amanda in the darkroom and had some fun with those effects.

I also REALLY need to finish my UW Personal Statement and submit my app. And then get all the other materials sent to the UW. That has to happen within three days now. If you see me, bug me about it. Thanks.

I�m thinking of expanding my sourceforge project, photolog, to be basically what my site it now, but with greymatter replaced and with MySQL or filesystem-as-database support. And secure it all. It would be good html, css, mysql, and php practice. And it would make my site better. I�ll let you know how that project goes. Add it on to the to-do list.