Felocity

I'm starting to think my living situation is a mistake. I'm trying to be happy about it since after all I need to have it for at least one year. But when things around the house here suck, they reach levels of suck I thought I would never know. Remember the parking situation? Well, I had to park a good two and a half blocks away last night. I walked out there this morning to drive to class, and stared at my driver side in horror. The mirror was half off, the glass shattered as if clipped. The top half was ripped clean away, nowhere to be found. It's going to cpst $350 to fix, rough estimate.

Too tired to really care much more beyond that. Damn what a shitty day this was.…

In my last entry I talked briefly about the sheer idiocy of people in college. Today in capstone, I witnessed the reason why. Let me explain the assignment that had me walk out of today's class.

A week ago, we were to turn in a progress update presentation of our assignment. This was to be a narrated powerpoint about 7-8 slides in length. Of course, assuming we would actually be you know... presenting our presentations, I kept my slides concise, following the rules for powerpoint presentations as told by Pat Watson and Rosalie Strong in my other two major CST classes. I got an email from the capstone instructor telling me my powerpoint was inadequate and lacked narration. I wrote back a "cheerfully distasteful" email pointing out that effective narration to accompany these slides would create a very large powerpoint that would be difficult to submit. Plus, for a presentation, I thought it best to go before the class and deliver the presentation as opposed to it just being played like some poor boring video. In the end, I will probably have to redo the assignment, but not without writing a very nice letter to he professor explaining why today's class assignment was reason for me to walk out of class.…

I saw an interesting post by Emma on students in programming who don't know programming. Furthermore, she talks about students who are computer science majors who lack any prerequisite knowledge. I don't want to sound elite or anything in saying this, but if you pick a major, you had better at least know something about your fucking field. I see this problem all the time, even at the tutoring center - it's somewhat depressing. You sit in a session for an hour, working with a design student that doesn't know how to resize their image to 72 DPI to put on the Internet. You sit for another 50 minutes with a student who thinks a web page should be done entirely in Macromedia Flash but couldn't tell you a damn thing about motion guides. You sit with a kid on the programming track, and he doesn't know how the return statement in c++ works for functions. I fucking kid you not. This is like being an English major and not knowing what MLA is or being a Math major and not knowing basic Algebra.

So how do these people keep getting passed in prerequisite classes? I don't know about other schools, but here at least, you only fail if you are genuinely trying to fail. Our school is soft and doesn't crack down on students, especially in our HCOM and CST departments. People are being passed out of English classes and are still writing a paper thesis that reads "I think that the author might have meant ________". Kids are taking advanced computing classes and they have a hard time saving their work to a Zip disk so they can take it with them. And yes, they keep getting passed higher up.…

This weekend was home to one of the better parties I have been to in my college life. Out of all four "parties" I think I ever attended as a student, this one currently takes the cake as the most enjoyable. It was a pleasant mix of costumes, anime nuts, gamers, and booze. The pirates, a Weird Al Yankovic costume, a chained out kitten bartender, and Mitch/Carin costumed as Carin/Mitch simply added to the atmosphere. It was H's party in honor of that event-type-thing that is supposed to take place October 31. That's right, it was a genuine Halloween party - costume required. Before the party though, I needed a costume. Many thanks to Shyene and Chris for going with me to Salinas (home of the only place that sells black cat ears) and for walking Northridge Mall, seeing the new place, and extra special thanks to Sheyne for helping me chain myself up. Cat ears, tail, chains from D-rings in bondage pants, a soft velvet collar with a nice sized bell on it, a chain from the collar through the shirt to the pants, a pair of cool boots, and a desire to mix drinks made for a great night for me. I didn't really get to interact with H much though surprisingly, she was always such a busy hostess, and I had booze to disseminate to the masses. When I got to Santa Cruz though, tragedy struck.

We didn't have nearly enough alcohol.…

Parking on my street is a bit of a trick. I'm fully relocated now, have a stocked fridge, a game center that I can see from my bed, all I really miss is a bit of wallspace, but I do like how there isn't a lot of floor to muck up, so my room is unable to get terribly messy. Anywho, about the parking situation. The new house is located on a one way street, with a two car driveway (parking in the garage just isn't happening). Now, if you ignore Kryn's motorcycle, there are three vehicles to park, and only two parking places. One our neighbors has approximately a houjillion cars as well, taking up a good majority of the street around our house as well. The end result of this of course is that if you can't snag a driveway spot, you are going to be four or five houses down. This isn't too terribly bad, but at eleven or midnight, it is a bit more worrisome. It seems safe enough anyway, but I haven't been here long enough to really know. Erin's apartment has a really good policy that I liked, though I am certain it wouldn't work here. At their place, the first person takes a street spot (since they are available close to the house) and then that leaves the driveway open late at night when there is no more street parking. However, everyone seems to want a driveway spot (not that I blame them) and changing the mentality is a battle I really don't want to fight. I've found it bet to pick and choose my battles, speaking up only when it is something that is a major concern. I intended to write a bit more about the house and about catching up on school, but I was distracted by the power of Nintendo in Something Awful's weekly Photoshop contest.

Oh and my spell check reccomended "Unintended" for the word "Nintendo".…

It's a clever name for the new house, handed to me by Sarah in one of our many conversations. See, at first it was a house, and then it was a crib. We couldn't call it a "cirznibble" because it wasn't worthy of the "nibble", and had no place for Z's. It also had electronics, and so it went bizneep as well; shortened to "beep" for the same reasons. And so now officially the new house is the criznibble that goes bizneep. And yes, if you were wondering, it is also very "bling bling". It's been a long four days, moving everything from one location to another, and the process isn't one I look forward to doing again any time soon. It's all sort of a blur now, but here is the short Reader's Digest version of the events that transpired.

Thursday: Moved a bunch of boxes with the help of Jennifer, discovered my wall jack wasn't terminated, and that I would need to do that myself. I was a bit torqued, especially on the heels of the apartment inspection which went less than well. I spent the evening bitching to nobody in particular while helping Jake and Charles yank down the wall. By the time it got too late for me to stand, I had hardly moved anything, didn't assemble anything, and accomplished almost nothing. I think I fell asleep about four in the morning.…

Just finished taking my MATH 370 midterm. I did it on no breakfast (no dinner), and 3 bites of burrito for lunch the day before. Needless to say, my brain feels all liquidy as if I can actually feel it sloshing around in my brain. Wait, no, that kinda feels cool.

The midterm itself wasn't hard persay, unless you were like me and refused to use truth tables for any of the problems (those of you familiar with discrete mathematics I am sure are used to those). So I spent the hour and a half proving things from Axioms (for example: p ­/ ¬p ~ true). Now, if any of this made sense to you, or brought back horrible flashbacks, I'm sorry. Kind of.…

It's not that I am terribly down, but more that I see nothing worth being terribly up about. It's been a busy past few days, especially with moving. OfficeMax has still failed to email me and let me know my order is being shipped, which is a minor annoyance. Hopefully it will arrive today, but by now I am starting to wonder. Charles (admin of felocity.org and everything else on that server) is moving in to replace Eric, who moved out really fast. This has also made cooking a fun challenge, with no microwave and limited cookware. I think I can manage up until this weekend though.

If you are one of the many who read the LJ version, you may have also noticed the new shiny icon(s). These were courtesy of H, so very yay!…

Got the permalink function working (so trackback auto-detection should be easier) and even got the cams online. With what little time was left in the day, I brought the Felocity Photos site up to the new layout. So now everything looks sexy and good. Speaking of new and exciting things, I am sure all of you read Honeybee Manor if not, you probably should. She's about as funny as a brick. You know, a brick with a smile. The brick also has a party favor.

I have spent the day (and a good portion of yesterday) making sweet love to my GBA and indulging in turn-based strategy. It's a bad addiction, and really time consuming. On the positive side, there is nothing better to do while waiting on a mechanic to fix your car or if your power is out all morning because the cable company can't seem to drill in a straight line. Additionally, my brother just made his way back from Humboldt, and is kicking it back in Sacto for a day or two as well. There is indeed a special reason for this. Barbecue and booze! Though, I must admit I know not the order. Anyway, for any of you who are in the area or just in Northern CA and feel like taking advantage of the food part of things:…

My body feels wrecked, tired, and worn out from a good 5+ hours of driving. It was worth it though. This last weekend was Ani-Magic 2003, or as I like to call it: my Birthday during the convention and trying to have as few people know as possible. So, let's do that day by day we do so well! Thursday: Long car, wrong hotel, early late night Because of some stuff going on with my new house, I had to skip my 2-4 capstone class. I needed to sign some papers, buy a black paint pen for touchup on my claws (I think Mel and Heather used the last of my other one doing their Escaflowne cats from last year), and make sure I packed everything I would need. I was at Chris' by about 4:30 or so, which gave him time to pack up and then we waited. And then we waited some more. By the time about 5:00 rolled around, I was starting to wonder where C and H were, who were joining us from the northern lands of Santa Cruz. They ended up past the school and down in Monterey, but with a new set of directions, they made it okay, and we were ready to pick up Sheyne and hit the road. We kept pace with H's car through the messy interchanges that take someone from highway 1 to highway 5 (the omgomgIamgoingtoSoCal freeway), and then we went at our own pace, stopping at Kettleman City for gas.

We got to Lancaster about 1:30 in the morning or so, and tried to check in to the wrong hotel. I swore I made the reservations for Inn of Lancaster, but apparently, I didn't. So we were back at the Desert Inn. On the plus side, we will never have to be there again. We settled in, unpacked, and called it a night. Sheyne and everyone belted out Happy Birthday in the car at midnight, while driving through the first part of the Grapevine to hwy 138.…