2009: A great year

Forget the economy. 2009 served as proof that a recording artist can stay active well beyond anyone's expectations, and even past the point where anyone cares. As proof, I give you the following list of studio (yes, studio) albums that were released this past year.

I feel obligated to post something on Christmas

I'm really surprised today's woot shirt hasn't sold out.

Gursh durnit

I understand the sentiment, but I don't see how they could possibly stuff a "12" into the logo.

Lyricism

Sometimes, I find it frustrating when I'm searching for something about a mostly-instrumental song and the results include song lyrics sites. Other times, it makes me happy.

Trucking along

I'm getting close to done with my work for the semester. The long-dreaded formal methods project is essentially complete, with my paper having been submitted Tuesday night and my presentation for this Monday already 85-90% complete. The project for my graphics class is an almost guaranteed disaster at this point, but it's so far gone that I've given up on worrying about getting it to work and am instead trying to just make it presentable, which actually seems like it won't be that hard. In my networks class, the paper is being handled by the entire group, and I managed to heroically cough up four and a half pages of draft today, very nearly completing the sections that I said I would write.

The problem is that I have about a paragraph and a half left to go, I'm tired, and either my upstairs neighbors or the people living next to them have decided to throw a Loud Student Party. I don't think I've encountered any of these in my time living in Spartan Village. I am very grateful for that fact, and I am saddened that I am now being reminded of why I dislike Loud Student Parties so intensely. There is a constant stream of bass noises coming through the ceiling. There are people half-yelling things indistinctly. And, most irritatingly of all, there are periodic shoutings of, "Woo."

They aren't Ric Flair. They don't have the right to say that. And they certainly don't have the right to interfere with the overtaking of one of the many obstacles between me and my degree.

I hate people when they're not polite...

Exceeding expectations

About a week and a half ago, I decided it was time to really buckle down on school. Since I'm posting here, I obviously haven't done a great job of that, but one thing that stuck is that I haven't cooked anything in a while. Preparing edible food and cleaning up afterward requires at least an hour and a half, and once I start cooking something, I have no choice but to finish. If I get fast food or unfreeze something, I can eat and be done with it.

The problem with this has been that there aren't many convenient fast food places between my apartment and the Engineering Building. The best two are Subway and Woody's Oasis (a Lansing-area Mediterranean chain), and I've eaten enough of them to largely exhaust my taste. Yesterday night, after working on something at the EB until about 6:30 or so, I realized that I would need to grab something from the food court across the street. My options were Subway (overdone), Woody's (overdone), Villa Pizza (consistently awful), and Panda Express.

I hadn't eaten at Panda Express in a while. When I first started going to Michigan State, I didn't have much of a reference point on Chinese food. My parents usually ordered from one place that I never particularly liked, so during my first few years, Panda Express seemed like a convenient and acceptable option. After moving off-campus, though, I started going to better places that were outside walking distance (mostly Golden Wok). Lately, most of the Chinese food that I've have had has been stuff that I've attempted to cook at home. I don't think it's ever turned out particularly well, but it's been palatable at least, and it has the advantage of being cheap to make in quantities that would give me leftovers.

So, yesterday night, as I leaving the Engineering Building, I said to myself, "I'll have Panda Express. It can't be that bad."

Oh, yes, it can.

Allow me to clear this up for you

It's never lupus.

Unabcseptable

I am aware that the primary criterion for bowl selections is how much money the teams will bring in. Therefore, I suppose should have expected the Orange Bowl to snap up Iowa, a school that gets solid fan support in road games. I am a little surprised that the Fiesta Bowl took both TCU and Boise State, however, because they get to pick before the Sugar Bowl and I would expect Cincy to be able to move fans better than either of those schools.

Mostly, though, I'm sad that for a while, it looked like we might get not one, but two chances to see a weak-conference powerhouse go up against a high-end team from the Big Six. Instead, we're going to learn nothing. Maybe someone decided that they didn't want a repeat of last year's Utah-Alabama game. I hate it when my inner cynic's predictions come true.

Also, my blarg now has a description. A few people will know why it's there, and I don't think I mind if everyone else has to guess.

Look! I can be a bowl committee, too!

I don't think I've posted any infuriatingly bad jokes here yet

Sorry, I'm away
From my phone
Guess you'll have to wait
'Til I get home
Please leave a message on the line
And I'll get back to you sometime

First snow

Hi, me.

If you ever find yourself wondering, "When in 2009 did I first wake up in the morning and find snow on the ground?" it was today. Whatever day it is. I think Blogger will automatically tell me that if I click "Publish Post."

The UNC thing

Disclaimer: it's very late, and I've spent most of today and part of tomorrow working on a paper, so this post may not make sense in places.

I'm writing this post because it's clear that MSU's basketball team can't beat UNC. I don't mean "can't" in the theoretical sense here — of course the team could theoretically pull out a win — but MSU just doesn't seem able to get the job done. I think we've lost the last six meetings, if not more. It isn't a case of a simple talent differential: we were supposed to be hopelessly outclassed against Pitt and Louisville in last year's tournament, but we managed to find a way to beat them. We then followed that by getting completely routed in the title game, as I watched the game at a movie theater in west Lansing and ate popcorn despondently. There's something about UNC that always seems to do us in.

After seeing yet another loss unfold tonight, I tried to think of possible reasons why this phenomenon continues to occur. This was what I came up with:

From my notes, v2

In my experience, there are two kinds of class projects: those that have the students apply the concepts from the curriculum to some concrete problem, and those that encourage the students to explore some related subject outside the usual material. Most of my projects as an undergraduate fell into the first category. In graduate school, the latter has ruled the day.

The project for my formal methods class is of the second sort. With my stress level growing as the project due date nears, I have found myself in an awkward position where the time spent in lecture actually seems detrimental to my success in the course. This resulted in the following things being recorded in my notebook today:

---

Macrohard Doors

---

Satan-colored dot
obstructed your progress!
-------------------------
 >Fight    Ham sandwich

---

Yo dawg, we heard you like monitors, so we put a monitor in your monitor, and now you can lock while you lock.

---

I really, really need to graduate.

Venting, addendum

Retrospection is a slippery slope. Part of my trouble is that as it gets closer to Christmas, and I spend time visiting my family and people that I haven't seen very much in the past couple months, I keeping thinking back to how nice it was when I was an undergraduate and I only had maybe one project hanging over my head as the end of the semester approached, and then to how good it felt to finish my last final exam and know that I wouldn't have any more worries for the next few weeks. This thinking is toxic. Every time it hits me, I am prevented from doing any sort of work for at least the next few minutes.

Knowing that this is what it's like to approach the end of a master's program, I'm really glad that I decided not to continue on for a Ph.D.

Also, as a follow up to a previous post, thank you, Bob Stoops!

Venting

The formal methods project that I've been ranting about for weeks is still not going well. I had hoped to set it straight over Thanksgiving break, but I found it to be nearly impossible to visit people and research at the same time. T minus eight days on whether I get this thing done or collapse like the old left front tire on my car.

Also, I've had Parry Gripp's "Smiley Cat" playing in my head near-constantly for the past couple days, and I think that the incongruity between that song and the stress that I'm going through with this project may be physically hurting me.

Blacked out

The Lions won just now, on the last play of the game, and I didn't get to see it because they couldn't sell out Ford Field today. I didn't even get to hear it because the one Lions radio partner that I can pick up in East Lansing decided to carry the MSU basketball game instead.

Yes, I could have bought tickets and seen it in person, but that would have cut into my futile-attempts-at-starting-my-formal-methods-project time.

Update on primarily irrelevant things

• The MSU-PSU game was much more of a blowout than I expected it to be. There's something wrong with the MSU secondary, and it's going to have to be repaired by next season for us to move out of the pile in the middle of the conference. We did put up one half of pretty good defense, though.
• The U of M-OSU game was less of a blowout than I expected it to be. The Rose Bowl will not be pretty.
• Cal did their job and knocked off Stanford for us. I don't think it's possible for the Pac-10 to send more than one team to the BCS at this point. Unfortunately, unless there's some factor that I'm missing, we may still need Oklahoma to do something about Oklahoma State for the BCS to stoop to picking up PSU or Iowa.
• I can't get the Clang static analyzer to work on my laptop, and it's driving me crazy, because it looks like it may be the only free tool that does enough analysis work to be usable as a test subject for my formal methods project, and it's too late now to try to pick up a different project. The abundance of pointer/alias analysis research made me foolishly think that I would easily be able to compare several different algorithms and their usefulness in static analysis, and it is now clear that there is precious little software that actually uses that research to do anything — and no, optimizations don't count. At the beginning of the term, I had reassured myself by saying that I only needed to barely pass my classes to graduate, and now it's looking like I might not even be able to do that. Such is life.

On class

According to either Harmonix or Microsoft, "International Waffle Symposium" is not a, "classy," enough band name for use in Rock Band 2's Xbox Live play. The actual classiness of the name is debatable, but I still find it rather frustrating because I know that when they say a name is, "not classy," they really mean to say that it is, "brutally offensive," and I have no idea what the problem is with that name.

It would help if I knew whom I should blame, but that seems moot given that I am once again out ideas for names (and no, "sickofhavingbandnamesrejectedcapriciously" doesn't fit in the name entry box). That and the schoolwork thing that I've been complaining about for weeks, anyway.

From my notes

In class today, it occurred to me that "Therac" sounds like it should be the name of a philosopher. I'm not sure why. Maybe I parse it as a portmanteau of "Thoreau" and "Dirac" somehow.

Regardless of how I came up with it, consider the following sentence for an example of what I mean: "I believe it was the great John Therac who said, 'Bzzt!'"

Also, the work deluge for this semester has definitely started now.

From the road

License plate frame I saw today, on the way back from the store:

HEY! Christian Businessman
Who are you discipling?

I did not realize that "disciple" could be used as a verb.

Crushed

About once or twice a semester, when I was pursuing my undergraduate degree, enough pending work would accumulate in my classes that I would find myself nearly overcome with a constant feeling of dread, as if it were almost guaranteed that I would fail to accomplish one or more critical tasks and fail my classes as a result. In graduate school, the feeling has come once every month during the beginning of the semester, and then turned into a near-constant paranoia once I get within three or four weeks of the end of the term.

This semester, it has arrived a week early, five weeks before exams start. I am leaving this post as a testament either to my ability to pull through stressful situations, or to the dramatic crash that killed my career before it started.

There will be a few weeks' delay as I determine which one it should be.

Also, I really wish the spasms in my right bicep would stop.

The Roflcopter has its revenge

I don't like that it was predicated on Ricky Stanzi's injury. I don't like the fact that now, unless Texas, Florida, Alabama, Boise State, Oregon, Cincinnati and probably a few other teams all pull a choke job, the Big Ten isn't getting any BCS bids other than the Rose Bowl.

Even so... Roflcats!

72 is less than 74

Wolfmother released a new album a few days ago. I picked up a copy earlier today at Best Buy (curse them and their sale on video games that I don't have time to play) and gave it a listen.

My main complaint with the album has nothing at all to do with the music itself, but rather with how the album is being sold. I had my choice of two different versions. One version came on a single disc, and included twelve tracks. The deluxe edition came on two discs, and included four additional tracks that were mixed into the track order on disc two.

Making a separate version of an album with extra tracks doesn't bother me too much — I've been willing to forgive other bands for doing it before — but the packaging for the deluxe edition is simply baffling. Instead of a jewel case, you get a folded-up cardboard sleeve that I'm pretty sure is going to rot out within ten years. More irritatingly, the sixteen songs included on the deluxe edition only run for a total of just over 72 minutes. A standard CD can hold 74 minutes of content. There's no justifiable reason to split the album up, unless the band that thought the listener might need a break in the middle.

Do not try this at all

So, there's a somewhat well-known urban legend — or at least, one that I've heard mentioned by a few different people — that it is impossible for a human being to consume a gallon of milk in an hour. This legend is usually phrased in the form of a bet, such as, "I'll give you (pittance) dollars if you can drink a gallon of milk in an hour, without throwing up." Especially cruel/miserly people will often attach other stipulations to the bet, such as not being allowed to consume any other foods or liquids during the challenge period, or not being allowed to throw up for another hour or two after the initial time window has expired. The idea is apparently popular enough to have been christened the, "gallon challenge."

From the inbox

Snippet from an e-mail that was sent out to residents of the MSU University Apartments today:

--RAPE CULTURE FILM SERIES--

Join us at Michigan State University for the Rape Culture Film Series in
November. FREE ADMISSION & POPCORN!

*facepalm*

Commercials make me sad

How far is Chris Berman willing to go to trade his dignity for a quick buck?

HE. COULD. GO. ALL. THE. WAY.

I need to learn how to not talk

Background: when I'm nervous, I talk a lot. I do this because if I don't talk, my hands shake uncontrollably.

While at a haunted house last night, I think I may have deeply insulted a clown on a both personal and professional level — entirely unintentionally, mind you — and I feel absolutely terrible about it. I wish there were something that I could do, but going back to the haunted house and trying to apologize to the entire staff as I walk through seems like it would make me even more of a nuisance, and I can't think of any other options.

Honestly, I think the next week or so of my life is going to be completely ruined.

This is a large part of why I don't go out more.

Sweating Bullets

Things I noticed today:

• BloodRayne II doesn't deserve its 2.4 rating on IMDb. It's a bad movie, to be sure — bad acting, bad dialogue, bad cinematography, bad directing, etc. — but I've seen far worse movies with higher ratings. It certainly deserves more than a half-point lead on Santa with Muscles. Trying to step back from all the Uwe Boll hate, and think about what I was really watching, I realized that it was no worse than a typical mid-week made-for-TV movie. Since it was released direct-to-video, I don't see the problem.

One of those things

I'm feeling really stressed right now. My reason for feeling really stressed is that I have a lot of work to get done in the coming week. I'm choosing to deal with this stress by posting on my blog instead of actually taking care of the work that I have to get done in the coming week.

I'm glad we could have this talk.

Really, Norway? Really?

I suppose it isn't fair for me to blame a whole country, but still. Remember when it was a travesty that you could win a Peace Prize for filming yourself giving a PowerPoint presentation? Remember those times? Those were better times.

I know that the most likely explanation is that the Prize committee is trying to use its recognizability to influence global politics, and that through this endorsement, they hope to encourage leaders to at least claim to use diplomacy as the primary instrument of foreign policy. If that is the case, I disagree with what they're doing, but I can understand it. That said, I prefer to think that we, as a species, have come to a point where we indisputably suck at peace, and that the committee just couldn't do any better.

Worse than useless

I try.

I try to make an honest attempt at things that I think I'm capable of doing. I try to avoid doing things that I know I won't be able to handle.

Sometimes, though, I find myself making incredibly stupid mistakes. Sometimes, the stupid mistakes I make involve other people, and wonder if I would have been better off not trying to do anything at all. I would be valueless, I would contribute nothing to the rest of the world, but at the same time, I wonder if that would be better than actively breaking things, like I occasionally do now.

It's a good thing my GPA is high enough to survive the mess I made of my networks class today. I feel bad for the rest of my group, though.

For the sake of posting...

After months of study, I have concluded that the only justifiable reason why Italian restaurants are able to charge as much as they do for chicken parmigiana is that after the meal, they do the dishes. I can't see what else would sustain demand at that price when it's so cheap to make it yourself.

Also, hooray for MSU finally showing some semblance of the form it was supposed to have this season.

Happy 12th Anniversary of The END DAY!

... it's you ...

I had a dream I could strike it rich... But alas... I failed...

I was captured... by some strange people... they put me in a cave... I also saw people from Leaf... They were all being forced to work... But I escaped... And they found me... I cannot move...

Oh, to have tasted Nadare's food again... I... am... eh... aaah... ... ...

Maintenance!

About half an hour ago, I noticed that my living room ceiling was leaking. It was not raining. Also, my apartment is on the ground floor.

I called the apartment's service center and they got a maintenance worker over surprisingly quickly (I estimate it took maybe five minutes). While he was on the way, I went upstairs and took a look at what my neighbors had sitting above my living room ceiling. I was expecting to see a broken fish tank or something of that nature, but instead, I saw a desk. A desk with some papers next to it. The papers didn't look particularly wet.

When the maintenance worker arrived, he looked at the leak, looked puzzled, looked at the dry ceiling in the adjoining bathroom, and then came back out into the living room and looked even more puzzled. After five to ten minutes of the two of us waving flashlights around and acting confused, he said he'd check the history of the apartment and have the main shift come out in the morning to figure it out.

Fortunately, he was smarter than I was, and made a more thorough inspection of my neighbors' apartment. There, he discovered water seeping out under their kitchen wall. Apparently, they had just recently drained the bathtub, and the pressure from the tubful of water was enough to force its way through the drainpipe.

Anticlimactic, but at least there probably doesn't need to be any work done in my apartment. I feel sorry for my neighbors, though.

On an unrelated note, go Lions.

Angry Day comes to a close

I was grumpy for much of today.

First off, my dad is in Maryland, visiting my mom. Nothing wrong with that, but he's also trying to get the wireless connection working on her computer. Because she has Windows 2000, she's at the mercy of the utility that came with the Belkin USB wi-fi dongle we picked up a while back, and things haven't been going well. It doesn't help that my dad has no experience with wi-fi equipment of any sort. So I spent a good amount of time today and yesterday trying to guess how to fix things over the phone, and completely failed.

Soundgarden sounds kinda like Nickelback

Soundgarden obviously has the excuse of being first, but there's a similarity if you listen hard enough. Also, a friend of mine swore today that Kid Rock used to sing for Nickelback, which, apart from the fact that it's not true, makes sense if you imagine his voice pitch-shifted down half an octave or so.

On a completely different subject, I picked up a copy of Lufia & the Fortress of Doom today. It is... unfortunately inferior to Lufia II, or at least the first half hour gave me that impression. I will have to complete the set one day, when I'm feeling less cheap.

Old things are fragile

I have an old bed. It was old when I got it. Before then, it was pretty old when my dad got it. I think it might've been new when my grandfather got it, but I'm not sure. Point is, it's at least sixty or seventy years old.

Yesterday night, as I was crawling into bed (PROTIP: crawling vertically is hard!), I heard something that sounded like a crack widening in a board. It is somewhat concerning that I would immediately leap to such a conclusion based on a brief noise, but at the time, I was more concerned about that fact that my conclusion was correct. After a brief it's-late-and-I-don't-feel-like-thinking-rationally attempt at stuffing some things under the bedframe, in the area of the crack, I finally gave up and decided that my bed was no longer capable of supporting weight.

I think it's fixable. The crack had not yet widened to the point where any wood had fallen off, and it's on the side of one of the legs, so I don't need to worry about realigning anything. I squirted a bunch of wood glue down the crack and put my Awesome Clamp on it. My guess is that when the glue dries, the bed will be stronger than it was before the crack appeared.

What mainly worries me is that the same leg cracked in a different place a couple years ago, and it also happened to do it a little while after I'd moved. Since I'm presumably going to be at least moving into a different apartment after I graduate (and probably to a different state), this is a bad omen for the Bed of Many Generations. On the other hand, I try my hardest not to believe in omens, so maybe it isn't an issue.

The lesson here is that Elmer's changed the design of their wood glue bottles, and if you don't consider that possibility, you'll end up having to ask an employee at ShopRite to find one for you. All I could do to hide my embarrassment was to think to myself, "Shut up, my bed broke and I'm tired."

...and that's how I discovered that the space in the middle of my room is just barely big enough to fit a mattress.

The cycle begins anew

Greetings.

This is my second attempt at a blog. The first attempt ended sometime a couple years ago. I started it actually quite a while ago, back when ads were mandatory on free Blogger accounts. I spent a good month or so tweaking the page layout, and made sure to post whenever something interesting happened to me. After a while, though, I found myself unable to cope with the futility of detailing my life to an uncaring abyss, and my posts devolved into cryptic half-sentences that could not have possibly made sense to anyone else. Finally, after a period of several months where I didn't post at all, I eventually decided that I loathed the entire thing and had Blogger wipe it off the face of everything.

So, hopefully, things will go better this time. Maybe I'll actually tell people that I have a blog, so at least a handful of people will be reading it, or maybe I'll just use it to cultivate spam. We'll see.

Since this is the beginning of my new blog, I feel it would be good to provide some context, so that you'll be better-equipped to understand future posts:

• I am at student a Michigan State University.
• I study computer science.
• I like pancakes.

But enough about me.