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Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
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12:21 am - San Miguel de Allende: días uno y dos
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I woke up at 8am Saturday morning, and as of this writing, I still haven’t really gotten any sleep. (The room we’re staying in has Wi-fi, but my ancient laptop does not, so I’m writing this in advance of posting it.)
Saturday night, I went to one last EB/WotC reunion gaming night, and didn’t get home until nearly 2am. With a 6am international flight, it more or less wasn’t even worth trying to sleep. Unfortunately on the flight to Mexico City, the kid behind me kept kicking my seat (or something), preventing me from getting any substantive sleep. The 4-hour car ride to San Miguel was also not particularly restful.
The town itself seems nice, though driving through the maze of hilly, cobblestone, one-way streets would be too much for me, I think. Shortly after getting to our room (with no time for a shower or nap) I was whisked away to a “Bark Mitzvah” party; a 13th birthday party for a dog. I know I’m pretty sleep-deprived, but that did actually happen. Nearly everyone there was my father’s age or older, so someone made a point of specifically inviting a young couple so that I’d have someone to talk to. Apparently, there are only 5 (adult) Americans in San Miguel under the age of 35, so I’ll be expected to hang out with them and attend some random stranger’s theme birthday party. Whatever. We’ll see how that goes, I guess. Now I need to collapse since the past 72 hours have held about 12 hours of sleep.
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ok, I thought I was going to post the above part before now, but I guess not. Day 2 involved a lot of walking... at 7000 feet of altitude. It actually isn’t too bad. I can feel myself struggling to breathe slightly harder than usual, but I also have to walk a little slower so I don’t get far ahead of my Dad. The weather is nicer than I was expecting: although it gets hot around midday, the low humidity cools everything off nicely later in the evening. I wish I’d brought more pairs of long pants to be honest.
Not too much to report today; mostly we walked around and looked at some shops and some art gallery type places. And found a bar to watch the Italy vs Paraguay match. Hopefully Thursday’s France vs Mexico match will have more audience enthusiasm behind it. Anyways, I should go to bed because I have every reason to suspect that I will once again be woken up early by roosters crowing.
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| Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
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12:45 am - Most National Soccer Teams have boring nicknames...
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| Tuesday, June 8th, 2010
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8:09 pm - Buried Treasures...
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Updated as I find more interesting things...
- X-Rays from when I broke my hand - January '99
- A 17"x11" Poster for the production of The Crucible that I was in - May '98
- A plastic bag saying "Get Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo at Software, Etc" - '93
- My old collection of Magic card wrappers - '94 onward
- Old name badges from the Maryland Science Center ('94) and Maryland Renaissance Festival ('95, '97)
- A $10 bill from 1934
- An EBGames Store Manager Handbook from 2004 and a Procedure Manual from 2005
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| Sunday, May 30th, 2010
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5:36 pm - World Cup 2010
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Who I'm rooting for...
 United States |
duh |
 France |
I'm still a bit miffed about Thierry Henry's handball at Ireland's expense, and I have my doubts about how far they can progress. But I still love 'em. |
 Spain |
Euro 2008 made me a believer, and they have a young talented squad that is incredibly fun to watch. I could easily see Spain vs Brazil in the Semi-Finals. |
 Netherlands |
Because I like the color Orange. And their names are fun to say: "van de Vaart! Ooijer! Huntelaar!" |
 Argentina |
They have the best player in the world (Lionel Messi) and a batshit insane head coach (Diego Maradona). I have no idea how well they'll do, but it should be fun to watch. |
 Ivory Coast |
Of the African teams, these guys may be the best. Also, I dislike every other team in their group (Brazil, Portugal, North Korea). |
 South Africa |
It'll be sad if South Africa is the first World Cup host nation to be eliminated at the group stage. Plus their nickname is "Bafana Bafana" which is fun to say! :) |
Who I'm rooting against...
 Italy |
I'm still annoyed at them for World Cup '94, not to mention WC2006! They have a pretty easy group, but I hope Slovakia and/or New Zealand manage to at least hold them to a draw. |
 Portugal |
Cristiano Ronaldo, aka CR9® (yes, he trademarked that) is a punk and needs to learn some humility. Also, the "Battle of Nuremberg" |
 Brazil |
Nothing personal, they just win too much. At least they are fun to watch, unlike the Italians. |
 England |
Normally, I'm ok with England, but USA & England are in the same group and I want us to advance at their expense. Yes, this means I will be cheering for Algeria and Slovenia. |
Any match not involving one of the above teams, I probably don't have strong feelings about. And in case it isn't clear, the higher on the table, the more strongly I root for/against the listed team. e.g. I'll root for Brazil over Portugal when they play on June 25th (unless there's something wacky where a draw or something would eliminate both of them).
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| Thursday, May 27th, 2010
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4:40 pm
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Some grades were just posted, and I got an 'A' in Algorithms. That was the only class I needed to graduate, so now I am actually done*! A grade for the Games Group Project class has not yet been posted, but there's no reason I should get anything less than an 'A' there, too.
* - I haven't forgotten about my 'I' in Independent Study, but I don't need the course and can keep working on it for the fun of it.
Edit: Last grade has been posted, no surprise that Slug got me an 'A'.
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| Tuesday, May 25th, 2010
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2:12 am - I graduated today
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(Technically yesterday because it's after midnight when I started typing this up.)
For a variety of reasons, I hadn't graduated anything since kindergarten, so I guess this was a long time overdue (especially considering how many years I "lost" to working retail). I wasn't even sure what to expect and was actually nervous before getting there! Intellectually, I knew this was of course silly, and I relaxed once I got there and saw the hundreds of other candidates. The few acquaintances I did make at my time at UMBC were generally all Computer Science majors, but I majored in Math and had to stand a ways away. There were a couple guys there that I knew however, and we traded war stories. "Hey, do you remember really hard math class X?" "Oh yeah, and really hard math class Y was so brutal!"
Majors were all sorted alphabetically by College, with the "College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences" going first (and being more than half of all graduating seniors). As part of the "College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences", the few "Mathematics and Statistics" majors were situated between the similarly rare Chemistry and Physics; there were only a few dozen of us combined. Waiting through all those Liberal Arts graduations got us a little restless and we started making snarky comments. "Magna Cum Laude in Dance?! How hard can that be?" "I wish they'd hurry up and get to those of us that will actually have jobs." Yeah, we were mean.
Eventually, after waiting through about 100 Biology Majors, I finally got to walk across the stage. I guess I don't really have much to say about that part; I handed my name card to the guy to read, walked across the stage, shook hands, forgot the video camera was there and thus ignored it, and then walked back to sit back down. The Commencement ceremony was mostly over by that point, and we just had to wait through the "College of Engineering and Information Technology", "Erickson School of Aging Studies", and "School of Social Work".
After the whole thing was over, there was apparently no plan whatsoever for where people were supposed to go and how students were supposed to meet up with their families. The whole ceremony prior had been pretty well organized and ran swiftly considering how many people were in attendance, but it dissolved to mass confusion as several thousand people all wandered around the building with cell phones in hand, trying to locate missing family members. I'm pretty sure my father & I both quickly decided trying to find each other would be a lost cause since he doesn't have a cell phone. I have to take his word for it that he actually showed up because I was unable to locate him in the audience anywhere.
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| Thursday, May 20th, 2010
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5:09 pm - 2 months later...
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I don't think I'm going to try to recap the past 2 months, but I haven't figured out what I'm going to say as I type this, so we'll see where I end up. </run-on>
Today I got my grades for my last 2 projects in Scripting Languages, which, as expected, enable me to skip the final exam. The way this semester has gone, I probably could have taken the class for normal grading and inched up my GPA another 0.02, but I regretted doing that last Fall with Computer Graphics. Speaking of Computer Graphics, today I also saw the grade switch from an 'Incomplete' to an 'A', so that's nice.
The only actual exam I had to take this semester was for Algorithms, and I really don't have a good sense of how I did. The exam was worth 50% of the total grade for the class and only had 4 problems, so botching 1 question is more than a full letter grade reduction! I'm pretty sure I got at least a 'B' on the final, and by extension, the class, but I feel I deserve an 'A' and will be annoyed otherwise.
My Games class didn't have a final exam, but we were invited to the Senior Art Show and we won an award for Best Game (or something, I'm not sure). An 'A' in this class was pretty much a foregone conclusion from as soon as I knew I'd be able to use Flash. (The game website if anyone reading this hasn't looked at it recently or at all.)
My last class of this semester will be another Incomplete that I work on over the Summer. Originally an "Undergraduate Research" class, I will instead be developing course materials for a new course called "Computation, Complexity, and Emergence". This will be the textbook. Considering I've been interested in Fractals and Chaos Theory for a long time (I think even before the movie Jurassic Park came out), I'm not worried about my enthusiasm waning.
So now the next tasks on my docket are to renew my Passport for a trip to Mexico, and find an apartment in San Francisco. It certainly doesn't look to be a boring Summer (not to mention the World Cup, about which I'll try to write something up soon)....
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| Thursday, March 18th, 2010
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5:32 pm
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My poor kitty is still traumatized.
Yesterday afternoon, a maintenance guy from the apartment complex came by for a quick look around. When he knocked on the door, Zizou got freaked out and started to run towards my room. Sweetums, unfortunately, decided to hide under a desk in the living room. Not believing that to be an adequate hiding spot, I reached down to try to pull her out. She freaked out, fuffed her tail, and started growling and hissing at me. She escaped from me and I had to answer the door to ask if he could give me a minute (I had been about to take a shower, so wasn't wearing a shirt, which may have helped). By this time, Zizou is starting to freak out and decided that maybe Sweetums knew where to hide. As I try to chase Sweetums around the apartment, Zizou excitedly follows and further agitates Sweetums, eliciting a full volume cat yowl the like of which I had not heard from either cat before. Eventually, I catch and carry Sweetums to my room, while herding Zizou and being clawed, hissed at, and bitten (weakly, no damage).
She still hasn't forgiven me. Hours later that evening, she was hiding next to my computer, hissing at my feet. This morning she woke me up at 5:30am, loudly purring and kneading my bed blanket, but when I tried to carry her out to the kitchen to eat, she got all upset again. She correctly doesn't seem willing to blame my roommate for any of this, but is now perfectly willing to hiss at the other cat if Zizou gets too close.
She's going to hate it when we move to San Francisco. (I got the job!)
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| Friday, March 5th, 2010
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1:12 am
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My apartment complex does not seem to have an emergency contact phone number.
Thus, my roommate & I have decided to turn off the main circuit breaker overnight so we don't have to worry about dying in an electrical fire in our sleep. An outlet in his room has decided to start sparking and I think the surge protector that is still plugged in is fused to the outlet because neither of us can pry it out. Of course we turned off the breaker before trying.
Update: As of 9:44am, the Electrician has been by, and the problem has been fixed.
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| Friday, February 26th, 2010
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9:49 pm
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It's been 3 weeks now, and the time estimate they gave was 1-1½ weeks. I think I need to contact them to ask when I might hear something....
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| Sunday, February 21st, 2010
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12:41 pm
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Talking to a friend online last night, I realized a fundamental difference between the Summer and Winter Olympics: speed. The highest (horizontal) speeds reached at the Summer Games are in the cycling events, but those are long races that take over 30 minutes to complete. Top Speedskaters exceed 25 mph, Skiers can hit 60 mph, and Bobsleds regularly top 90 mph. By contrast, Michael Phelps swims at less than 5 mph, and Usain Bolt ran at a 23 mph pace, but only for 100 meters.
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| Friday, February 19th, 2010
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8:16 pm
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| Monday, February 15th, 2010
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11:54 am
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Went to Darkon yesterday to fight in the snow. Honestly, I can't remember the last time I had that much fun at a day event. Several guys showed up early with snow shovels to dig out a big snow fort for us to fight over. There was a 2nd, smaller snow fort with paths connecting them, but nothing was stopping anyone from trying to trudge through the snow to attack from a different direction.
Lots of pictures here (not that I'm in any of them).
Unfortunately, I think I did something to my right arm. It felt fine for a few hours after the event, but later in the evening I cracked my elbow joint, and now it hurts. The good news is that by now, it isn't nearly as bad as it was last night.
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| Thursday, February 11th, 2010
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12:57 am - San Francisco: Day 2, 3 & 4
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Saturday morning, we all had a light breakfast at the hotel before heading out for a city tour. It was raining a little bit, and my phone (camera) was running low on charge, so I don't have much to show in the way of pictures. We saw a lot of the touristy sights, nice Victorian architecture, statues, etc. The tour guide told us about the history of the city along the way. We went up to Twin Peaks and also to the Golden Gate Bridge, where we had a nice view of Alcatraz. For lunch, we went to Fisherman's Wharf and we had dessert at Ghirardelli Square. After we returned to the hotel, we said our goodbyes to each other and wished each other luck, as we wondered who among us would get hired or not.
( More... )
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| Wednesday, February 10th, 2010
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1:50 am - San Francisco: Day 0 & 1
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The initial leg of the trip out there was pretty uneventful other than my being pretty nervous in advance of interviewing the following day. But when changing planes in Charlotte, NC, I overheard 2 girls talking about the same company. I introduced myself and we discovered that all 3 of us were applying for Software Engineer positions, and we became curious how many people were being flown in since the odds of 3 on one flight would seem rather low. During the flight, I saw a guy in the row ahead of me with some scribblings that lead me to (correctly!) guess that he was also flying in to interview with us.
( The flight was fine until... )
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| Tuesday, February 9th, 2010
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1:45 pm
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Redeye flight left San Francisco last night at 11pm, got a little bit of sleep before the layover in Detroit. Finally made it to BWI at around 9am, had to take a cab to Mom's house, and they were charging a +25% snow rate. Dug out my car, made it home, very tired by now. Roommate only cleaned kitty litter once since I left last Thursday, and there are lots of fruit flies in the kitchen. ewww. :(
I'm going to take a nap now, but I will have a real report on this whole trip up sometime later, I promise!
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| Sunday, February 7th, 2010
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4:25 am
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After the city tour today, I went to a party in the afternoon. When I found out I was going to be stranded here in San Francisco for at least another day, I ended up staying at the party pretty late. I'm very tired, but since I have a whole day tomorrow with nothing* to do, I'll try to write something up about this whole trip. Also, I was able to make use of someone else's phone charger, so I'm no longer at risk of not having the ability to communicate.
* Yes, duh, of course I'm going to explore the city, but I'm sure my feet will get sore eventually.
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| Friday, February 5th, 2010
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3:08 am
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Finally at San Francisco, in my hotel room, 3 hours later than originally scheduled. Soo tired....
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| Thursday, February 4th, 2010
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11:10 pm - Posted using TxtLJ
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so the weather was too bad in San Francisco so we just landed in San Jose. :(
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12:47 pm - Posted using TxtLJ
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zithuan's journal
Mexico
Uruguay
Nigeria
South Korea
Greece
Algeria
Slovenia
Germany
Australia
Serbia
Ghana
Denmark
Japan
Cameroon
Paraguay
New Zealand
Slovakia
North Korea
Switzerland
Honduras
Chile