The change of month caught me off-guard, like it seems to do every
time, and once again I almost started typing a new entry into the old file
before realizing I had to go through the rigmarole of creating a new
month, updating my calendar page, and so on. Today is April Fool's Day,
and already I've been taken in by one prematurely posted Slashdot story,
about a version of QT that could run on a text console, which was
just believable enough that I tried downloading it, but realized
it couldn't be real when 1) it was only a meg and a half or so, and 2) the
only actual source code in the tarball was (roughly) cout <<
"Happy April fools".
On Saturday I rode home with my mom and her new husband, sleeping almost the entire way. Over the weekend I accomplished roughly nothing. I didn't even play Final Fantasy 9, but killed a ton of time on Super Mario World and Master of Orion II. I suppose the fact that it's been so long without a decent break where I felt like I could catch a breath of fresh air and really not worry about getting stuff done has taken its toll on my ability to focus when cut loose. I did manage to regrade a couple of project 2's, answer some questions, and get a very very vague start on project 3's. I also did a fair bit of work organizing my MP3s (and oggs and flacs and ITs).
All the people on my LiveJournal friends list seem to have freaked out, or at least started writing things that make absolutely no sense to me. I'm realizing that it may be the latter and that the problem may be lack of context. I don't deal with Ed or Priya nearly as often as I'd like to (although I've been making a conscious effort with Ed at least to increase the time we spend communicating) and Alison - well, after the number of times we've re-initiated contact, fallen out again, etc., I'm guessing (and this is only speculation) that she's finally given up on the whole thing.
I can't blame her for so doing, and I actually think it's fairly reasonable. However, there's something weird going on here. She knows I still read her LiveJournal, and I know she still reads this page. Yet neither one of us actually talks to the other. It just makes me think how only a few decades ago, it wasn't terribly likely for two people to both follow one another's lives without actually being in contact with one another. That, in turn, makes me appreciate why some people don't want to have online journals (and I'm not talking about people who don't have computers or Internet access, or can't spare the time). I can't revoke this page - there are people archiving the entire Web, and I know for a fact that my page is archived there - I've actually gone and retrieved old versions of it. Everything that I say here, that I say on Usenet (and cmu.misc.market counts as Usenet), that I say in any public forum, will be and largely already is archived forever. Even email isn't necessarily safe - once I let it leave my control, it's up to other people whether it stays a secret or not, and other people's psyches, especially years down the road, are far from my ability to fathom.
I guess this is turning into sort of a rant, and not a very interesting one at that. And I still have more to write about meta-topics, but I'll save that for another post so as to avoid boring everyone. But before I close this post, I have a request. Could everyone who reads this piece of text please send me an email at kenn@cmu.edu? Even if I already know you read this page, and you already know I know, and so on, I'd appreciate the email. It doesn't have to actually say anything, although it would be nice if it included your name. Obviously I can't force you to do this, but hey, if it's worth reading my page at all, it's worth taking fifteen seconds to send me email, right? Feel free to actually include interesting content in your email if you want to also. :-) Just be sure to indicate unambiguously that it's a response to this request. Thanks in advance to everyone who responds.
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I'm at Ed's house at the moment. Before I go on with more stuff, I should mention that only two people have responded to my request below to send me an email if you read this page (thanks, you two!). So, if you read this page, send me an email. You can now use kenn@nilmop.com to email me as well as any other address you might have - and I expect this one to be permanent. Ed and I gave up on the email server he was using and switched to the one I'm also using (since I know it actually works :-) and he managed to configure it properly. Owning my own domain is just so cool.
Monday evening into Tuesday I spent at Charlie's. I drank almost a whole two-liter bottle of the Stewarts analog of Mountain Dew, not specificaly to stay awake but because it was what was there to drink. I spent a fair bit of time trying to fix Charlie's internet connection, and managed to figure out what was wrong, but not how to fix it (the TCP subsystem of Windows 98 seems to be borked). We had interesting conversations about a wide variety of things, largely philosophy and practical psychology (such as how I'm managing my stress this semester). On Tuesday my father picked me up there and I had an appointment with my therapist. At some point around then, I realized that the animosity which I once subconsciously bore towards Charlie due to thinking of him as a threat to my superiority seems to have completely vanished.
Tuesday evening, I played Final Fantasy 9. No, I didn't beat it, but I did pass another dungeon. Let me describe the setup I went through to get sound that wouldn't keep my father awake: I passed the sound output of my Playstation into the back of my monitor, which has built-in speakers (I brought it home since I got another one at school that's better anyway). I then plugged my headphones into the front of the monitor. Unfortunately, the monitor doesn't like being on without a video signal, so I needed to find a source. That source was Robert Jr., but it would have been very irritating to have something constantly on the screen (since the room was entirely dark except for the TV), so I created an all-black image in Paint, opened it in Irfanview, and made it full-screen. Then I turned the brightness and contrast on the monitor down since it was still visibly illuminated. Now how's that for a process to go through just to get sound on my headphones? :-)
I've slept about nine hours in the past two days, which isn't little enough that I can reasonably ask for pity for it, but is little enough that I'm feeling it. I don't really have anything to do tonight, so I suppose it's okay. My opthamologist appointment was very quick; she gave me a slightly stronger prescription at my request, but I think I'm just going to wait until August to get new glasses, as it's not worth paying the extra money when in August I get a pair for free from my insurance.
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I beat Final Fantasy 9.
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I'm torn between which Final Fantasy is now my favorite - 6 or 9. I never really looked back and compared 6, 7, and 8, and I'll probably never be fully objective about 4 since it was my first RPG, but now that I do, the more I think about it, 7 was ultimately a great concept but a flawed execution, and 8 never managed to really draw me in. 9 and 6 both have the old-school factor going for them. 6 has that rosy glow from having played it over and over so many years ago... but at the same time, and I recognize this isn't objective, the experience of Final Fantasy 9 is for me forever bound up with with the time in my life when I played it, the fact that I was overcoming something to do so, the very real sense of achievement I got from finishing the game. Oh, and the ending was long. (That's not a complaint!) Square certainly put in all the flourishes for what I believe was their last Playstation game (although not my last Playstation game of theirs; I start Chrono Cross next).
I suppose gushing about Final Fantasy 9 is less than productive, but I can't resist mentioning the ludicrous amount of hidden stuff that I discovered in FAQs after beating the game - enough that long-term I'm going to have to put replaying it into my queue, not necessarily so that I can get everything (that may well be almost impossible) but so I can get the really important stuff that I missed.
Okay, since it's been so long since I did a real update and if I look back at this period of time years from now it will seem like a black hole, I'll try to do that. I was up all Saturday night into Sunday morning, first beating Final Fantasy 9 and then watching The X-Files. (By the way, Charlie, what on earth were you talking about when you said you beat FF9 "accidentally"? I'd think that the "teleport" option, present only on the very last save point, would have clued you in... not to mention that it was very obvious to me given the pacing of the final dungeon anyway.) I did finally catch up on The X-Files, but then managed to get behind again on Sunday evening (although only one episode this time, so I'm going to try to watch it some time this week).
Sunday was spent in travel; I drove the first couple of hours after a couple of hours of sleep, slept a few hours in the car, and we arrived quite early - I think around 16:30. I taped my TV shows so that Mark, my father and I could go out to a Thai restaurant for dinner.
On Monday at the KGB meeting, the opportunity to be nominated for President by Ed was tempting enough to convince me to actually pay my membership dues. :-) Afterwards I actually helped out a little with KGB's booth, first holding stuff when Ed was cutting it and handing screws to people who were screwing them in, then helping carry one of the large curved wall sections from KGB's cage in Margaret Morrison to the other one in Gesling Stadium. It actually wasn't too bad, although it certainly would eat up a lot of time if I tried to do it on a regular basis.
Last evening we (Greg and the OS TAs) had a meeting to establish grading criteria for the kernel, so now we can get going on that. It's going to be a ton of work, and I'm going to have to try to squeeze it in edgewise between everything else. I'm not very happy with my last couple of Algo grades (nor do I really know why they're lower than the previous ones), but I supppose I'll just have to deal and try to do better next time.
I've been re-reripping my FF8 and FF9 soundtracks and been pleasantly surprised so far at the lack of actual giving up by the ripper, so hopefully I got a clean copy without the cracks and pops that minor scratches on the CDs often cause... this time I'm backing them up in FLAC, so hopefully I'll be able to keep around good copies long-term. As I write this I'm listening to the FF9 soundtrack, partly to check for those cracks and pops (if they are there, I want to know, so I can try to acquire copies that haven't been screwed up somehow), and I'm realizing just how much I like it... yes, the themes are reused perhaps even a bit too much, but I really like when musical themes ("leitmotifs", anyone?) are used throughout the game. Quite a masterful performance by Nobuo Uematsu, one could almost say it's restored my faith in him (not that I ever really lost it)... I'll have to get the Final Fantasy 10 soundtrack (as well as a Playstation 2 and the actual game!) one of these days.
Well, this isn't a rant insofar as everything I've written has had a clear point, but it is nevertheless becoming a very long update, so I'll resolve to write again after a shorter lapse of time than I have been, and close this entry.
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So, I guess it's time to update again. Not much really has been happening lately, which I suppose partly excuses the infrequency with which I've been updating. The weather lately has been disgustingly humid, and although the temperature has varied, I've determined that it's really the humidity that gets to me. I've been sleeping far too long and when I am awake, my eyes are sort of blurry and don't want to focus and I can barely think straight at all. I haven't gotten a significant amount of work done in the past week even though I have work to do for every single one of my six classes (OS counts as a class, if not two...) I can't tell for sure that the weather is responsible, but it certainly feels like it. I constantly feel out of it.
Unlike my last update, I really can't think of much of anything at all to write about this time (possibly due to the aforementioned mental fuzziness). I'm thinking about how nice it will be to have my own room next year, not necessarily to isolate myself but so that I can retreat from social contact and the experience of constantly having people around, which I am finding increasingly unpleasant. It's just another of those things which is making it harder for me to sit down and focus for a while. I guess there was one bright spot: of the three Algo problems which my group has to present on Wednesday, I managed to find solutions to two of them relatively quickly. Hopefully I've done enough work on that and Mark and Nithin can figure out the remaining problem. I don't really feel like getting philosophical at the moment either, so I guess that's it for now.
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I have noticed a disturbing trend in my behavior. Specifically, it seems that now when I want to make an entry on this page, I often don't do it, because it seems like too much work. As a matter of fact, anything that's related to a computer often seems like too much work lately - even as I have been spending inordinate and uncalled-for amounts of time doing nothing useful on computers.
Today I managed to get almost nothing done, because my eyes don't seem to want to focus. Or maybe it's not that they won't focus, but merely that my head hurts a little and their resolution somehow seems decreased... I can't explain it. It seems to apply more to computer monitors (both CRT and LCD) than to physical objects. That may be related to being an emissive rather than a reflective light source. Oh well, I suppose I'll just have to hope it goes away.
There is something which I must note with sadness. It appears that Final Fantasy 9 is the last Final Fantasy game. Now, I know that Final Fantasy 10 is already out, and Final Fantasy 11 is on the way, so allow me to explain. I learned a short while ago that the score to Final Fantasy 10 doesn't include the Final Fantasy Theme. This might seem small and esoteric, but to me it's a very big deal.
Now, you might say that Final Fantasy 2 (the Japanese one, not the US one) also did not include the Final Fantasy Theme. My response to that would be that honestly, I'm not sure whether I'd consider it a Final Fantasy game, since I haven't played it; and furthermore, we can't turn back the clock. But leaving it out of Final Fantasy 10 is just a slap in the face. I may still play the game, and I'm glad to know beforehand, because I would have been crushed to have beaten the game, expecting the Final Fantasy Theme and not hearing it. But still, I think that with Final Fantasy 9, a little bit of the innocent magic of the series has died. Oh well, if I do consider Final Fantasy 9 the last of the series, it sure went out with a bang. I'm going to need to replay it some time. It really is spectacular.
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Damn. A whole week without an update. Actually, a day more than a week. That's too long.
Honestly, that's not just too long, that's so long that I can't even remember some of the stuff that I've done since my last update. But I can only write about what I can remember, so I'll do that.
I've finally gotten back into the curve of doing work again. Graphics is what did it. I totally forgot about my raytracer and then heard on Sunday that it was due on Tuesday. Graphics has a very unforgiving late policy. I was officially screwed. So, I asked for an extension, in email to the professor and on the course bboard. One girl I don't know and Mark both followed up to my message expressing their interest in an extension as well. The extension was granted, for two days. The ray tracer was due about 26 hours ago.
I worked my ass off. I probably did as much work last semester during the weeks before the kernel and filesystem were due, but not much more. The most incredible thing about it was that I did all of the work on my own. Well, that's not 100% accurate - I would ask people if I had questions sometimes - but all of the code was written by me. In O'Caml. In a grand total of about 100 hours (that's total hours, including sleeping time, eating time, at least a little bit of attendance at classes, etc.). I am quite proud of that accomplishment.
Now I'm doing kernel reviews. I had two on Thursday, one yesterday, and I have four more (all the rest of them) tomorrow. That's going to be a bitch, but the good thing is that the tests we have for the kernel are pretty easy to conduct, and I can go over the design decisions in the review rather than have to extract them from the code. Then I just need to compile all the information and calculate the scores. It's really not so bad.
I didn't get many questions during office hours today (well, yesterday now). I did briefly go the the CS picnic. They didn't have any veggie burgers left, so I ate a bunch of potato salad. That was okay.
Oh, right, KGB elections were on Monday. Needless to say, I didn't win anything (although I had been nominated, jokingly, for a couple of positions). Ed won Corresponding Secretary, so I guess that's good. I sort of want to participate in some of the KGB events, and sort of think that the reason I haven't is that I've had so much to do this semester, but at the same time I wonder whether I'm just trying to force things on myself. Oh yeah, Laura Marsh is a cool person, and I think she'll finally remember my name now. She was the president of KGB this year and will be the Sergeant-at-Arms next year (needless to say this was a voluntary change of position and her election as even Sergeant-at-Arms wasn't assured, although I voted for her). We were walking the same way after the meeting and we talked for a while while she was waiting for the bus. (How often does one get to use the word "while" twice in a row in a grammatical English sentence?)
Also on Monday was OLR. (My OLR start time was actually during the KGB meeting. Thank God for wireless Ethernet.) I registered for Video Game Programming (yay!), Compilers, Continental Philosophy with Cavalier (which fulfills a History of Philosophy requirement, plus I know from past experience that Cavalier is a good professor) and some other philosophy course which fulfills the ethics-type requirement for Philosophy. I guess I don't seem too enthusiastic about that last one since I can't even remember its name, but I still have hopes for it not to suck. :-)
I guess that more or less catches me up with the present day. Now I just need to force myself to update more often. Oh, I realized that I could easily spend several thousand dollars on individual items none of which cost more than a few hundred dollars each and all of which I badly want. I guess I'll have to ration my money somehow. Sigh.
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Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Sat Apr 27 03:46:36 2002