Descent Into Maelstrom

MacWorld Again

2007-01-10T19:54:24Z

Yep, I'm here at MacWorld. It is kind of disappointing though. I was expecting some better and more abundant product announcements.

Fun with fashion

2006-10-02T20:36:14Z

Ok, just a quick post, apparently (this is according to Ariana) I am officialy straight since I didn't know the difference between a skirt and a dress and what an oxford shirt is. She has some odd criteria for guys being gay (of which I apparently fit most, but certainly not this one).

As far as school, I finally scored a good grade on a Stats quiz. On the quiz from last Friday I scored 10 out of 10. I think that he miss graded it and gave me a point where he should not have, but I'm certainly not going to point that out. Hoorah!

Ok, I am off to get ready for work. Oh, I get to finally start work on the new Credentials database today (which I have been looking forward to since Jon told me about it last week.

Update...

2006-09-29T05:28:28Z

Ok, so I really haven't posted since the first week of school. Really, I should just post something. Anyways, school is fine, work is awesome, and life is generally doing well in general. I finished creating a program for work that imports/exports addresses from Apple Address Book. The best part about it (besides it working absolutely beautifully) is that I wrote it in applescript using Apple's XCode IDE. My boss has agreed to put that down as another requirement for my position when he flys it next month. He will also make knowledge of OS X Server so long as I can figure it out in time (and he may even include it if I don't and have me bend the truth). The unfortunate part of having to know OS X Server, is that my boss is not letting me have any time to read up on how it works. I still should be able to get the job with out too much of a fight.

For classes, I have been having a lot of homework, but note-taking in classes has been made much simpler due to the laptop I got from work. I have been typing all of my notes and audio recording all of my classes so that I don't have to take word-for-word notes as much. Anyways, I have to get to bed.

Prob&Stats Notes

2006-08-30T18:58:03Z

I'm sitting in HSS304 waiting for my prof to come, so far s/he is five minutes late. Louis from my Physics I course is here. Hopefully I won't be driven insane by him. He's here (the prof).

Right now I am waiting for MSWord to finish processing the audio recordings I made of my last class so that I can type in Word, but it is taking forever (not a good sign). This course will be on BlackBoard. His name is Dr. Michael Maxwell. His office is in Psy401. Hours are from 12 - 1 MW. Email is maxwellmath@hotmail.com (though his email is not reliable since he hardly checks it). *MSWord is still going through its paces and taking up one entire core in my poor computer.* A TI82-89 are all good calculators for this course. *Oh no, Louis is already asking stupid questions. There are generally no stupid questions, but Louis seems to find those few exceptions with a sharpshooters precision.* We should bring text and calculator to class every day. He will put his overhead presentations on BlackBoard (the ones from the previous semester). We will always need to read the text and all of the lecture notes on BlackBoard.

The course will be broken up into a Final, midterm, quizzes, minitab(?) project. Minitab is a piece of software similiar to Excel that is bundled with the book.

On BlackBoard right now are the Course Information section, course documents, and assignments sections. The syllabus is online right now. There is also an assignment online right now as well.

The homework is never turned in, we will only be quizzed on the homework. The problems are 1.1. #1-7 odd and 1.2 1-7, 9,11, and 12.

We will talk about population, sample, variable, data set. Population is a collection of individuals (or individual elements). A sample is a collection of individuals within a population that is significantly smaller than the population as a whole. The homework involves identifying what a sample and population are. A variable is something that can change and here it does not have to be a number. It is a characteristic that will change from individual to individual in a population.

Variables are quantitative and categorical. Quantitative: numerical (numbers must not be labels), arithmetic operations make sense. Categorical: non-numerical. Quantitative variables can be continuous (no gaps in possible values) or discrete (gaps exist).

Goal: inferences must always reflect the entire population. However, even the best samples fail to represent the population exactly. Sampling variation is the tendency for the samples to differ from reality and form different results.

There are two types of sampling: random sampling and convenience sampling. Random: very hard to achieve, think of a jar of marblings mixing them completely and randomly pulling out a handful, "a way in which every sample of same size has equal chance of being chosen." Covenience sampling is what is normally used.

Games and Television

2006-08-21T03:29:25Z

Yay! I bought a new TV today that is HDTV (1080i to be exact). Our old one is finally in its death throes so I figured that it was time to finally give up on it. It was a nice tv while it lasted, but this one will be better. Albeit it is not as good as Greg's, it is nice. Marie is also coming home tonight with a Playstation2 in tow. I happened to buy Lego Star Wars for it when I was in target buying the tv.

As for right now, I am waiting for Marie to come home while I sit in candel light working on my computer. Don't ask me what possessed me to light some candles, I am in a weird mood right now and candels just seemed appropriate. In a few minutes (when Laura is ready) we will go down to my car to finally bring the tv up to the apartment (where it will sit and wait for the old tv to be moved out so that we can put in its proper resting place).

Leopard gone awry

2006-08-16T05:56:53Z

Ok, I finally gave in and had to downgrade my poor laptop from the beta OS10.5 (Leopard) back to OS10.4 (Tiger). It was fun while it lasted, but I finally gave in when I had to load the administrative version of Apple Remote Desktop and it gave me all kinds of errors. 'Tis sad, I was enjoying finding all of the bugs and seeing it work when it ran smoothly. Well, here's to hoping that it will live up to all its potential when it arrives to the public in the Spring (my bet is on MacWorld).

Also, I just read an article this evening that says that the new BootCamp version offers all kinds of functionality to Windows including support for the iSight. I can't wait until I get a chance to load it up this weekend and try it out. The only problem is that I really don't know what program to test the camera out with in Windows. *shrug* I'll figure that out when I get there.

MySpace Fun/Aggrevation

2006-08-13T22:37:45Z

Ok, so I finally convinced myself to signup for MySpace. However, I can't do that. Apparently MySpace does not want to make it that simple for me. My account has already had trouble to the point where I cannot login. I was logged in immediately after I signed up for about ten minutes. I then proceeded to message marie a couple of times and try to add her and Vicki as friends. The messages worked and the adding of friends did not. After five errors, I was kicked off. So then I proceeded to check my email and notice that there was a confirmation link in my email. Clicky-clicky. And well, nothing. So here I am after messaging the MySpace techies trying to get them to fix it only to recieve a response saying that they are "working on it." Well, that was my wonderful introduction to MySpace. I'm off to try and find some real, live humans to interact with.

Geekness

2006-08-12T02:10:18Z

I love being a geek. This week I got to completely enjoy being a geek. How do you ask? I was able to go to a few WWDC (Apple's Developer's Conference) sessions. I think my brain just about melted through the second session. I was overwhelmed by the shear amount of tech stuff and geek talk that was around me. It was so neat to be around so many people that just loved everything about computers. I also managed to install the preview version of the next Apple OS, OS10.5 "Leopard." It is obviously very buggy and is beginning to make me wish that I had not installed it, but nevertheless, I plan to keep it for a little while to see if I can get used to it and so that I can start reporting some of the bugs that I find (so far I have found three blatant bugs).

Beyond that, I have a horrible headache right now which is probably caused by the amount of stress that my boss has been putting me through since Jon was not in the office most of the week to keep him in line and keep him from losing his thin grip on reality. Long story short, we are all working together on developing a database to keep track of credential information for one of our departments. Yesterday he kept having "meetings" with me on this database every five minutes wanting to see my progress. Well, I pretty much got nothing done and wanted to either strangle him or break down crying by the end of the day. I asked Jon when I saw him last night after work to please keep Seanchan busy Friday afternoon so that I might be able to get a little bit of real work done. Well, it was all for naught since we had all (the whole office) had a meeting two minutes after I walked in the door this afternoon (at 2PM) and then immediately after meeting he had me show him what I had accomplished since our last meeting (again nothing) and then he left for the day. Wow. That man needs a hobby (or a real job).

Also, I have decided to atleast attempt to learn Objective-C and Cocoa. It looks really simple and extremely powerful.

Earthquake

2006-08-03T14:35:40Z

I felt my first earthquake last night. It was cool, in a disturbing kind of way. It took me a minute to realize what was going on. That's all, I just wanted to report that I now have been through an earthquake.

New toy

2006-08-02T04:26:57Z

Sweet Jesus, this job gets better by the moment. I now have a new MacBook Pro of my very own so long as I am staff. This thing is more awesome than I could have ever imagined. There are a few quirks to it that I will have to get used to: the keyboard backlight that keeps fading in and out is making me a bit nauscious and the keyboard is a different layout than the one I am used to typing on, so typing is a little more difficult and for some reason the display keeps dimming and lightening up (I think this is because it cannot decide whether it is bright or low-light conditions).

Right now, I am attempting to set this thing up just the way that I want it.

Staff!!!

2006-08-01T02:00:29Z

As of Wednesday, I will be staff (i.e. no longer just a petty student assistant)! This is awesome. One of my first fun things to do as a staff member will be to grab a couple of g3s from the swap shop to make them into servers and or media center machines. If, you'll excuse me while I dance around the room for a minute.

Note to self: buy a bouquet of flowers for Ewa (the lady in charge of all the COE personnel) tomorrow.

Camping

2006-07-06T14:16:41Z

Just a quick update since I haven not posted in a while. I'm going camping with just a few other people this weekend at clear lake. It should be fun. We are going to be bringing lots of food and I'm not entirely sure what we are going to be doing for two whole days there. *shrug* I'll porbably bring a book and a couple of magazines to read. I will mostly be enjoying the sunshine. Also, still no word on my boss upgrading Alex and I to part time staff positions yet. He was out all last week and was out yesterday and will be out today. So, maybe something might start happening tomorrow.

Ok, I'm going to get back to my breakfast before it burns down the apartment.

Staff!!

2006-06-25T15:33:30Z

Ok, this is the third time I have gone after a staff position, but this one looks the most promising. Basically, my boss took Alex and I aside on Friday and told us both that he intends to hire us each as part time staff. Over the summer we would work as half-time staff and half-time student assistants. Then when the semester begins, we would just be half-time staff. The only thing standing in between me and the staff position now is the little requirement of having five years experience. I'm just hoping that this is one instance where my boss can work his magic and force everything through. Plus, I just looked up on the HR website that all staff working atleast half-time get full benefits. However, I have to work for atleast six months before I can get those benefits (and probably longer knowing what some people have gone through to get their benefits).

On another note, I was planning on posting something bad about my boss last week, but now I don't think I will. To sum up what I was going to post, it was a quote from Atlas Shrugged that I found about fighting an indefinite object like some sort of fog that you can only see out of your periferal vision.

And finally, my cousin is here. He is awesome in part because he downloaded a collection of every 3rd and 3.5 edition book and burned them onto two DVDs for me. It is amazing simply because I had no idea that there was this much stuff on D&D.

Economics

2006-06-24T15:31:03Z

To start off, my boss has a philosophy club meeting every thursday during lunch. Basically, it is an excuse for a bunch of IT guys to sit around and b.s. about philosophy. Well, I normally don't join in, but this last Thursday I did. It was rather interesting since they were talking about class differences and somehow I was pulled into the fray and had to explain my capitalistic views.

This got me to thinking that I should put my view of money and value down into writing. I believe that paper money is only given value by the person holding it and that that person can only give it proper value if they have rightfully earned it. An example I use to describe this (since it is rather unclear) is basic sandwich. Personally, if it were a good sandwich, I would pay $3 to $5 for it. How you show that same sandwich to a starving man in a desert and he would likely pay $3,000 to $5,000 for it, if it were to save his life. That same sandwich has a different monetary value using the same currency from each person's perspective.

Come to think of it, I probably should not put this down into writing since I am really beginning to confuse myself. I'll post more about my week later today or tomorrow.

Victorious and Older

2006-06-18T14:15:18Z

Ok, so yesterday was my birthday. It wasn't the most thrilling or exciting of birthdays, but it was rather nice. I went out to dinner with my aunt, grandma, and my aunt's friend, Lynn. I probably wouldn't go back to the restaurant. While the food and service were good, the food was way to expensive for me to justify going back there. However, I didn't have to pay for it, so it was still all around good.

As far as victories: my new internet connection is working and I bought the first pieces of my new desk last night. The internet connection was not working because I thought that my modem was not working. It turned out that I had typed in the user name wrong. Well, anyways it is now working and my connection is faster than it was before. Yay!

Ok, I'm off to have some breakfast.

Sans Music

2006-06-13T03:09:43Z

Ok, so I went to the concert yesterday and it was amazing and completely awesome. Unfortunately, I had to leave a few minutes early since I had to pee really bad. But anyways, I stupidly stuck my iPod in my back pocket (which I normally do), but then I proceeded to sit on it for several hours (it was behind my wallet so I didn't feel it). And as you can probably guess by now, it is broken, or at least the screen is broken. So I have been looking at other mp3 players and I found a really good one that I think I am going to buy to replace it. It is the Sansa e260. Now, if I get the College of Business job, I will get the $230 6GB version, otherwise I will get the 4GB version. This thing looks to be a million times better than my ipod. Just a few of the neat things that it can do that my nano couldn't: play video, listen to/record radio, and it has a built-in voice recorder. Not to mention the fact that it has a much larger capacity than my nano (which was 2GB).

Speaking of the job, when I called John Palme last week he said that I would find out about the job this week. I was kind of hoping that that meant Monday, but apparently not seeing as I have not heard from him and it is 8PM. I know that I probably won't get the job, but it is still making me anxious just thinking about the opportunity.

Read on for my adventures in web design, literature, and academia...

Apparently, every department in the university gets a bunch of money at the end of the year and all of them have to spend it within a span of about two weeks. My department was no exception. So far we have bought roughly 22 new iMacs (and not the bottom of the line iMacs either), a black MacBook, a couple of PDAs, at least a few copies Apple Remote Desktop (for which the unlimited license copies run about $550), two digital camcorders with built in hard drives, 6 wireless lavalier mics, and around $1000 worth of books (and as my boss finished off with when he was talking to the sales rep, "a partridge in a pair tree"). My guess as to the total is about $50000 for my department alone (I mean just the tech support for the college of ed). And that is just the stuff that I know about.

I've been trying to read as much of the books as I can in my free time. I also borrowed one from a co-worker and got a new one in the mail this evening. I really want to get into re-designing the College of Education web site now that I know how easy it is to do all of this. Just reading these books and seeing it done absolutely amazes me. I am shocked that more people are not doing it already.

Ok, I'm off to read until my head explodes and its remnants leave the etching of a beautiful website design on the wall.

Fun with ovens...

2006-06-11T15:48:35Z

Ok, my oven was really gross. As in layers of substances unknown caked onto the sides. So I finally broke down and bought some oven cleaner. I cleaned my oven, and let me tell you, that was really, really gross. Unfortunately, I will have to do it again since I forgot to spray the cleaner on the ceiling of the oven.

Anyways, as for an update as to what I am doing: I am mostly working on reading a few books and trying to get in some overtime at work to make up for the two days I will be missing next week in order to meet my parents in Fort Bragg. I decided that I would need to make up the hours when I realized that I am making $100 a day at my work over the summer. Of course that is before taxes and such, so I am probably really only earning $80 to $90 a day, but still, that's a lot of money. That means that I will roughly make $6400 over the entire summer if I work every single week day possible. Holy Crap! I still wish I could be staff and earning more that that throughout the entire year, but, oh well, I still have a good job that pays decently.

Well, I have to head off so that I can take a shower and go to a concert in golden gate park this afternoon.

A small victory

2006-06-07T14:27:40Z

Not sure how many of you watch election results, but here in California we had an election yesterday. I think that it was a small victory because there were two propositions on the ballot. Each of them were calling for bond money and thankfully both of them have failed. One of them was calling for something like $2 billion to create a new state preschool system that would be available to all four year old children. But they even included a small caveat that they could charge higher income parents if they come to find out that it is costing more than they originally planned for.

Hookie

2006-06-03T01:50:47Z

Wow, my job can be awesome at times. Today, since my boss was out (like he is every Friday), my supervisor let us all go and see x-men 3. The best part is that it was on the clock and paid for. Woo-hoo! I'm not going to explain how it was paid for, though. We actually did stay all the way through the credits, and yes, everyone seeing the movie must stay through the credits. That movie is amazing. I felt kind of guilty when we got back to the office since we were gone for a total of three hours. So I stay until about 5:45 finishing a project even though my boss said we could all go. The unfortunate thing is that my supervisor is now in serious trouble with my boss.

Also, we are all going out to the Marin headlands (some place named Tennessee Valley) to go for a hike tomorrow. Sounds fun.

It's a database!

2006-06-02T02:40:25Z

Wow, my boss can be stubborn. Currently he is having Alex and I learn Filemaker Pro which is a database application. He is also trying to have us learn using a database and a script that he created for a project that we are working on. Unfortunately, his example is seriously wrong. Anyone who has ever worked with any programming or any sort of database would know that there is something seriously wrong with his implementation. To sum it all up, he is trying to hard-code in every possible situation that the end user might want and he is implementing several tables within a database to do it and each of those tables carries the same information that the other tables contain. In essence, he is creating redundant tables. His reasoning: it will take to long to do a find function on a single table. But it is a database! Databases are meant to store data and then perform finds to retrieve that data on the fly. Not to mention the fact that he also has like four or five extra tables to simply load the data when the data input could all be done with one php script and no extra tables. You could even do a bunch of error checking in the php script. Arrrggghhhh!!!!!

And convienently, we are doing all of this in the classrooms while Jon sits in the office doing some other work, so he is not there to defend us (Alex and I).

Seanchan also mentioned that Glenn isn't going to be coming to work in our office over the Summer any more. Now I'm kind of confused/anxious about how the staffing situation is going to work out. Originally it was planned that Glenn and Jeff would each be part time filling in Kamil's position. So maybe my chances might still be open. I'm not going to get my hopes up entirely though.

Anyways, that was a good chunk of my day. I got my haircut after work and it looks pretty good.

Just two more days...

2006-05-23T02:19:35Z

Ok, so I have two finals and a paper due this week. I can make it. That's it. Just two finals and a paper. And the paper is almost done. Right now I am sitting at the dining room table desperately attempting not to procrastinate and to put together a "cheat sheet" for physics. This is so much harder than it should be (partly because I am typing everything). It also isn't helped by the fact that I am overly anxious about whether or not I am going to get the new job. Odds are against me since my competition only has to meet the minimum requirements (since he is already staff at the university, see other posts for a more in depth ~~rant~~explanation).

I've also been looking into getting a new desktop computer if I get the job. If that doesn't jinx me, I don't know what will. But I also plan on getting my little brother the ginormous K'nex thing (read:over five feet tall) for his birthday as well, if I get the job.

I also finished my student loan stuff last night and received an email today saying that it has already been processed and sent to SFSU. Now to just wait for the letter from SFSU asking me how much money I want to take out as a loan.

Finals

2006-05-20T15:01:32Z

I'm done with two out of my four finals: CSC413 (Software Engineering) and PHYS232(Physics II lab). The first one went pretty well. I'm kind of afraid though, because when tests usually seem to go that well it's because I didn't read the questions correctly. The lab final sucked though. I think I was the only one in class that knew how to use the multi-meter to measure a capacitor. But still, we had to measure the inductance of an unknown inductor three different ways (each way was spelled out for us) and each way that I did it, I came up with a completely different answer. *shrug* I've kind of stopped caring about that lab. The lab TA/Professor really sucked. He can't teach worth crap and doesn't seem to care if we learn. He also held an attitude that we were all lowly little students who are simply too stupid and ignorant to understand the high ideals of physics.

As for everything else, I did really well with my job interview. John said that basically my only competition is the one internal candidate left standing. To sum it up, I have to hope that the internal candidate is a complete moron. If he even barely meets the minimum requirements, he must be hired. I am starting to get a little bit nervous though. My worst fear is that I will get the job only to find that I have gotten in over my head.

Ok, I'm off to study endlessly for the next four days.

Potential Job Update

2006-05-17T00:35:56Z

Ok, so I finally was able to get an interview appointment for the Web Coordinator job I have been going after. I'm set for 5:30 tomorrow evening. I'm going to be the first interview candidate I think, so it might good since it should be a little bit more informal seeing as the guy hasn't had practice at this yet. Which brings me to my next bit of good news: the guy that will be doing the interviewing is the same person that I know and the person that told me that I should apply for the job in the first place. He has assured me though that he will have to go with the internal candidates if they meet the requirements (because of some union thing that the school has worked out). I'm seriously anxious about this.

Fun with electromagnetism

2006-05-14T15:25:05Z

I have come up with a wonderful project for me to do over the summer that will do a lot of public good. I'm going to create an emp gun. Why would this be a public good? Because I would then use it to completely disable an alarm in a certain car.

Ok, some background info. There is a mini cooper that is around my apartment and sometimes parked right out front that has an extremely f*ing obnocious alarm. Everytime someone walks by (and sometimes even when there is no one around) it will beep several times. It is kind of like a get the f* away from me before my alarm goes off beeping. Well, last night it was parked out in front of my building in the three hour parking all night long and beeping all night along and waking me up all night long.

Now back to the EMP gun. Once carefully built so that it wouldn't explode in my hands, I would look up diagnostic manuals for mini coopers and figure out exactly where the battery is located. I would then aim the gun at that spot and pull the trigger. The battery would explode, leak battery acid all over the inside of the engine compartment, and nothing else would happen (save for the alarm probably being toasted). I would finally be able to sleep peacefully again.

Social Constructs

2006-05-07T15:47:51Z

I noticed a couple of weeks ago something peculiar in a conversation I overheard. It was basically about some cheap manual for some technical equipment (not really important to know). what I noticed was the way that my lab professor talked about it. He mentioned something about it just being produced my some "paper pusher" who really doesn't care for his job. The term paper pusher caught my attention because I realized that in an offhanded (and probably subconscious level) the person was degrading private enterprise. He was basically saying that large companies are completely ineffecient and full of ineffecient "paper pushers." I know that there are other examples of this type of cliche/phrase out there, but I can't think of any more.

I was wondering if anyone else has noticed this before, or if you all think that I am just a paranoid conspiracy theorist (who knows, I might be :).