Tim’s Blog

I am back at school after going home for Thanksgiving. I got to eat lots of good food and see my family for the first time since I left for college. I also had my Eagle Scout court of honor. What a boring event that was. I understand the point of the court of honor, but most of it was repetitive, at least all the ceremony bits. Oh well. It was fun to see all of my scout leaders again. And I got quite a bit of money. Speaking of which, I need to finish writing all my thank you cards. Procrastination… Anyway, by the end of the weekend I was missing my computer and was ready to go back to school.

Now I can spend more time doing homework. I finally beat it. No game I have ever played even comes close to Half-Life 2. Every moment was very well designed and extremely fun to play. I will definitely have to beat it again, except on hard instead of normal mode. I will start playing it again in a couple of weeks or when I get really bored. I have to bring it home so that my Dad can try playing it.

I am coming home for Thanksgiving. Yay. Finally I can eat some quality food and see my family.

I just heard that the Titan Robotics Club has successfully registered for the 2004 FIRST competition. I was wondering if they were going to get the funds necessary although now it looks like they will. Yay. Assuming one occurs in Washington, I am planning on attending the FIRST kickoff during winter break. Hopefully the TRC will have another year in which they completely dominate the competition. This may be tough without me as the driver

I was all set to write a 4 page paper for English tonight. I watched a couple of movies to get in the right mindset and then played a few games of FreeCell just to procrastinate. Then I looked at the assignment sheet and it said that the paper is due on Monday, not tomorrow. That made my day. Then I did a little happy dance which made my roommate’s day. So now I can occupy my time doing more important things like playing Half-Life 2. I have 6 days to beat it since I am coming home on Wednesday for Thanksgiving.

Last night just before midnight, I went with 2 friends to Wal-Mart and picked up the much anticipated game, Half-Life 2. All I can say I wow. Very few games manage to hold my attention for more then a few hours. Half-Life 2 is one of those games. It has Doom 3 graphics, with Far Cry surroundings and as much attention to detail as the original Half-Life. With a break for a good night’s sleep and classes, I have been playing almost continuously since I got my hands on it. The game play is absolutely stunning. If you like computer games, get Half-Life 2.

During one of my few breaks from playing Half-Life 2, I registered for next semester’s classes. I am going to take Math 182 (Calculus II), Computer Science 201 (Program Design with C), Computer Science 221 (Data Structures), Physics 221 (Mechanics) and Economics 101 (Economic Way of Thinking). That’s a total of 18 credits. The university gives everyone a map of every class they need to take if they want to graduate with their chosen degree in four years. I am taking all of the necessary courses plus Computer Science 201 because I really want to learn to program C. So if I become too bogged down, I can always drop that extra course. It should be a pretty good semester, all the classes seem interesting at least.

“There’s a time and place for everything, and it’s called college.” -Cook, South Park.

That’s the motto that I have been trying to follow. The last thing that I want to do is leave college and think of all the things I haven’t done. Of course above all, I have been following the three rules.

We didn’t have school on last Thursday due to Veteran’s day. Friday was a pretty easy day so this feels like the middle of a four day weekend.

Lately the sound on my computer has been acting up. Sometimes it will randomly cut out for a few seconds and then jump back in. Then Windows wouldn’t let me install the latest patch for Doom 3. I decided it was time for a reinstall. Reinstalling Windows is relatively painless when you have multiple hard drives. I just copied the My Documents folder along with some save game files and my email settings to one of my other hard drives and proceeded to install Windows again. It’s always a pain to install all the drivers and programs again, but I managed to do it in just a couple of hours. However now I was not getting any sound at all. My computer was getting kind of dusty so I took out my Audigy 2 sound card and cleaned it off hoping that would fix it. It didn’t. I put the sound card in my other computer and installed Windows 2000 along with the sound card drivers. Of course it worked perfectly fine. To make a long and hard story short, it turned out that when I installed the drivers on my Windows machine, I accidentally checked the box making the digital sound output default. I don’t have digital speakers, so it didn’t work. I reinstalled the drivers and now my computer is healthy again. So I wasted virtually all of today playing around with my computers. Oh well.

On another note, apparently there is a correlation between a state’s average IQ and whether or not the state voted for Bush or Kerry. Or maybe not. Who knows?

Tell me what you think. How are the colors? Should I automatically redirect Internet Explorer browsers to the old stylesheet? Or let them see the flawed version and force them to get firefox?

If you are still using Internet Explorer, I strongly suggest that you get firefox. It is an easy download and install. Just download from the firefox webpage and double click on the file. Click “I agree” and “Next” a couple of times and you are done.

I played around with the cascading style sheet on my website to add background images similar to this webpage. I ended up with this. It is kind of rough and not very nice looking at this point. I need to play with the colors more. Note: this is not viewable in Internet Explorer.

Last night at around 6:00 I got a call from one of my Dad’s friends, Terry Wong. He was in town on a business trip and offered to take me out to dinner. I agreed and he picked me up at my dorm and took me to Ferraro’s Fine Italian Restaurant. I had a very good pasta of some kind. The waitress asked me how hot I wanted it and I said “hot.” That is one of the things that I has been missing from cafeteria, spicy food. All the food that should be spicy they bland down so that no one complains. For an appetizer we had calamari that was superb. Mmmm. I am getting hungry just thinking about it. If anyone else is in town, feel free to stop by and take me to dinner.

From an article on slashdot I found this really well designed site. When I first saw it I was inspired to redesign this web site. Unfortunately the techniques that the guy who made the cool site used do not work on Internet Explorer. This is because IE does not correctly interpret the cascading style sheets standard. The cool thing about his site is that it was made with only HTML and CSS. No java script or anything else. If Microsoft starts to follow the standards and it makes IE display CSS properly, I may consider redesigning this website to make it look really cool. Of course I could be really clever and use php to direct any non-IE browsers to the new site. I’ll have to think about it. I have all weekend.

On Friday I realized that my weekend was going to be boring again, so I decided to install Linux from scratch. It took me all weekend, and most of Monday. I installed LFS on the second hard drive of my 1.2 GHz computer which is running Suse Linux. I ran into a little bit of trouble when it was time to configure the boot loader Grub. I had some parameters set wrong which made it unbootable and I inadvertently overwrote the master boot record on the hard drive running Suse. Luckily I was able to use Knoppix to rescue the system and make it bootable. I decided I want to install X windows and maybe KDE or Gnome. I’ll have to see, it will probably wait until next weekend.

On Sunday, Isaac and I decided to hike up to the M. However neither of us have a car and we could not find anyone to drive us so Isaac borrowed a bike and we rode the 5-6 miles to the trail head. On the way we noticed a few snowflakes coming down, but it soon stopped. There are two trails up to the M. We chose the shorter more direct path which went straight up. We had a great view almost the entire way to the top until it started to snow. The view at the top was somewhat clouded and it was snowing pretty hard. We took the long way down and eventually it stopped snowing so we got a pretty good view again. A little further down we noticed a few deer. At the trailhead a couple of other friends met us in their car. Isaac was not feeling too good and got a ride home with them. I decided not to get a ride and I rode back to my dorm.

For some reason, Montana State University does not have classes on Election Day. So I was able to sleep late and sit around all day since I had already voted absentee. At around 2 pm Eric came to my room and asked me if I wanted to hike to the M. I said I would and we left at about 4 pm with another guy named Erik. Luckily Eric has a car so we did not have to ride our bikes. It got kind of late and we ended up hiking back in the dark.

I just finished watching some Election night coverage including the Daily Show. It seems to me that people are too dang anxious. I mean take a chill pill. There is nothing you can do about it now. It’s over. At this point the election is so close. We probably won’t know who the winner is for a week or so, until they finish recounting the votes in Ohio and other swing states. Hopefully the election will work out fine and the best candidate will win…