Surprise, surprise! Another few months have come and gone with naught in the way of activity hereabouts. Go figure.
So this quarter has been…interesting…if nothing else. Certainly the busiest quarter I’ve had in a long, long time. And that’s saying something, considering I’m rocking a schedule sans-MSE this quarter. I suppose I’d better try to break down recently goings here in one giant chunk, because infrequent and massive content dumps seem to be my status quo. So it begins…
If you stay remotely up to date on the goings-on in the video game industry, or if you have a sizable assortment of news outlets on your RSS reader for that matter, then you’ve most likely seen the name Alexander Stern lately. It seems as though the entire interwebs are abuzz with coverage and discussion of his recently-filed lawsuit. For anyone who doesn’t know about it, I’ll attempt to give a readers digest version before giving my two cents on the whole situation.
Last night was the much-hyped inaugural banquet for the HCDE department’s diversity mentorship program. Boeing gave the department a grant to start this program, and this kickoff event was intended to bring together a bunch of “diverse” undergrads and then meet & chat with alumni. While the turnout wasn’t quite as high as what was expected, I don’t think, we still had eight or nine undergrads and a fairly comparable number of alumni. After everyone had finished eating the provided dinner, we undergrads rotated around speed-dating-style, giving each of us — in theory — about five minutes to talk with each graduate.
Feel free to completely ignore this post. I’m only writing it to verify that this new widget I’m using is successfully linking to new posts on my twitter feed. Of course, if you’re reading this, then that most likely means it worked. Yay.
Carry on…
Last night was the third game of the season for the UW men’s basketball team; the third in three nights, actually, as this weekend the Bank of America Arena was home to the Athletes in Action Classic. I missed the first game on Friday against Wright State on account of the Pixies show, though I’m not terribly disappointed as we put up a rather mediocre effort. Sure, we won, but the margin of victory should have been much bigger considering how hyped we were going into this season. Saturday’s game against Belmont was a tad better, and featured an impressive showing from Matthew Bryan-Amaning. Last night, though…last pretty much eradicated any lingering concern I might have had about the remainder of the season.
There is no better way to kick off a season than by finishing up the third of three consecutive games (by which point one would assume a team might be starting to fatigue) with a 111-55 dominant demonstration of kickassery. Seriously, by the end of the game, I was actually starting to feel bad for Portland State’s head coach. Undoubtedly not the way he intended to start his first season at the helm. That said, there was a certain satisfaction in seeing Phil Nelson start relatively strong before ultimately proving completely ineffectual when it really counted. Nelson began his college career as a Huskey, but transferred to Portland State where he felt that he wasn’t getting enough playing time. It was clear that he really had a chip on his shoulder last night and wanted to go crazy on the court to show us what we lost. Instead, he just came off as whiny & pouty.
I just can’t wait to see what Isaiah & Q do as we edge closer to Pac-10 play. Frankly, if they both perform like they did this weekend, I really doubt there’s going to be another team in the conference that can shut them down on the offensive end.
WordPress is finally installed and operational, and I’ve migrated the contents of my old LJ over. I officially have a stable blogish thing!
I really haven’t had time to frak with any of the customization options yet, so it’s straight out-of-the-box for now. Hopefully, with moderate tweaking at some point in the next week or so, I can make this mesh well with the rest of my site. As for actually, y’know, blogging…I anticipate I’ll be considerably more prolific now that I’m not using a service of questionable stability.
I’m going to be trekking down to campus momentarily for two different research group meetings. Didn’t make it in at all on Wednesday on suspicion of coming down with Swine Flu. Considering I’m still kicking at this point, it probably wasn’t, but I’m laying relatively low for the remainder of the weekend to ensure I’m fully functional by Monday. Sleep, some moderate MSE reading, and moving forward with the custom CMS I’m building for the HRCL website are in my future. And possibly cookies…
So, this weekend is the Battlestar Galactica auction. Realistically, I probably don’t have a shot at winning anything, but I’m still going to bid. I soooooo want the small wall plaque of the “3rd Vigilantes”.
I wonder if Paul Allen is going to try to get some of the big ticket items, like the oil painting of the First Cylon War or the full size Viper Mk. II, for the museum here in Seattle. I certainly hope so, because it’s SERIOUSLY lacking BSG stuff. Right now, all they have is one of the Cylon suits from the original series.
I just got home from classes, and wow…that was the worst on-campus experience I’ve ever had. For some reason (probably the snow melt and torrential downpours of late) an ungodly stench that I’m fairly sure was raw sewage was rising forth from the storm drains near the engineering-centric region of campus. To make it even better, it turns out the lovely little subterranean dungeon that the MSE department calls home has drains inside which directly feed into the storm drainage system. So, I got to enjoy the unique stench during class, too!
My laptop entered the “assembly” stage, so I should have it by sometime next week. I seriously can’t wait, because this downtime between classes is KILLING me. I tried to get on one of the PCs in the MSE department’s undergrad computer lab, only to be greeted by a pop-up message that I could not be logged on because my account has been restricted. What the fuck? My lab access is restricted and the department doesn’t bother to tell me? Bah! I guess I’ll be chilling in the TC department computer lab for the time being.
My classes today went fairly well. It was my first day of my Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule since I missed Monday with the blizzard. The professor for both of my MSE classes on these days is really cool. He’s really got (at least he seems to have) quite a bit of enthusiasm and interest in the topic, which has been seriously lacking from some of my past professors. Plus, he has the most Harry Potter name of any of my professors thus far, which is consistently amusing. This quarter might not be as bad as I anticipated. It will still be insanely tough, but probably manageable.
In unrelated news: wtf is up with LiveJournal? Laying off 1/5 of its staff, including the entirety of its design team? This does not bode well. Sounds like it’s about time for me to install WordPress on my site.
Today was the first day of classes for winter quarter. I ended up not being able to make it down to campus, though, because of the freakish mini-storm of yesterday and last night that dumped around 5″ of snow. That’s one of the biggest downsides of needing a van for transportation: a few flakes, and I’m totally stranded.
Tomorrow I have the first sessions of my MSE Junior Lab II (ugh…) and my interaction design class. 9:30-5:30 makes for a very long, very boring day. Especially since the labs are without a doubt the most uninteresting things I ever do, and I don’t yet have my new laptop to occupy me during the two-hour midday break.
This is going to be a very, very crazy and intense quarter. I’m taking 5 classes, and I have no idea what the actual workloads for them will be like. At least I’ll be able to be slightly productive during downtime once the laptop gets here.