nfiniti plus one

Nothing to see here anymore. ;) Move on over to the new site here.

As I promised, the domain + webhost I got is finally up. The DNS is still propagating through the world wide web, but at least in my parts, I can access the site now. It's in it infancy and I'm learning CSS like a madman. To say the least, it's just a test page up there for now. Doing this CSS stuff is pretty cumbersome at first, but once I get all the initial code down, it'll make for a much simplified updating procedure. I just have to get my photochop skills up to par. I am absolutely useless at it right now, but I've got a buttload of tutorials lined up and I'll just mess around and see what I can create. Expect nothing professional for a while yet. :|

In other news, I've realized that IE and Firefox both suck. Well, that's not true. It's just that coding that looks fine under one browser doesn't necessarily look fine in the other. Why can't they just get along and use the same damn engine or something. I can see why a bunch of pages back when didn't work for Firefox. When it had a much lower adoption rate, developers probably just said, 'You know what, screw it. I'm not going to recode all this so that it looks good for the 2% of users who use Firefox.' But not so anymore so I get the awesome task of coding for both browsers. Don't even drag Opera, Konqueror or Safari in here. Opera doesn't have the usage of Firefox, Konqueror is on Linux and I really don't want to go there right now. And while I'd love to pick up a PowerMac G5 just to test Safari compatability, I (unfortunately) don't have the dough. I'll see if I can't find some people using all those browsers to check compatability once in a while though... (Rene?)

So uh.. Hooway for hand coding!? <-- click it

Anyone here remember when this blog was actually named 'The Ramblings of Me'? Well I do. =P In any case, I've been sitting on my ass doing just about nothing (well... if reformatting counts as nothing) but a lot of reading. Okay, so I've been still doing 'stuff', but nothing close to the amount of work I'd normally do at university. It's been so great not having to worry about assignments and stuff. It's definitely a way better feeling knowing you went through it all and now you've got your break from it. Yeah, I've even been hitting up the old ivory keys these past few days. The first time playing in like a month and a half really killed me. Apparently playing the Black Key etude as a warmup tune after a month plus isn't such a good idea. My right arm was so tense and I felt like I'd been lifting weights after running through half the piece and just falling apart. Let me tell you, tenseness + fast = very bad. But I've been practicing and the Black Key's sounding a lot better now and I'm working on another Chopin etude. They're so fun. No joke.

Now, onto the geeky stuff. I've been having a ball listening to these podcasts, especially this one called This Week in Technology or TWiT for short. (for short... is that proper English? I'm saying it over and over and it doesn't sound very legit :$) Anyways, I'll have you know 'Podcast' is the word of the year according to the New Oxford American Dictionary. It didn't even make it into that dictionary at all last year. How ironic no? Oh what was I saying... Right, TWiT. It's an awesome show if you've got any interest in technology at all. Yes, it's a little geeky and whatnot, but it's also just plain hilarious listening to these respected ndividuals of technology verbally rip apart different companies, persons and whatever. Just a whole lot of fun. It definitely sounds like they're having fun.

So I've finally got most of the applications installed on the laptop again. I'm currently installing up a whole lot of games to keep me entertained over the work term. I've so far got this lineup:

• Final Fantasy VII
• SimCity4 (yeah, going to give this a try again)
• America's Army
• Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
• Rome Total War
• Maybe UT2004 for a little bit o' CTF fun once in a while
• Steel Panthers 3 with DOSBox

Damn, that last game is so oldschool. Sometime when I get a chance I'll post up some screenshots of it. Ooooo those luscious 2D textures and practically MIDI sound effects... I even had to run it with DOSBox since otherwise it would run too fast. Those CPU cycles let me tell you. Apparantly computers have gotten faster over the past decade *insert rolling eye smilie here*. I've been also enjoying America's Army immensely. It's possibly the most realistic FPS game made so far. It became pretty clear to me UT2004 with the lasers and low grav isn't very realistic at all. I had a nasty habit of shooting the first thing that came through the door when I started playing America's Army and that's a sure-fire way of getting a lot of team kills which kind of pisses people off. At least I'm not the only one though. At one point on a map, I, along with 2 other teammates got blown to pieces by a friendly grenade. Way to go killing half your team! Hooway! I'm slowly getting better at it, but generally still suck. I'm sure I'll get lots of practice over the work term.

In other news, I've become extremely interested in various web technologies including Javascript, CSS and AJAX. I think AJAX is the thing that is most appealing to me. Basically a marketing term, AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript + XML. If you've used live.com, protopage.com, start.com or Gmail, you've used a site that incorporates 'AJAX'. It essentially loads up a bunch of things right when you open up a page so you don't always have to do the classical click-wait for server response-receive server response approach to browsing. You'll notice how quick Gmail seems when comparing it to say Hotmail for example. (Microsoft has their Live Mail Beta as well which uses AJAX to present an Outlook-like mail client) Eventually technology like AJAX could allow us to run more and more applications, not just email, directly on the web. I've already started to learn Javascript, which is going very well since it is similar to Java which is in turn similar to C# which I have, *gasp* learned at university.

How do I intend to learn and practice all this? Well, I'll be getting a webhost of course! =) I'm currently narrowing my choices down but I'm pretty sure I've found my host of choice. Hey Mike/Nick, remember our website plans from back in the summer? I should be able to get that going here soon. It'll be a test/community website. You'll get to put up with my buggy-ass coding and I get a place to test stuff out. ;) Kidding about the buggy code, I promise I'll keep that to a minimum. I have some ideas which I'll talk to you guys about. Maybe you'll be interested.

Ok, one last thing, I got accepted into the Microsoft Windows Live Messenger a bit ago. How is this pertinent to you? It's not. I just wanted to boast.

Carry on.

Well, I never thought this day would come, but it finally has. Actually, this is really a few days late since basically I was free of the chains starting Friday around noon. But of course, I would have seemed extremely anti-social if I had of spent that day writing in my blog. Even I have limits you know. ;) Friday night was pretty crazy, although not as crazy as some of the stories I later heard about what happened that night in other parts of the university. We won’t get into that…

I spent a good portion of yesterday packing up all of my stuff in preparation for moving out. I was extremely surprised at just how much stuff I brought to my dorm. I brought stuff that I didn’t even know I brought. As I was folding all my clothes, I dug up so many shirts and stuff that I didn’t even know I had. I am glad, however, that I did not bring a desktop. I saw numerous parents lugging huge computer cases around.

As people were leaving they would all come down to my room and say a little goodbye until next semester (hopefully…) and it was actually pretty sad to think that I won’t be able to see them for 4 months. I’m going to be living in res again next semester since it was just the most convenient route to take for my work semester, but none of them will be back. It’ll be interesting to see how I got eat with, hang around with and all. Four months isn’t really that long and it definitely feels like I just met all of those people yesterday, but we’ve shared (nearly) the same experience and we’ve really grown close.

So this is just a short little update before my laptop goes under the knife. And by under the knife I mean it’s going down for a backing up and then a reformat. I’ve also got to go see if I can’t get linux working on this thing again. I didn’t have time before to fool around too much, but oh, it feels so nice to have all the time in the world right now.

Tis the morning of my final exam of this semester, Chemistry 102: Chemistry for Engineers. I'm going into it feeling pretty good. I did last year's exam as practice and just about aced that. However, I had the most horrible night of the semester, meaning although I got into bed at around 11:40PM, hoping to get a lot of sleep before the exam, I didn't actually fall asleep until around 2:00AM. In any case, I'm up and about and off to eat a nice light breakfast before the exam.

So close now! I can taste the freedom!

I always say it’s just one day older when I’m being really pessimistic but this birthday is supposed to bring something special. 1-8. What does that mean? I wrote about it a while ago in another post (aside – I always find it quite enjoyable to go back and reflect upon the things I’ve written in this blog of mine. Perhaps the second best thing about it aside from you guys being able to know what I’m doing and thinking is that I have a place to look back upon my life). The actual being 18 thing isn’t really anything fancy to me. I guess I can buy pr0n, lotto tickets (got one tonight) and vote in the elections coming up in January. That’ll be kind of exciting I guess. Ok, I probably sound really doom and gloom especially since it’s my birthday, today. The fact is, I’ve got a lot on my plate right now and I just don’t really have time for it. I wish I could delay my birthday until after exams were over and let loose. But nooooo. Oh well, I’ll have a nice Christmas I’m sure. You know what they say, there’s no happiness without sadness or whatever. I’ll thoroughly enjoy the lack of work after all this is over.

So my birthday huh. Let me dwell on myself for a little bit here. I went out with a bunch of guys from our residence/program to the local East Side Marios. I had a pretty good dinner and I even got the whole birthday treatment. You know, the random singing that makes you all embarrassed because everyone’s staring at you and then I got to spin the wheel for a prize. Maybe they thought I was like 12 or something… I took it easy last night. Well, today’s really my birthday but today is the beginning of the study week of death where I spend about 90% of my waking time with my nose in a book. That should be lots of fun.

And to show you how my birthday’s been going, I’ll tell you about my day. I went to our programming tutorial this morning. It just so happened that I was the only one who showed up for it out of a class of 120 people. So instead of actually doing anything productive with my time, I chatted with our TA, who I also talked to Friday night at the party. We reminisced a little and we told each other what we did afterwards. After talking for a while, I went back to residence and ate some food and then proceeded to our last four lectures of the semester and of 2005. They were all just review of random things, although calculus was nice since what we had to know for the exam was slightly clarified.

After all that, I ate dinner and started studying. Since my first exam is physics this Thursday, I decided it would probably be a good plan to really start now. I’m about 2/3 of the way through one of the previous year’s exam and it isn’t too bad, yet. I’m hoping I don’t run into anything too difficult, although I don’t expect to get them all either on the first try. I’m still wondering when I’m going to fit in enough studying for my other courses. As easy as it may sound, Linear Algebra has the potential to destroy me. In all the other courses, I at least understand (mostly) all the concepts. It’s in algebra that I actually don’t understand what’s going on some of the time. I’m definitely going to have to work on that and ask a few people some questions. Stupid math proofs. That’s for the mathies here…

So yeah, basically the only thing I’ve done 18ish is buy a lottery ticket tonight. And the lady didn’t even ID me. What a shame. Maybe it’ll be a winner; who knows. That would be the funniest thing ever. Well only 365 more days until I can drink… legally at least.

Oh and I’m still on the lookout for a good web host that isn’t expensive as hell (or crappy as hell).

Seeing that yesterday was really the last day of our normal university semester, the local party house, Unit 36, held its regular end of term party. It’s the times like last night that you see in movies and TV shows. There were more than 200 people crammed into a townhouse and the backyard. On the menu was ‘Batch’ and your regular keg beer, brewed here in Waterloo. Batch is basically a mixed drink the engineers here came up with. It doesn’t taste much like alcohol but has a pretty solid kick to it. I downed 8 and a half cups in the course of a little over an hour. To say the least, I was having a good time. Who says you can’t have fun in computer engineering? I went along with a couple friends in my program as well as a few from out residence. It was good times and I’d have to say that was one of the most fun filled parties I’ve been to. It’s great when you’re having a few with your teaching assistants. That’s always gotta be good for the marks or something!

So the party ended at only 9PM, and most of the upper year students went on over to the engineering bar, POETS (Piss On Everything Tomorrow’s Saturday). The guys from our res decided that it would be a prime time to retreat back and lick our (drunken) wounds. But on the way home, we stopped at this Vietnamese restaurant. I didn’t really know what I was doing and supposedly I told them I didn’t want anything to eat. So when I was in the bathroom peeing (I pissed 5 times in the course of like an hour and a half last night. Twice out in the cold against the side of the house. I realized I pissed on the power box by accident) they all ordered without me.

Well, as consolation, they broke a table there. Everyone on one side of the table like kinda passed out at the same time and the whole table just broke. That should teach them. Anyways, I drifted in and out of consciousness (ok, so I’m exaggerating a bit) and we finally made it back to our res. I spent the rest of the night eating chips and stuff. I had physics extra help this morning and I had to be functional in the morning.

So yeah, it was generally a ton of fun. But that’ll be it until after exams are over. I cannot wait until I get to just go home and not have to worry about anything. Last night was nice since I just let loose and forgot all I had to do. It’s okay to take a break every once in a while. Unfortunately, aside from the two hour physics session this morning, I haven’t done any work yet. Exams are only five days away. Uh oh!