trisweb.com

I’ve categorized my last two entries as “Technical.” This one will be “Life.” Technically, Technical things are a part of life too, but I categorize so you who cannot see the categories should know what to expect. Maybe someday I’ll make them visible; and I haven’t touched this design in months, I bet it could use some touching up. Just a little. It’s nice as it is. I like it.

I am going home tomorrow. Grandpa’s taking me halfway, to San Luis, where my Dad will be waiting with a big giant hug. And then we’ll be off to the Santa Barbara Jazz Festival, where my old high school jazz band will be playing, competing for the elusive first place at SB. I hear they’re good this year though… I hear they’ve got an awesome trumpet section. And, after all, they did sweep the world-renound Reno Jazz Festival, taking first place (High School D Bands, Nordhoff) out of some fourteen bands in their division. We’ll see how they do in their own neck of the woods– or I should say, I’ll see how they do.

And then I’ll go home again. It’s been quite a while since I’ve even seen my parents or been home — since spring break, when I took the train down. It’ll be nice to be home again; Ojai just feels better than Berkeley sometimes. It’s a beautiful little town, and it is, as Berkeley is not yet, Home. Berkeley is home to me like this house — Grandma’s house — is a home to me — like Tuolumne is a home to me. It is a comfortable place with all these vivid memories attached. But it’s not Home in the absolute way. Ojai will always be that, and I look forward to returning. I’ve talked about home being an attachment to people before; but it’s definately an attachment to place too.

Well, the clock strikes midnight. I should be going to bed very soon, considering I have to wake up at sevenish. So, goodnight; see you at home. ::

Oh man, I’ve done nothing but watch TV and program in the last four days. Only one left. And the funny thing is, once I’m done with work, I watch TV (lots of Seinfield)– while I’m sitting at my computer programming!!! It’s the only thing to do around here… pretty sad. And even more sad is the fact that I’m actually decently enjoying it. I wouldn’t program in my spare time if I wasn’t enjoying it… and I’m learning a lot of PHP… I’ve been practically dreaming PHP (or, I assume I would be, if I could remember any of my dreams these days). Tonight I wrote a program to take a directory and print the contents of each file in that directory that has a specified extention (like .txt). I’m going to use it in the web site for the news headlines on the front page. Whoever is maintaining them will just need to add a text file to a directory to add a new article… pretty sweet. Next up: a (secure) web interface to add/edit/delete articles. Maybe tomorrow…

The week hasn’t been very stimulating for the artistic part of my brain (right or left? I forget…). I mean, I have translated the page design (from a PDF from a graphic artist, looks very good), but really, the design template was complete after two hours on Monday. The rest was coding and fine-tuning and content… not terribly creative. And the programming is more mathematical than not… it has a certain artistic quality to it, but fits better in the “non-art” category. Maybe I’ll play some clarinet or flute or somethin tomorrow.

And, last but not least; toast to a friend: Here here. ::

Work work work….

It’s already Wednesday, leaving me three more days to finish this web site. It’s been a really great project, honestly. I was only given a PDF of the design by a graphic artist who wasn’t a web designer nor wanted to be, and I’m in the process of converting it to web. I’ve chosen to do it in a completely new way (for me) — I’m using PHP (pre-hypertext processing — essentially a very capable programming language made for the web, which can be embedded into normal HTML very easily). Instead of every page having its own code, each page simply holds its content, and I use PHP includes to place it in the design template. It’s working extremely well, and because it’s in PHP, I have the capability to do many many more things that I could never do with regular HTML web pages. For instance, there’s a news page and an events page. I’m going to make their content come from a text file, or possibly a directory of text files each containing a story, and then use the PHP to format everything. And if I have time, I might make a secure web interface to edit the story database so they don’t even have to worry about uploading or anything like that. Damn I love this stuff.

All work and no play… hmm… can’t be good. I should do something fun tomorrow. Maybe go to Fry’s; we’ll see. Lates. ::

I spent all day packing up, of course. It wasn’t fun. Well, actually, it wasn’t that bad — just a lot of work. But Saturday was a lot of fun, so that made up for it. Matt came to get all his stuff, and we woke up around noon after playing Jedi Knight II for hours the night before. So, we woke up and went to lunch at Stuffed Inn (deli) and then hung out for a few hours, and then played volleyball for like three hours at Sada hall (one block away). Then we went to dinner at Denny’s (burgers always a safe bet…) and came home and played cards for the rest of the night. The lack of necessity to do anything feels really great. I have projects to do over summer, but sometimes you just have to have fun. Definately.

Right now I’m at my grandparents’ house in San Jose, looking at a huge 17″ LCD monitor with two annoying dead pixels in the upper left hand corner. But it’s big and bright and LCD, so it doesn’t really matter now does it? Plus it’s hooked up to MY computer, so I can set my resolution to the native 1280×1024 and not that 1024×768 interpolated pixel crap he has on his… I’m working on his company web site for a week (4th redesign by me, www.planware.net), and then coming home. The pay’s good, and room and board and free washing machines are included . Ah, life is good.

So, anyway. I better get to bed. I know — it’s only 1 AM! Grandparents have breakfast too early… I hope I can sleep… goodnight… ::

Today was great… the best Saturday of my life. Nothing but fun and relaxation…

Packing up everything tomorrow morning. Kinda sad. I found my to-do list from when I was packing up my room leaving home… now *that* was weird. Made me think, though. A lot. Maybe more on that later. Now, sleep. Goodnight.

::

The results of the poll are mostly what I thought they’d be. That’s good.

Okay, moving on. Literally. This is the last day of my freshman year at the University of California. I only wish it didn’t involve a CS final… but even that’s okay, because it’s finally over. As far as the academic part of college goes, that’s a good thing. Summer will be a wonderful break, and I’m glad to be going home.

The camping trip was badly planned (as in *not* planned) so it won’t be happening. Maybe next year.

And as far as CS goes, I’ll be fine. I can only practice; the rest just comes down to concentration and whether or not I know my stuff or not. I know my stuff.

Been listening to my entire music collection on shuffle lately. It’s fun. I’ve heard stuff I forgot I had, stuff I haven’t heard for ages, and some stuff I don’t think I’ve ever heard, which is weird, since it’s in my library… whatever, it was good. It’s pretty cool to have so much music, and most of it is legal, regardless of what the RIAA says about digitizing your own CDs.

Okay, time for some relaxation before final. ::

I want to know something. I’ve been wanting to try this for a long time.

Here you go: If you read this, please comment on this post. All I want to know is how many different readers I have. Even if you’re just passing through, comment. Use a fake name, fake email, I don’t care, but please comment; and if you want, tell also how you heard about this weblog, and how you got here, and why you came back, if you did.

Thank you.

Many more ideas. It was unbelievably better the second time. You just notice so many more things, so much more complexity. We spent the entire walk home from the movie formulating ideas and connecting and linking and hypothesizing… it was great. We got home and started writing things down so we could remember everything and connect things easier. I won’t give any spoilers about Reloaded, but here are some things we came up with from the first movie, most of which are referenced in the second:

• The Oracle: Knows the future; Tells Neo he’s not the one, then gives him a cookie, saying “Here, take a cookie. I promise, by the time you’re done eating it,
  you’ll feel right as rain.” Think of the cookie like an internet cookie; stores information, causes changes in the code. What if the cookie caused Neo to be the one?
• Colors: Everything in the matrix is tinted green, everything pertaining to it is green. Everything outside the matrix is blue. Notice colors, especially in Reloaded.
• Allusions, obviously; Alice in Wonderland, the Bible (ressurection, Trinity, Nebuchadnezzar), greek mythology.

There are a lot of very interesting things. And the 2nd movie is just more in-depth. Reviewers see the flaws easily, but they manage not to look under the surface to see the numerous more important things. Yes, the action is great; yes, the plot seems lacking, but the depth is amazing if you look far enough into it. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe “there is no point.”

On another note, I did my Math 1B final tonight. Took me all 3 hours, because I promised myself I wouldn’t waste a minute. Okay okay, I used the last five minutes to guessdimate my score…. I got it between 5/7 and 6/7. Divisible by 7 because the test was out of 175 total points, so I rounded my estimated score to +/- 25 points and divided by 25. So, pretty decent. That’s a high-C low-B. I hope, at least. Just glad it’s over with at this point.

One more thing — I looked at some of my entries from way back when (back on Pitas) and noticed some interesting things. Here: go here, and read November 15th (about halfway down the page). Then read the 17th, the one above it. Isn’t it funny that I sincerely wished for my life to get interesting again: “I wish just once that something makes tomorrow interesting. Really truly interesting.” and I got my wish, and the next day, I got even more of my wish in the opposite direction (fire sprinkler incident)? That really freaked me out when it happened. It was one of the truest wishes I had ever wished, and it came true without a doubt that very night. Just makes me think–what with the Matrix speaking of Fate and Choice and all–why do things happen the way they do? I mean, it’s like someone was messing with me — ‘here, I’ll make your life positively interesting tonight; but tomorrow, have a taste of the darker side of interesting too! You asked for it…’ I could see someone smiling slyly at me as they drop these subtle hints of something. It’s something you can’t dwell on too long without driving yourself crazy with the inability to find a logical answer. It’s just one of those things, I guess. I could say that is was all coincidence; that everything that played out with the sound system was just right, and it was all coincidence. That– we just shouldn’t have been shooting pellet guns indoors — that it was a bad choice on our part. Or is choice just an illusion to keep us under control? Ha! I have been thinking about the Matrix too much…

Well, in any case, my other point in linking to those entries was to show how much better I wrote back then… really, though, it’s some good stuff.

Okay, sleep. ::