Plutor

I consider The Wave to be the single greatest work that Mankind has ever created. A hundred thousand diverse individuals can – and often do – work together with no clear leadership or supervision. A single individual’s responsibility is quite simple. So simple, in fact, that even the most dimwitted participants would be able to figure out what they should do. In comparison, the Pyramids and the Parthenon aren’t even worth mentioning.

Oh, and I started working at Priceline today.

This weekend has been the best weekend of my life. I graduated from college, in what I considered to be a huge ceremony, but others might dismiss as trivial. I also received a job offer from Priceline. It’s hard to imagine that next year, I’ll be solely in the Real World, with no classes, no homework, no tests or exams, no Academic Integrity agreements, no syllabi, no GPA, and no Tuesday-night parties. It’ll be like a different planet.

Someone asked me about Ow, My Foot! today, after seeing the wonderful mug my wonderful fianceé made for me four years ago. I thought about the one-dollar bottomless coffees. I thought about the sharp December breeze and the dingy downtown funk. I remembered Dilbert and Flash Gordon inspired almost-spoken word. I remember Vanilla Steamed Moo. I smell the people, I feel the carpet, I taste the angst and the hippies and the yuppies.

“It was a band I was in,” I told him. I wiped a tear from my eye.

You’d think I’d be excited that graduation is a mere nine days away. But in all truthfulness, the stress over the job situation, the wedding, and the mystery of where M and I will end up has been preventing me from really enjoying the fact that I’m done with seventeen years of “organized education”.

Should I be excited about Episode 2? I’m still trying to decide.

My newest project is up and running. In order to stem the tide of ignorance and the use of the Imperial Measurement System, I’ve created Go Metric. You may rejoice.

Okay, so I’m giving in and updating. Thanks for the boot in the pants, Chris.

The wedding invitations are out, and people have started receiving them. The wedding is in about two and a half months. I’m two weeks from the end of college classes, and a month (and one day) from Commencement. I’d like to find a job in the next month, but it’s no easier now than it was six months ago. Anyone need a CCNA certified Network Engineer with lots of UNIX and programming experience? (I’ll pass the BSCN by graduation, and am interested in pursuing my CCNP)

It’s too hot.

MrSplatz: dude, update your blog Plutor: bite me

Back from a nice relaxing spring break. Played some paintball, did some cleaning, and top it all off with a visit to M and wintry Rochester.

Splatta sliced up his hand something awful today while assembling his mom’s new computer. He’s got some non-greusome pictures up on his webpage, and I hope to see the bloody scar when the bandage comes off. Stay tuned!

I passed.

I’ve been spending a lot of my time lately studying for the CCNA. In fact, almost all the time that I’m not in classes, I’ve been reading or testing myself, or rereading, or going through lame Exam Cram flash cards. I dream about RIP holddown timers and split horizon. I eat fragment-free switched sandwiches. I drive an IETF encapsulated car. It’s taking over my life.

And really, how useful is all of this? It seems like they took the basics of every single networking concept and crammed them into the CCNA. I won’t be able to really construct anything expertly, but I can administer everything adequately. Frame Relay? ISDN? I say WAN connectivity should be on a separate test altogether.

I’m having an increasingly difficult time preventing myself from rationalizing a purchase of a Gameboy Advance. It’s got more power than the SNES, and a game selection that is getting better and better. The Portable Monopoly lighting system will be released soon, and appears to solve all of the related lighting issues. And at $70 in some online stores, the GBA only represents about 5 hours of work.

On the other hand, how many hours of work will it end up costing me in the long run?

“Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I love you, M.

Splatta and I, inspired by a link from Memepool, created a script to search Google for pairs of english words that had no matches. Here are our results.

Happy Groundhog Day.

The college dilemma: If there’s a class that’s required for your degree, but you actually get stupider by going, do you go?

My school schedule is strange; my classes are concentrated into eight hours Monday, six hours Thursday, and two hours Wednesday evening. Martin Luther King Day gave me a six-day weekend, and then there’ll be another weekend right on its heels. Matt came to visit for days 1-3, and we had a Matthias'-home-brew inspired party, for which we purchased way too much beer. Days 3-5 are (and will be) spent in snowy Rochester, in the company of my beautiful bride-to-be.

Right now (day 4, 8:45 AM), I’m alone in a computer lab, working on a powder-blue G3 tower. M is at class, and I don’t know her password to the PC’s. This keyboard is too small and the hockey-puck mouse really IS annoying. Not just Macophobe FUD.

[Note: Yes, I am making an effort to post meaningless news more often.]

Jeremy named his mice. The parents had been named 0 (zero) and 1 (one). The babies are Ada, Erlang, Eiffel, Perl, Pascal, Python, Ruby, and the currently unnamed female that Karl’s girlfriend is getting.

Tragically, three of the babies were lost. We’d like to post-humously name them ALGOL, BCPL, and APL.

Back at school. Weird schedule. Planning some fiction. Reading a lot. Studying for CCNA. Working for bioinformatics “department”. Still have lots of free time. Weird how that works out, eh?

I spent two long cold days tenderizing my rear and my knees, so I feel very soft right now. For a while it hurt to sit down, but I think I’ve gotten past the worst of it. Thanks to my buddy Splatta for inviting me, and to my considerate, brave, and (most of all) beautiful fiancee, M, for spending a lot of money and taking the 5 hour drive (each way) to do something we weren’t even sure she’d enjoy.

In other news, I got my Firewire card, so don’t be surprised if you see some short video of little ol' me doing something foolish here sometime soon.

SNET conspired to create a full month of downtime for coolass.net, plutor.org, and wsvw1u.com, among a few others. Now that this has been resolved, and it appears that everything is working again, I can sleep.

After spending way too many hours trying to get SSI to work on anger – Splatta’s web server, and the home of plutor.org – I decided that I could accomplish the same thing, and add to my already ironic list of web skills by learning PHP. If you notice nothing different, don’t worry. I didn’t do it for you, I did it for me.

Thematic rant: The idea of using tests to evaluate an individual’s education seems inherently flawed. How often will an employer ask you to sit in a crowded room with 50 of your peers and sit and silently take a written exam in order to solve some business or technical or ethical problem? Is test taking even marginally related to the real world? Teachers should spend less time giving tests designed to stroke both their own egos and those of the administration, and more time assigning projects which require creative thinking and demonstrate the application of in-class concepts to real-world problems. As long as the evaluation process is flawed, no college graduate will be truly prepared for the real world.

The one and only release of my Science and Industry inspired web-based text adventure. Note that there are lots of features missing. It should be considered an alpha-quality product.

I changed the site design since my last “update”. Added (and now removed, because of crappy drivers) my webcam. Added my S&I text adventure to the projects page. More to come, when I’m not bogged down by schoolwork.

Created the damn web page. Swank, eh?

I got a little sick of having all my content on wsvw1u.com, since that was more of a community site. I wanted somewhere to put personal information (writings, pictures, resume, etc.) so I got this domain.