Portal 2 is Getting in the Way of the Rest of My Life

Posted on 19th April 2011 in Something Daily

Uh, so much is happening yesterday and today that I really don’t know what’s going on. I side note: why is it that schoolwork always feels like the least important thing I have to do? No matter what, there’s always something I’d rather be doing, even if it’s fun work. I think the fact that people are telling me that I have to do it is actually a demotivating factor for me. ANYWAY…..

Oh man…well I spent three hours writing the code to Huffman encode text files for my Data Structures class yesterday, which was fun. I’m a little disappointed that my bad algorithm takes ten seconds to encode and decode the US constitution, but it’ll get me the homework credit I need. Also I really dug into Javascript for the first time, working through a few different tutorials in parallel in order to build an audio player for the Wonderleague website. That took a bit of experimentation, and I was, for some reason, beyond tired last night, which made the whole “thinking” thing a bit difficult.

Another factor making it hard for me to concentrate was the ride that Valve was taking everyone on regarding the imminent release of Portal 2 last night. I kept checking hasportal2launchedyet.com to see, and the second I refreshed the page and it said “YES”, I was bolting back to my MacBook Pro and launching it. As you may be able to guess, I stayed up until about 3 AM playing it until I couldn’t think anymore. This, in combination with the fatigue I was already experiencing, is causing me to not have a very fun day today.

I woke up at 8:30 and immediately started playing Portal 2 until 10, when I was forced to clean up and go to class. But you can rest assured that, if I have access to my MBP, I will not be doing much of anything else until that game is finished. That’s why I’m taking advantage of this time right now, while I’m out at the Courant lounge, to do important stuff like blogging and implementing an entire CMS for Wonderleague….how did I agree to this….?

OH AND ALSO, GUYS…I reactivated my Facebook account today. I know I probably look like a hypocrite now, but I will always maintain that there was never a time when I claimed to dislike Facebook – there was just a time where it wasn’t for me. It still might not really be for me, but for some reason I’m in the mood today to reactivate it. I don’t know how much I’ll use it. Seeing my profile page again is bringing back all of these weird memories about what it used to be like to use Facebook. So strange – that will probably happen for any other social network that I eventually stop using and start at again someday.

And I have midterms and projects to be doing, and finals to study for….what the heck, man? All I really want to do is make and use portals and portal accessories. If you need me, I’ll be at my desk. Not much different from an average day. But really, it is.

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All this Bass is Gonna Break My Ears

Posted on 18th April 2011 in Something Daily

Good day. I just spent about three hours on an assignment for my Data Structures class that involved creating a Huffman code based on a text file, then applying that code to compress the file, and decompressing it to make sure you did it correctly. Turns out I did, but this was one of the harder assignments in the class. My algorithm works, but it’s incredibly slow, as a result of the codes not being sorted in size order. It takes ten seconds to encode and decode the constitution, and it takes more than ten minutes to do ten constitutions (a lot more than ten minutes). So I understand how to fix this, but having it be efficient isn’t part of the assignment…I know. This is me being a terrible programmer. But right now, in this context, I’m ok with that. Because I have other things to be doing right now. Like designing wonderleaguewill.com, and playing Portal and Half Life 2 Episode 2 before bed, in anticipation of the awesomeness that will be waiting on my computer when I wake up tomorrow morning (and I don’t have class until 11! So much awesome!).

Yes, Portal 2 is going to be sweet. That’s really all I have to say about it right now. Let me just see here….I’ve been listening to a lot of Odd Future, and I feel like it might be messing with my head. At least the metal I listen to has mostly unintelligible lyrics, so if they’re singing about something awful you’re probably not going to hear it. But Odd Future, though…most of their songs are sort of..I don’t really know how to say this…”about rape”, I guess would be a good way of saying it. Tyler has an incredibly evil sounding voice, and the beats are really awesome. So I’m into it. But I do occasionally wonder what it does to my psyche to listen to so much violent music. I’m not too worried, if it really is damaging me, I’m probably already too far gone from the months of Wu-Tang.

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Unix/Vim Cheat Sheet

Posted on 21st February 2011 in Something Daily

Like I said I would yesterday, I have completed my conglomeration of two Unix/Vim command cheat sheets that I came across in my travels around the internet (or grape-net, if Justin is to be believed), along with some commands I know and use often that weren’t on the sheets. This hasn’t been spelling- or error-checked much at all, so I dunno….if you happen to take it and use it for yourself…you might, like, tell me if there are any errors that you find…probably? That would be nice of you, if you, the reader, were to use this in such a way. Anyway, here it is…(click the image for the fullsize 1440×900 version)

I tried to include as much as I could think of and fit into the frame – but surprisingly, I have space left over. I may add to it as I come across more useful stuff. But for now, enjoy if you care to do so.

I saw the Upright Citizens again last night. The line was huge because there were rumors that Amy Poehler was going to be involved, but unfortunately she was not. Still it was a sweet show. I also ate some pizza, skateboarded around a little bit in the snow – it was very good. I feel like I’ve been ending a lot of my posts recently by saying that I’m going to go play video games, but that’s actually kind of a rare thing for me these days. I’m being too productive – I gotta get my head in the game. Portal 2 is coming out soon, and I must prepare.

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Let it be known: I will eat my shoe

Posted on 14th February 2011 in Something Daily

I just got a package in the mail, and when I was going to get it I was so convinced that it was going to be my Tropicana gear, but it ended up being Valentine’s Day cookies from my mom. I was really excited for the Tropicana stuff, but cookies are very awesome too. Thanks mom. I’m expecting the gear tomorrow then, or (hopefully not) the day after that. It just needs to get here already. Along with letters from my friends and the confirmation of my double major declaration. I’m waiting for a bunch of stuff in the mail. And as I do so, I’m getting pumped up by I Get Wet. I honestly used to hate that album, but it’s growing on me rather quickly. I feel the same way about it as I do about Blink-182, in a sense – I acknowledge the fact that it’s simple and kind of idiosyncratic, and then stop worrying about it and jam out.

I finally finished getting all the star coins in New Super Mario Bros. Wii, which took an ungodly long time, even with our whole suite playing in a shared account. I decided that I’d just go ahead and do it today, but level 9-7 is so unbelievably annoyingly difficult. I don’t want to talk about it. I have bad memories attached to that level. The second star coin is stupid if you don’t have the propeller hat – which I never did – and I ended up trying it about forty times. I did succeed though. This was about an hour ago.

I was playing Mario instead of doing something productive partially due to the fact that I chose today to once again reconfigure my MacBook Pro – I deleted the Ubuntu partition (decided I have enough Ubuntu on my old MacBook, and Portal 2 is coming out for Mac) and reinstalled Snow Leopard, crossing my fingers very hard that my automated backup scheme had been working correctly. Turns out it had been. It’s gone through a lot of revisions over the last few months, but it works awesomely now. I am, once again, proud of myself. Also because of that piece I wrote in LSDJ over the weekend; I still think that sounds rockin. I rerecorded the guitar since it was a little bit out of tune, it’s way more rockin now. Check it out.

And I finally preordered Portal 2 on Steam today. It comes out on a Monday, and let it now be known that I will not stop playing on that Monday until it’s finished. If I can’t, I will eat my own shoe.

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