Sugar High-Five

Posted on 22nd April 2011 in Something Daily

Last night, I was in the mood for chocolate. So I put on my slippers and walked downstairs to the Duane Reade and bought one of these.

And then I went back up to my room and on the way up shared the elevator with two girls, each of whom I offered a truffle. They both took them, of course, because who can resist chocolate, especially when it’s offered by a dude with a strange mohawk on your dorm elevator? So I took the rest of the bag up to my room and ate the whole thing in ten minutes while listening to Earthless, who are a cool blues-metal band who kind of sound like a more rocking Black Sabbath. Let me just say that eating the whole thing in ten minutes was a very bad idea. I couldn’t sleep from the sugar rush, and also my stomach was killing me as a result of it being filled with mostly dark chocolate. Seriously, bad idea.

Apart from that, yesterday was a bit weird. I did make a ton of progress on the Wonderleague website, taking the time to implement the foundation of a small-scale content management system that will allow whoever it is that ends up maintaining the site to easily edit the content. The blog section will be WordPress-based, but the rest of the site will essentially be a pretty frontend for my CMS built around a database of music, video, and upcoming tour dates. So far I’ve built the system by which entries can be added and edited by the administrator. It just occurred to me that I still need to implement a deletion function as well. That’s coming soon. This really isn’t as difficult as I thought it would. I’m getting a lot of incredible PHP practice, and building something really usable that I can put into my portfolio. Keep in mind that it’s really my first time doing something quite like this on such a scale. It’s going well though!

Sweet, rad, everything is awesome.

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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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