Anxiously Awaiting

Take a look in the upper right hand corner of my site. Isn’t it awesome? I added that little nav bar for the convenience of you, dear reader. After I figure out how to make the links go, make sure to browse through the rules section. Since I am such a kind hearted blog dictator I think people should know why I nuked their comment. This also means that any complaints will be link’d to that page. Hey, I’m all about the people.

In other news, I made a 91 on my 4400 test. Since that was slightly above the average I guess that will do. Next time will be better.

Autumn is my favorite season. But even better is the transition weeks from summer to fall–which I call pseudo-Autumn. I woke up this morning, got ready for school, and stepped outside to a lovely 70 degrees and sunny with a slight cool breeze. Why can’t Georgia weather be like this all the time? I’m convinced that heaven will be an eternity of pseudo-Autumn weather. After putting up with the sweltering Atlanta Summer, the past few days have put me in a wonderful mood.

Cold weather has a number of advantages for me. First is I don’t have to worry about continuous movement when I am in my car. I don’t have Air Conditioning other than TWD, so in order to gain relief from the heat I have to find creative ways to keep my car moving in bad traffic. I get honked at alot. Secondly, girls actually wear clothes! Wow what a concept! It’s hard enough being a guy, so the repercussions of cold weather on fashion is a blessing to me. I don’t have to worry about dodging all 10 of the girls here at Tech who are covering 10% of their bodies with tiny pieces of cloth they call “shorts.”

Modest is hottest anyway.

Ever since I heard Absolution in our producers studio a year ago Muse has been my favorite band. The ridiculous piano, incorporation of electronica, and catchy lyrics of that album led me to buy their entire discography. Needless to say I was not disappointed.

Black Holes and Revalations is the English Trio’s newest addition to their already amazing album line up. Here’s the track listing:

1. Take A Bow
2. Starlight
3. Supermassive Black Hole
4. Map of the Problematique
5. Soldier’s Poem
6. Invincible
7. Assassin
8. Exo-Politics
9. City Of Delusion
10. Hoodoo
11. Knights Of Cydonia

Overall, this album really gets better each time I listen to it. When I first heard the single Suppermassive Black Hole on Muse’s myspace I was suprised. This track sounded like a song out of a pop stars repotoir, but Lord was it catchy. I found myself singing it for the rest of the day.

This album takes you from the deep trance like piano melodies of Map of the Problematique to the driving, outright guitar smackdown of Assassin. Songs like Knights of Cydonia, City of Delusion, and Soldier’s Poem have some obvious spanish overtones–they even throw in some heavy duty brass solos, and throughout this album there are alot of Queen like harmony vocal parts where Matt sings a full chord ranging from low note to falceto.

Overall, with the exception of the politcal overtones, this album is really good. Since I have had a month to digest it I like it way more than when I first heard it, but I still usually skip Take a Bow (way too political) and Hoodoo. If you are new to Muse, this isn’t a bad album to listen too, but I recommend getting Absolution if you are short on cash, or better yet get them both.

Today is the last day of one of Mother Tech’s famous career fairs, and I decided to go and look for my next professional victim. The fun, however, came before that. Since the people who show up to these things are from pretty hardcore firms like IBM, Google, and Intel, it’s probably a pretty good idea to attempt to impress them. So, to my semi-pouting dismay, on goes the monkey suit.

Well, in my case it was khakis, a nice dress shirt, and–blarrrghhh, a tie. The last time I had to wear a tie was at my cousin’s wedding, and amazingly I could never figure out how to tie the piece of crap so I left it at home. It behoves me that something so simple in concept could foil my every attempts at looking somewhat decent.

I was a little late waking so most of my morning was spent in a maelstrom of clothes, toothbrushes, and resumes. Right before my roomate and I were going to head out I realized that I didn’t have my tie; which by the grace of God I only own one of these agitating little pieces of cloth. So I borrowed one from my roomate, and spent the entire time during the drive to school attempting to tie it.

By the time we had made it to Tech, my struggle had intensified to near name calling. Websites like this one didn’t help either. I spent then next thirty minutes in the TSRB trying to get the retarded thing to look half decent on me. Finally my roomates PhD advisor showed me an easy and quick knot that I am 50% sure I remember how to tie. I was victorious!

Even now I look down at the docile piece of ornamental polyester and smile with triumph. For I, from now and until next week, kinda know how to tie a tie.

I just took my first test for the semester. Well, technically it was my second, but Japanese Kanji tests are notorious for being on the suck level of hard for me. Rote memorization is retarded. Or maybe the neurological bus from my perceptual stores to short term memory and long term memory is freakin broken.

Anyway, it was at least my first test that counts. I thought it was very easy, but who knows. I’ll post about my grade on Wednesday. When you have already had some industry experience with professional database implementations, an Intro to Databases class just doesn’t seem to have any teeth.

I feel like a jerk because of something else I did after this particular class today. I had a group consisting of me and 3 ISYE majors for the final project. Note that this is a CS class, and really the only reason I originally grouped up with them was because of my roomate’s girlfriend being in the group. Unfortunately, that means that I would most likely be taking the role of code-monkey on the project. Not that the ISYE’s are inept at writing code or incabable of learning, but I would spend more time teaching them than getting anything done on the project. In other words, I would probably write the whole project myself.

So last week I found two other friends in the class that are both CS majors. They needed a third member, and I wanted a more balanced workload. So today I jumped ship. I feel bad about leaving the ISYE’s all alone, but they do have the option of foregoing the final project and taking the final instead. Either way I think did the right thing for my grade and theirs too–one guy with a schedule like mine won’t write a very functional DB frontend, but I may have made some people mad. Bummer.