First Week of School

Tired, busy, bored, along with anticipating a ramp up later, this is how I feel about school after a week. Well, technically a week, but with school starting with a half week it doesn't quite mean as much as a week would normally entail. Why not start on a Monday? I have no idea. While it doesn't make much sense to me, there's probably a decent reason for it, though.

Frustrated

Frustrated. In a word, that is my feeling towards this blog at the moment. I start a post, get anywhere from just the outline of what I want to write about, to almost fully writing out, sometimes even proofreading to prepare for publication, and, nearly without fail, I run across some article that utterly eradicates my entire logic foundation. Of course, this probably reflects on the quality of my research, but this has happened on even my very well researched articles.

The issue is that I do not have enough time, or, at least, I don't allocate enough, to research as much as I want or need to do what I consider adequate. As I already mentioned, I read a lot, but not focused research—to be honest, the reading I do daily is more entertainment to me than education. THERE. If I had held back that particular post until I realized that my reading is entertainment for me, I might have never published it.

About now is about when I sputter out and have no more points or content to put in the post. Two paragraphs, they feel so unsubstantiated, and so lonely. Perhaps that is all I should strive for, two paragraphs.

I started this blog as a way to... hmm, I'm not entirely sure on that. I suppose it was to have a platform to showcase my programming and math work, but neither have been producing results like I want. Perhaps I merely need to post more often—a more constant stream of smaller posts.

To finish positively, Rampant Intelligence has allowed me to practice writing, so that will help me when writing essays for school. Speaking of school, I need to go to bed; 8am comes quickly and I have a long day ahead of me. Perhaps with the start of school I will have enough downtime between classes to effect an uptick of posting on here.

Google Reader

"I recently read an article that said..."

That is an oft-used phrase of mine that you'll no doubt hear when passing time with me. I normally read for at least an hour a day, frequently in the range of two to three hours. My RSS feed reader, Google Reader, says I've read nearly 5,000 items over the one and a half years I've been using it. Of course, those 5k items do not include the in-line links in the article's text, nor the tangent subjects I read about because the article happened to mention it, which usually results in a lengthy visit to Wikipedia. Tangent: I wish I had statistics on the Wikipedia articles I've read—they would probably be quite interesting.

Other than my edification, I don't directly benefit from this reading; it is just something I do. You might have heard about those people who get 100% of their news from the Internet. I'm one of them. Here's how I do it and keep track of what I've read and what I haven't.

Visual Studio Express

I had been making good progress on project Unison, getting about three-fourths of the messages out of the game successfully. I had noticed a particular one fairly early, but decided to delay tackling it until later because it looked to be a symptom of other, smaller bugs. Finally, I had to tackle this bug; for some reason, a message would completely stop in the middle, but only after several messages had been sent in quick succession, and it would fix itself a few messages later. It's probably something to do with a loop condition or data integrity check; however, I can't figure it out because Visual Studio C# Express 2010 doesn't support multi-threaded debugging.

wuts up?

I can't stand that phrase when it is used as a greeting. I can never figure out whether the speaker means it literally or merely using the phrase as a greeting. Normally, I try to strike a middle ground with a one sentence overview of what I'm doing, but that frequently seems awkward, especially when the speaker keeps walking on or focuses on something else immediately after uttering that phrase.

Traditional phone lines and TV going the way of the dodo?

Are we approaching the day when TV and phone lines are obsolete? Phone landlines are on the way to being obsolete. TV still has a significant amount of inertia to overcome, especially with DVRs so prevalent, but it could happen. I can already get all the services I would normally get from TV and a phone line from the Internet. They sometimes aren't as polished—if that can truly be said about some of the service my provider, Comcast, gives—as services that the incumbent companies give, but the Internet is increasingly approaching it.

General Grammar Irks and Two Specific Things

I always cry a little inside, and express my distaste a little more overtly in some cases, whenever I visit Facebook and internet forums that have comments with absolutely no vestige of grammar or even spelling. I always wonder if the poster actually wants to be misconstrued when he leaves his post with no punctuation.