Today I registered for the spring semester at MTU. I decided I should finish up the general education credits so I'm taking a few of those and then some computer science classes. I also still need four PE classes so I'm going to do two more of those this semester. Both of them are skiing of course.

Monday
CS4121: Programming Languages
CS4711: Intro to Software Engineering

Tuesday
HU3701: Philosophy of Technology
HU3120: Technical and Scientific Communication
CS4461: Computer Networks

Wednesday
CS4121: Programming Languages
CS4711: Intro to Software Engineering
PE0320: Advanced Downhill Skiing

Thursday
HU3701: Philosophy of Technology
HU3120: Technical and Scientific Communication
CS4461: Computer Networks
PE0220: Intermediate Downhill Skiing

Friday
CS4121: Programming Languages

Fridays will be nice with only one class. We'll see how it goes.

Labels: mtu, school

Halloween is quickly approaching and I think it might be one of the coolest "holidays". A bunch of scary movies are in theaters, scary video games come out, Halloween specials are on TV, and there are decorations on people's homes. This year my parents made this spooky looking fence for our house (picture below). Anyone who has seen my dorm room or apartment in the past two years knows my dad likes to make things out of PVC pipe, because it's easy to take apart and reassemble. Well this fence is made from PVC pipe. It doesn't look like it at all, does it? They did a great job. Oh, the picture was taken by my brother Todd.



Not too much else new lately. The Office was a rerun this week which totally ruined my Thursday. I've become addicted to that show after buying season 1 and 2. Getting the full story so far is a lot better than just part of it, everything makes more sense in the current episodes.

I register for the spring semester of school on Monday. So far it looks like I'll be taking two humanities courses, to get all of my required general stuff done, and then three or four computer science classes depending on what I think I can handle. I'm also going to take a bunch of PE credits because I need four more classes in order to graduate. Winter is the best time, in my opinion, for PE classes. I'm planning on taking intermediate and advanced skiing which basically means show up at the hill and then go do whatever you want. It'll be fun to be forced to ski 4 hours a week. I may also be taking another bowling class, we'll see.

It looks like I'll be able to see the Packers again this week since the Vikings play on Monday night. It will be nice since I just bought new speakers for my TV and since we get the digital Fox HDTV station it will look and sound awesome. Now the Packers just have to come through and beat a crappy team (Cardinals).

Labels: halloween, packers, school, the office

So I decided I should finally post on here again. Really there hasn't been much to post about. It's been kind of cold out lately so I haven't done any Geocaching or anything like that or explored any strange places. I should have done more of that during the summer I guess.

I did buy seasons 1 and 2 of The Office though, since I got some Best Buy gift certificates for using our reward zone card when I bought my TV a while ago. I figured it was a good excuse to buy The Office. Season 2 is really good. After watching all the episodes it makes the newer ones a lot better since you pick up on things you didn't know about before that are really jokes from past episodes.

I've been playing around with my older computer that I have here by using it as a server development environment for some php development I've been doing. I really don't know php so when I do things wrong I don't really want it to be on someone else's server but mine instead, so it's easier to tell what is happening. It's pretty useful too because I don't need to upload the files anywhere. Ubuntu is really great, I really love how they are pretty much the only distribution that realizes they need to make everything easy for people.

We saw The Prestige at the theater on Friday. It was actually pretty good. The movie has a few things you have to think about and I won't say what they are, but it will definitely keep you wondering during the movie. This weekend was mostly movie filled as well. I saw about half of War of the Worlds and then Batman Begins and part of The Island today. Mostly I like watching the movies on the HD stations, it looks really good. Since the Vikings were playing at a different time than the Packers this week I actually got to watch it on TV. I don't know if I mentioned this before or not, but football in HD is WAY better than standard definition. You think that the announcers are full of crap when they tell you that all the time but they aren't. After seeing games in HD it's almost hard to watch them when they aren't.

Labels: high definition, movies, php, programming, the office

It's been a while since my last post. You'd think I'd have a lot to post about but I don't really. I went home to Green Bay this past weekend so I could pick up a few things and got to see Jackie, Chad, and Ryan who were all home for the weekend as well. That was pretty nice, since I never get to see anyone anymore.

Yahoo is making a digital time capsule that they are planning to beam into space in about a month. It's an interesting idea. If you want to be floating around in space, you can contribute items to it on that website.

It's supposed to snow in Houghton tomorrow and Thursday. The weather service even says it will accumlate. Pretty crazy, I wish I was there. Rochester is only going to get flurries on Thursday, according to ForecastFox. The weather is strange here, it will be perfect out and then all of a sudden start pouring out or hailing. So we'll see what happens.

I bought a book on AJAX programming yesterday so I could learn how to do all these fancy tricks that modern websites are using. I'm actually trying to read the book from cover to cover, since I really don't know anything about the technologies that AJAX uses (Javascript, CSS, DOM). It's actually a decent read, even if it is 600 pages. Maybe I'll make some improvements on this site after I read it. I have some ideas of stuff to make with AJAX too, so hopefully this book helps me out with that.

Labels: AJAX, friends, green bay, programming, snow

The Killers are releasing their newest CD this week, I believe. Hopefully it's as good as their last one. I hope it's a bit longer though, their last CD is way too short.

I downloaded a demo of the game Lego Star Wars II for XBox 360 the other day and thought it was one of the most hilarioius and unique games I had ever played. The demo features one of the levels in the game, the Mos Eisley Spaceport. After spending a good deal of time playing the demo and reading about the game, I decided to get it. Apparently there are many different hidden doorways and interesting puzzles to solve during the game, which will keep me playing it for a while. There are also TONS of characters. While there is little difference between some of them, it's still cool how there are so many. The coolest part of this game is how it follows the story lines of each of the older Star Wars movies. You are treated with entertaining cut scenes between episodes which give the basic run down of what is happening. The characters do not talk but the developers gave them a very good sense of humor instead. Combining the unique style of Legos with Star Wars and humor is a winning combination.

Since I've already made a geek out of myself this post, I'll just continue to do so. I also downloaded the demo of the new Sonic the Hedgehog game for XBox 360. I had heard it had some camera angle issues, which pretty much every 3D Sonic game has had so I didn't think too much of it. Well let me say that the demo is HORRIBLE. Maybe I'm just not playing the game how it was intended, but the level is extremely poorly designed. If you don't do exactly what is asked of you at a certain point you will most certainly die. This wouldn't be a big problem to me except that you can't even see what you're about to do because the camera angle is so bad all the time. Sega has a LOT of work to do before getting this game to the point where it doesn't suck. Graphically it looks pretty good, but there is a lot to do still to fix the gameplay.

The third demo I tried this weekend was called F.E.A.R. It stands for first encounter something something. This game has a lot of potential. It's a first person shooter but the controls are really sensitive. So much that I had to turn the sensitivity WAY down so I could even aim my character in the right direction. It's really cool when you fight enemies in this game though. They jump over obstacles, hide behind stuff, and they die very dramatically. There is also a feature similar to bullet time, like The Matrix. The demo starts like a game where you just are against some military group but then it freaks you out by having these ghostly characters appear and disappear at unexpected times. For example, you start going down a ladder and turn around and there's a little girl in a red dress looking right at you and then she suddenly disappears. The weirdest part is when you are suddenly in a hallway where the ceiling appears to be a pool of blood and as you walk down the hall weird stuff happens and the little girl appears and disappears again. Messed up game.

Labels: music, sonic, xbox 360