you're nice, but I've had nuttier.

(or: reach out and frell someone.)

hullo blog. good, old friend.

sit down and have a piece of cake, compatriots! this is the dawn of a new era-- the era of me blogging (and striped lycra socks!)!

I'm not sure who Sherry is, but I'm sure if she knew what an amiable fellow that I am, she cut a slice of her anniversiary cake for little ol' me. and then hurl it into my nether-regions.

life sure has changed recently. With the new quarter fully swinging like Bea Arthur's oversized purse during a racy New York alley brawl (one which I would hope to attend, popcorn in hand), my schedule has been shot to hell.

before Bea started swinging however, I flew up to Boston to hang out with the Aaron-meister, herein noted as Subject A. we had quite a bucket-load of fun walking in Harvard Square, walking, trying to find Ximian headquarters (which we were unable to find, but found Akamai instead, see fig 1), walking, trying to find El Pelon (which we found, but was closed, see exhibit C), walking, looking for food, etc. Basically, if you juiced Subject A, further noted as Writing 39a, and my adventures (herein noted as "Excellent Adventure"), concentrated it and condensed it in chewable, cherry flavored pill form, printed on the prescription bottle would be "Walking 10000 mg".

Figure 1: Akamai Datacenter

Exhibit A: El Pelon, mysteriously closed hours before it was supposed to be closed

But overall, we had a bunch of fun. Most notably, we caroused with Jonathan North Washington, a few penguins, and with Writing 39a's new girlfriend, Shanna (pic). Good times.

Unfortunately, it was DAMN cold (colder than hell^-1) and I was forced to wear pantalones (not cortos, mind you) and shoes the whole time! Yes, me! Pants! I mean, what kind of totalitarian type of nature would do such things? DAMN YOU MOTHER NATURE!

anyway.

after that marvelous, life-altering event, I began my 7th quarter here at UCI. thank torvalds that I'm only taking 3 classes (plus research), but I'm still having trouble keeping up. My main difficulty is my upper division ICS class, Digital Logic Design. just my luck, in a class thats difficult to start off with, both the TA and the professor have a low capacity for spoken and written English language. You'd figure that a "hotshot" with a PhD could at least come up with a coherent english sentance every few weeks... or months, maybe. Hell, the forces of entropy, the chaos effect and non-dairy creamer combined should force it to be so!

my other classes are pretty normal... I'm really enjoying Sartrean Philosophy (better known as the ontology of phenomenology) and even had an hour-long discussion by pastry lady with Mark Norman (my Math 6c TA who, as a sidenote, is totally my role model) when I should have been studying for that class' midterm.

dog-piled on top of all that other humdrum, my research is progressing well. I completed my SURP propsoal after a few days of editing and was tickled-punk [sic] by the results. shortly after, I turned in my Spring UROP proposal, asking for $1000 for a NVIDIA Quadro4 900 XGL video card and a 5-day pass to SIGGRAPH in August (worth $400) which, fingers, eyes, toes, brain lobes, mevonks, etc tied, I will recieve. presently, I'm working on figuring out the grand quaternion quandry which, if you're even remotely connected to me (whether by physical connection, land-line, telegram, ups, paper cups or remote viewing) you've been hearing the bitchy fallout of my successive failures. I sincerely apologize for my past conduct and the hours, days, months and years that you will hear about it in the future. but, ask yourself, who doesnt want to know that i * k = -1? or that i² + j² + k² = ijk = -1 is the fundamental formula for Quaternion Algebra and that this formula was scratched into Brougham Bridge by William Rowland Hamilton, the coolest alcoholic linguist-mathematician from the 1800's that I know?

Damn, that guy is cool.

Anyway, Writing 39a (Aaron) and I went to buy cds yesterday. To our dismay, we bought sheer crap. Modest Mouse, Mae and The Postal Service all had deceptively good looking covers and such, but its the most "kill me (or how I've said it before, down not across), I'm emo" or "too emo for skin" music ever to grace my ears. I still need to check out Anberlin and a few others that people have mentioned. Wee.

Oh yeah, and Amanda and I are going to see Something Corporate in Ventura on Thursday!!!1 It's going to be awesome, minus the driving and the whole Ventura vibe. Yay! I'm so excited I'm going to piss myself.

I've always grasped the question of who I really am in life. Well, its settled:

Which Golden Girl are you?

I am so not a corporate whore.

when I think of <thing>, I touch myself.

I promised I would blog today and, here I am, going through the motions as usual. today was in-sane. in----sane. Basically, I was awoken by the chirp-chirp of my alarm clock at the wonderful hour of 9. I rushed out of the house, only to be somewhat late to math class and to be dressed identically like Jon. It totally wasn't intended, but it was the only set of khaki dress pants and blue collared shirt that was clean.

math was alright, but I feel like I'm really drifting away from the class, not doing the homework and all. I'm a naughty boy.

ics 151 sucked the nut AGAIN... we found out that the distribution for our class resembled the twin towers... a buttload of Ds and Fs and a pretty large amount of As (around 20) and NOTHING in between. So, in otherwords, I'm basically fucked. I doubt highly that I got an A, and since there arent very many Bs, that puts me at a D or an F. Suckfest.

after ics 151, I dropped by Mari Cruz' office for a little help with my quaternions of doom. Between the two of us, we were unable to figure out the problem. Meh. Supposedly, this is pretty unusual to attempt as most researchers just deal with the gimbal-lock condition by quitting the program and restarting it. Blah. Go reinventing the wheel.

right after my meeting with the doctors, I ran-jogged-walked-crawled in my spiffy outfit and horribly uncomfortable shoes down to the Philleas Banning Alumni House (which is actually quite nice around noon-time) to be there for Jon when he was accepting his award for Biggest Kiss-up... er, Best Research Paper out of something like 24,000 papers. Congrats Jon! But really, I need to be honest here, I was only there for the tea and crumpets and my wonderful hate-laced conversation with Andrea Troyer, my hated Writing 39b professor. Mmm... marmalade... mmpf.

once the clapping had ceased and the country music started 'a-playin, Jon and I skedaddled out the door to greet Kathy. I headed home to crow-bar-off my cement-blocks-for-shoes, repair the shrapnel that had become my feet, change out of my hot and sweaty dress clothes and run to the Vis Lab to help out with a round of camera calibration and visual hull calculations with M.C. Visual Hull (aka Mari Cruz), Mark and Dave. Unfortunately, we had compatibility problems with the aquisition of camera data and called it a night.

settling down at home, I finished up most of my webwork problems for calc (only two alluded me), checked email and now I plan to crash and sleep for another, what, 8 hours, when I have to get my fat ass up and go to Philosophy class, then grab lunch with Jon and head out to see Something Corporate in concert in Ventura. WEEEEE

I so deserve this break. I've been running non-stop for the past week and I am damn tired of it now. However, I still have a bunch of things left outstanding... like:

• Email Mr. Root
• Read 45 pgs of Sartre
• Do Math homework
• Study for ICS 151
• Do ICS 151 Homework
• Quaternions

Oh joy.

fuck you jordan, you make me sick

the procrastination cycle ends HERE.  <~~Yes, right here at this point.

I'm offically cutting off all my access to my "procrastination cycle" like somethingawful.com, peoples xangas, livejournals, and the bane of my sanity, antfriender.com.

If you see me around campus, or wanna chat, I may or may not be online, and if I am, I might be busy, so make it short. I don't mean to be rude, but I need to get at least Bs in these classes... and that is going to be harder than one would think, unfortunately.

See you in three weeks, world!

-Brad