Big day at PetCo

Sweet Jeebus, PetCo was busy today! Back to that in a minute, though.

So yeah. I think my math teacher is Dumb. From calling a square root a ‘squiggle’ to forgetting to add a “C” when taking an anti-derivative to making a test that she knew would take more than 90 minutes for a 50 minute class! I’ll admit, I’m no expert in the ways of Trig, Calculus, or math in general (hell, sometimes I have problems with addition/subtraction). And it could be worse… she’s not as dumb as Chris’ CS teacher. But all the same, I’ve had much better math teachers (I’d link to Ray Menegus’ website, but it isn’t much to brag about).

Didja catch that?

Anyway. So yeah. PetCo. I get there, and me and Mollie buy our stuff. A bag of dog food, bag of cat food, a treat for the chinchilla…. and a 50 gallon and 29 gallon aquarium (thats about 30 gallons more than we intended to get…) Yikes. “You saved $94 today!” No really, it was something like $94! Can’t wait to start a salt water tank with my 50… Mollie’s putting some feeder goldfish in the 29, maybe I can talk her into a betta or something for more color.

So anyways, it was crazy. Tons of people came for the grand reopening… and whats even better, the mean customers were few to none! There were one or two annoying ones, but even they seemed less annoying and in fewer number than usual.

Worked with just about everyone today, but I closed with Josh and Lindsay (sp?). Josh I’ve got pegged; he’s a great guy, and funny to boot (“Nice pants.”). Lindsay I’m still trying to figure out. I can usually make just about anyone laugh, but she barely cracks a smile. I’m trying to figure out if she just doesn’t show much in the way of emotions on the outside (maybe she’s not an expressive person?) or if she just finds me vaguely annoying…. oh well.

Well, its about 1:40ish… so I’m gonna hit the sack.

Night all

no good very bad day

Tonight at PetCo was alright (I was there til midnight). I think it was cool cuz it was a lot more laid back than usual for an after-hours shift. Everyone’s really excited about the Grand (Re)Opening that starts tomorrow. All kinds of stuff going on sale! It’s crazy. Mad I say.

Mollie wasn’t feeling too hot, apparently; nor was Tyler Durden too happy with me – I took him in to PetCo to get his nails trimmed.

Well it’s definitly 1 AM… so I’m calling it a night.

damn math

Bah! Math sucks. Bombed another math test today. Studied my ass off, didn’t have any problems with the study guide or the homework.. but the test somehow kicked my ass…. I hope my teacher feels really clever, sitting there with that smirk on her face. She’s possibly one of the worst math teachers I’ve ever had. Who takes roll in a college class? Especially in a 5 day a week class?! Flat out refuses to allow make ups if you miss a day, too. Can’t explain things for beans. Bah, I say.

I’m sorry, Kurt

I have a confession. I’ve always hated Nirvana. More specifically, Kurt Cobain. This is a strange thing for a 20 year old to say; Nirvana was and is a really popular band. An emotional outlet for millions of people my age. But I had my reasons.

I remember the first time I heard them, my cousin Mary was playing their CD, probably Nevermind. “How dumb is this, you can’t even understand what he’s saying.” I never made much of an effort to try to listen to them. Never saw the appeal. Or rather… since I never listened, I never saw the appeal.

Then I listened. I heard a track on the radio by the name of Lithium. I could relate to this. I could hear the message. What? This is Nirvana? So then I listened to some of their other stuff Save Yourself, All Apologies, About A Girl. Their unplugged stuff is nothing short of incredible. All great music.

I still didn’t care for Kurt though. I remember being at a kids *cough* bible study group *cough* (again, with Mary). The group leader told us all that it was ok to be upset right now. “Why?”, I asked. “Kurt Cobain shot himself.”

I remember my thoughts, “What an idiot.” I later found out he had a wife and child. Then I really looked down on him. How could a man leave his wife and kid like that? How selfish. And this is a man that had millions of pictures of himself printed on t-shirts that sadly say “1967-1994”.

Then I caught a small bit of Nirvana on VH1. Found out Kurt was heavy into drugs. “Well, that makes sense then. But why did he have to mess with drugs? He was so successful, could have been so happy. What a waste.”

But then I read this today. It’s an excerpt from one of his journals.

(Note, these obviously aren’t mine. Don’t sue me.)

ABOUT A BOY

I like punk rock. I like girls with weird eyes. I like drugs. (But my Body And mind won’t allow me to take them). I like passion. I like playing my cards wrong. I like vinyl. I like to feel guilty for being a white, American male. I love to sleep. I like to taunt small, barking dogs in parked cars. I like to make people feel happy and superior in their reaction towards my appearance. I like to have strong opinions with nothing to back them up with besides my primal sincerity. I like sincerity. I lack sincerity … I like to complain and do nothing to make things better. I like to blame my parents generation for coming so close to social change then giving up after a few successful efforts by the media & Government to deface the movement by using Mansons and other Hippie representatives as propaganda examples on how they were nothing but unpatriotic, communist, satanic, inhuman diseases. and in turn the baby boomers become the ultimate, conforming, Yuppie hypocrites a generation has ever produced.

Here’s another:

Within the months between October 1991 thru December 92 I have had 4 four notebooks filled with two years worth of poetry and personal writing … The most violating thing ive felt this year is not the media exxagerations or the catty gossip, but the rape of my personal thoughts. Ripped out of pages from my stay in hospitals and aeroplane rides hotel stays etc. I feel compelled to say f—k you F—k you to those of you who have absolutely no regard for me as a person. You have raped me harder than you’ll ever know.

Wow. Now I understand. And I feel so bad for not giving him a chance sooner. He was so beyond troubled, and everything he did, all he became, all of his successes only made it worse. It wasn’t like this was a man who was just fucked up all the time, and on drugs for fun. He was a smart person, dedicated. He turned to drugs to try to alleviate physical pain, not just his depression.

Apparently, next month a group of these are going to be published in a book called “Journals”. I don’t know that this is ok, or if Kurt would want it to happen (especially after reading the above entry). But there’s a chance, I think, that Kurt would want his fans to know why he did what he did, and then to move on. He didn’t want to be some Pop Culture icon – he just wanted his message to get out. He wanted to tell someone who cared.

I’m sorry Kurt, I underestimated you.

Math sucks… in a good way.

hmmph. couldn’t run a program over the network… I know I’m close now, though… I just need to figure out a way to tell the computers here at school how to find my computer at home. My home computer can’t connect to the school’s X-Server for some reason. Rather annoying.

So Bio201 sucked. Boring stuff today. Math was boring, and yet interesting…. We talked about Newton’s Method. Newton’s Method lets you find an approximation of a point where a line crosses the X-axis (ie, X-intercept).

It’s really a genius little algorithim… it works like this:

Take a line: y=2x^3+4x^2-1

Where’s it going to cross the X axis? Well, _y_ is going to be negative at x=0 (y=-1). It’s going to be positive at x=1 (y=5).

So the line crosses the X axis somewhere between 0 and 1, right? Right.

Plug a number (we’ll call it _z_) between 0 and 1 into this equation:

a=z+(y(z)/y`(z))

alternatively it looks like this:

y(z)

----- + z = a

y`(z)

where y(z) is the equation of the the line _y_ at point _z_, and y`(z) is the derivative of the line _y_ at point _z_.

and you get an approximation, _a_. _a_ is a point between 0 and 1 on the X-axis, that is relatively close to the X-intercept. Now, thats a fair approximation, but it could be really far off. So let’s plug our _a_ into that same equation, as _z_ this time.

We’ll get another _a_, probably different from the first one. This one should be closer to the X-intercept. Now here’s the kicker – you can keep doing this for as long as you like, and you will keep getting closer and closer to the right answer. The more the _a_ values start looking alike, the closer and closer you are.

That’s killer! I’ll explain better *why* it works later. But it’s a really clever little idea. Why does it suck? Well, cuz its math, silly. And why bother doing all that crap, when you can plug it into your calculator and get the right answer quicker? You’ll probably want to use a calculator to get the answer anyways when you divide!

No, the really cool part is that this would make a really neat program to write. You could do it it C, C++ or Java or something… you’d have to make a few sub-routines (functions, methods, whatever you like to call em) and a library backend wouldn’t be a bad idea for taking derivatives of stuff. It’s a great beginner to intermediate program to work on.

So its another one to try on a lazy day.

Sorry it was so long, I had to cram an hour’s lecture into a single journal entry.

Dating, D-land, Dorms, Databases

Another week. Still nothing new. Most of you probably know I talked to Michelle, and most of most of you know how it went. Yeah. Don’t really know what to add to that. I obviously was hoping for something else, but at least it didn’t make things weird. (I hope…?)

Of course, that leaves me with a feeling of monotony. Ya know, that “Same-shit-different-day” thing. Dunno what to do. What does one do when one can’t get a date…. ever? Well? You can’t blame anyone but yourself – it’s not the other person’s fault they don’t like you the same way. I don’t want to lay blame on anyone else, anyway. I want to figure out whats wrong, and fix it. I love having friends… its just sometimes I wish that wasn’t *all* I had.

This asking random people out thing that people talk about seems so weird to me; I just can’t see myself doing that. I don’t *want* to do that. Who wants to date a person they don’t know? I mean, you don’t want to start out knowinh everything about them… I can see where that would take a lot of the interesting parts of it. Agh, what would I even *begin* to know about dating? Nothing. Whatever. That’s enough for one night.

In other news.

Disneyland is on. Michelle found a sweet suite (sorry. had to.) and Mollie reserved it today. So we’re on. November 15-17 we’ll be in Anaheim. It’s gonna be awesome… maybe we can find one more person to go, to split the costs. It’s so funny, Chelle (who’s never been) and Mollie are just nuts about it. Still not sure about California Land, but we’ll just have to see, I suppose…

Let’s see, what else?

Oh! I think (95%) I’ve figured out how to run programs through X-Windows over a network. That means I can run a program from my computers here at home, on any computer with an X-server installed (most importantly the Linux terminals at school) (yay). This isn’t *that* big a deal… I would have been able to do this years ago, except for the stupid firewall in the Dorms. Damn dorms.

Anyways, I’ve got more ideas planned for this little chunk of 1’s and 0’s… I’m thinking of doing something similar to the Everything2 database. Except by hand. It’ll be good. Just you wait.

Anyways… good night for now. More tomorrow, probably.

Bill

Also…. added Everything2.com and slashdot.org to the links….

the next day

I’m at school right now. So yesterday had its ups and downs. Did a little remote admin for Tres on Linux – got his USB mouse working in some beta version of Mandrake 9.0. That’s kinda neat, seeing as how I’ve never used anything USB in linux (and only once in win98, heh). Turns out he needed to do a

modprobe usbmouse

to get it working (usbmouse being the name of the driver). Then we just had to tell his computer to do that everytime.

vi /etc/modules

and adding

usbmouse

then a reboot and it worked perfectly. I was quite impressed with myself.

Chelle, Mollie, and I are going to D-Land in November, probably for the weekend of 15-17. That’s gonna be cool. She (Michelle) has apparently never been there – weird.

We’re (Chelle and I) going to a play at Grossmont tonight, I have (as usual, hehe) no idea what its about, or what its called. But I haven’t been disappointed with her movie/play decisions yet, so no worries. Actually… I recall something about a girl who got pregnant and these pre-lifers kidnap her and force her to have the baby instead of an abortion. I think. We’ll see.

Other than that, I think I’m going to reinstall Win98 tonight… I’m certainly due for it… I keep getting that bug where my Start button changes colors, pictures, etc… I’ll have to take a screenshot and post it sometime. After Win98, it’d be time to reinstall Source Mage Linux (hardcore time, again…) and then Mandrake. Eventually, I want to try Lycoris, and RedHat8, too.

Yes, I am a nerd.

By the way…. if anyone knows of someone trying to sell their old Mac let me know.

Time for class

Fear != Inexperience

I gave it some thought last night, (you know, the long sleepless kind) and it occured to me; I don’t think fear is the problem…

I think that its inexperience… I have no idea what I’m doing, therefor nothing ever happens. Rather than fumbling around, I just wait… until I know, until someone gives me that experience. Because, really, I have no idea how to go about it.

Of course, there’s a small amount of fear, there always is, I think. You don’t want to mess anything up, and you’re afraid you might. But its not the driving factor; at least, it hasn’t been for a long time.

I saw a movie last night with Christopher Walken and another guy whom I don’t know but I know I’ve seen before. This guy (Jimmy was his character) walks by this girl in a club. They make eye contact and he goes over to her. He says to her, “Are you in love?”

“Why?”, she asks.

“Because, if you’re in love, I won’t bother. I’m not the type of man that would get in the way of another man’s happiness”

Ok, so it sounded pretty smooth at the time. But you gotta admit it has a certain style (despite it being a movie). That says “I know what I’m doing, and what I want.” It shows experience… not two failed on-line relationships. Anyways, its way past time for me to get on with it, and just blunder my way through it.

Hmmmm

so its about 1 am, at dad’s house and I think I’ve finally got this formatted in a way I somewhat like (not sure about the color scheme just yet…)

Looking around for a way to use Frames, but it doesn’t look like it’s possible (or at least easy). I’d really like that bottom banner to be stuck on the bottom of the page….

Anyways, let me know what you think… about the colors, or the layout or whatever…. I’m going to start adding actual content soon….