I should handle my own pants.

Damian exercised some of his free time by hanging up this humungo load of laundry I did over the past two days. I thought it was fair, since he wears my clothes too. Closet communist. Anyway, I opened my mouth and had Something Wondrous come out. I can't believe I actually said this with what I thought was a level head.

That sort of thing comes out of your mouth, and "...when you hear it, your brain comes to a screeching halt. Your left hemisphere goes to your right hemisphere, and says, 'It's dark in here...'

"'...And we may die.'" -- Lewis Black, taken only slightly out of context. I've used that quote once before, in a much more appropriate manner.

Computability: Day the First

Today I got to sample the new facilities of Evergreen. The school spent at least two years building the Seminar II building, and the results are slick. Rooms have projector screens built in, often projectors too, and the windows have built in black screens that roll down over them when the projector screen goes down. The lecture halls also blow my socks off in looking like actual lecture halls. That, however, would probably be nothing big to all of you, but to me it's huge. I spent last year studying mathematics in a cleaned-up wet lab for the chemistry and/or physics programs, amidst a little fog of chalk. The change in setting is quite welcome.

Unfortunately, none of the three professors I have this year attended the seminar on how to use the Seminar building. That's one point for irony. So, they spent a half hour this morning frantically trying to figure out why (professor) Sherri's Linux laptop couldn't log on to the network. In other words, seventy people (from both DtoI and Computability) watched their computer science professors have their presentations trounced by technology. While most could easily sympathize with their pain & anguish…Irony: 2. Professors: 0.

The day was good otherwise. I'm taking Discrete Math, but by contract instead of in the kinda-slow-for-a-math-student, lower-division course. This means I get a lovely two-hour break between Curry (programming) lectures and Curry labs. I spent today's break reading out of a Dover-edition Discrete Math text. Yes, it was for fun, before you ask. I actually stumbled upon something that sounds a bit silly, but is nevertheless profound: The Proof of Proof by Induction. It is an elegant paragraph, and I'm glad it graced the pages of that cheap, cheap textbook.

Not all of today was good, though. The programs crammed into the ACC, and got a "How to Log On" lecture from a guy who hadn't even set up our accounts right. Of course, he didn't realize something had gone wrong until about a minute after nearly everybody's hand went up in the lab asking for logon assistance. I sorta get the feeling he has a "King of the Computers" admin-persona; I drew that from his eyes, never more than 5/16^ths open. Or maybe he just doesn't sleep much. Anyways, he eventually found the error he made and announced it, and all was OK.

Back to happier times, I scrapped the Upper Division seminar for Computability. Happy times, trust me. It's hardcore philosophy: Plato, Descartes, Hofstadter...seven texts in all, including the 5 lb. Gödel, Escher, Bach. That just screamed "Time Sink" to me, and after last year's Math Philosophy, I felt like I had had enough. I'll get my Humanities somewhere else, when I have the time for it. Instead, I'm taking a Unix seminar! Yay! My SPSCC Unix knowledge was woefully dwindled, anyway; classes tend to do that after 3 years if there's nowhere to practice the material.

I still need a way to generate a weekly schedule in an HTML table...or something electronic. My whiteboard will soon be the site of a turf war between my need to schedule myself (drawing a big week's layout) and my urges to sketch out theorems.

I should probably head to bed now. I'm adjusting myself to a "Sleep" schedule that allows me to get up at 7 in the morning. I haven't had a 9 o'clock class for a year, and am now spoiled to reparation. Day 1 of getting up early resulted in an OK day at school, but less than moderate at work: Curtis and I had a ping-pong match, 36 points scored, and only two rallies lasted more than three hits. It seems that I need to get better sleep, and I need to arrive before 3 so Curtis isn't sluggish from the day's work. I hope tomorrow has at least one five-return rally.

Evaluation Day for Java

I was up 'til 3 last night working on my self-evaluation for the Java course, thinking I would get it out in final form on Evergreen letterhead. Unfortunately, there's something pretty not cool about Evergreen's form's: here, the forms are available only for two versions of PC MSWord, and one version of Mac MSWord, none of which I have. So, I was up 'til 3 for a rough draft. Oh well. I imagine the Word 2000 will be compatible with WordXP, but I didn't want to try anything that would muck up Office. Reinstalling Office is not pretty.

The actual evaluation this morning went swimmingly. I was afraid Neal would be greatly disapproving of the point that I copied a lot of my work out of the book. He's actually for the notion of building off of working code; the data structures I developed had to have some code written by me, and that was dandy. Besides, I successfully completed one programming lab that used a Hash table, with external storage in a DoublyLinkedList. He was happy. Him being happy means I'm happy.

So, now, I have to touch up my rough draft for entry to my record, and then after that I'm finished with Java… at least, until December. I still want to try that server-side JAR archive comment-system for Excess Celery, no matter how sensical PHP and/or CGI sound. After intensely studying Java for fourteen weeks, I should at least know how to make a JAR and an applet, no?

Anyways, I'm finished with Java. That means my evenings are now free! …for GRE reviewing and practicing for OCO and SOGO. Well, at least I have some breathing room. I may take an eve' or two off from serious thought: Fable came in the mail. Damian convinced me to impulse-buy that when he told me about the record for punting objects, including chickens and heads. I'll just burn a day or two on it. Honest.

Tomorrow, I plan to relax by going to work for the full day. 8-5, with a lunch break. I've never done that. The one time I showed up to work before 8:00 was the day they interviewed me. I've sporadically arrived between 10 and 1, thanks to a poor sleep schedule and poor notion of scheduling myself to begin with.

One day, I showed up at 9:00 (driving Damian to SPSCC or something). This was two months into working there. Every single person in the office, when they saw me, looked at me, then slowly turned to the nearest clock. It was kinda creepy, because it just so happened that everyone saw me when the clock was on their right, so I saw three people do the exact same bodily motion.

So tomorrow, I'm going to be there the whole day. I'll try to convince Pete, Curtis & Joe to have a Doubles match at ping-pong, as that was much fun the day we did it. Oh, and there's something I did today that I am begrudgingly forced to tell to the world:

To one side of the ping-pong table, on a mini-wall structure, there is an inverted CD spindle cover, housing the supply of spare ping-pong balls. I took a practice swing today at a ball with one of the oversized paddles, and it spun with great torque right into the spindle cover. And nobody was there to see it.

The coolest things in life happen when nobody's watching.

End of Java Course

Thursday morning, I'm going in for an evaluation meeting with my professor. By two hours after that meeting, I'll be done with my Java course in Data Structures and Syntax. Hoo boy ho boy. The only reason I find this concerning is that I've discovered that NetBeans encodes CRLF characters in something Notepad doesn't read. So, if my computer science professor is so archaic as to use NotePad as the end-all text editor, this evaluation conference will suck.

I've discovered that FireFox reads all text files just fine, though. So huzzah! I only need to insert line breaks in all of the text files containing my exercises.

...(2 hours later, after several pleasant distractions)...

David saved the day once again. He helped me (both of us, actually) discover that WinSCP will convert linebreaks in files from Unix to DOS, or whatever system you're transferring from and to. It'll translate linebreaks if the text file is transferred as Text, and not Binary. There's a useful utility for these hundred code files I would have otherwise been unable to discuss.

I feel smarter every time I talk with David. Seriously. He showed me this great page on Ruby, good for everybody (including non-programmer folk). Highly entertaining, too, if you read through to the end.

I'd like to spend some time on Ruby scripting eventually; maybe even set up a Wiki at work to keep track of all the things we need to fix in our Query Analyzer systems. The Wiki was another of David's ideas, and sounds greatly effective. Pete bought a whiteboard about a month ago, and we all used that for a while, but we eventually ran out of space; it's blocked solid with a "To Do" list. We no longer cross things off of the list and revel in the glory of finishing something, but instead scrounge for space with an eraser. We're going to have a picnic the day we have the room to draw a grand picture on that board. (Note: I may have made that sound like we're a bunch of inefficient types, but that is not the case. Trust me. The board is actually loaded with "Features-to-Be" at the moment.)

Tomorrow, I'm not going to work (LGAN). I need to work (Java). Then this weekend, I really work (potentially six hours of GRE practice). I actually gave some thought to scheduling everything I need to do before the Math GRE, which is the great Work Milestone at the moment, and according to a weekly layout which I have no idea how to present graphically, I get a max of 8 hours of sleep every night if I'm efficient. I mean every night, especially if I still want to get a paycheck. Wish me luck.

What to do next year?

This may surprise some of you, but as soon as I finish this Java contract I'm on, I will be one credit shy of being a "Super Senior" at Evergreen. After this year, I'm graduating, with a BABS degree. (Edit: Cassie has supplied an alternate definition of a BABS degree.) This means I'll be off to Graduate school next year.

I've been giving where I'm going to Grad. school...too little thought. In a sucky sort of irony, my preparations for the GREs, among/buried under my other work, have left me in an ill state to choose a school. The only idea I've had for the past four months has been the University of CA, Santa Cruz. That recommendation came to me from my dad, who went to about 11 colleges and grad. schools before gettings his Ph.D. He said it's like a pleasant Olympia day, every day of the year, except for one month which rains like No Other.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure how well I would do down therewith the background I have. I want to study something between Statistics and Computer Science, but I don't have the background for either -- Computer Science, I may have room to dabble in after this year (with nowhere near the background of some people), and my one Statistics class on my record is now a joke. ...Well, the class isn't a joke, and was actually interesting when I was taking it, but it's a 100-level course (MATH108), and the knowledge is 5 years old. I barely remember how to calculate the probability of drawing a Royal Flush in poker; I mean, I can calculate it, but the Combination notation is lost to the annals of my brain.

So, my dad and I talked again about schooling, and this is now the most likely course of action for fall of 2005: I will apply to the UW's Statistics Ph.D. program. I don't think I'll have to find a thesis for a year or two, and by then I'll know if I want to continue my studies there or move on to somewhere else. More likely than not I'll finally get out of Washington for schooling; but I just don't feel like I'll be strong enough of an applicant to most schools. Two years in college with two degrees resulting may sound impressive, but I'm never sure of how experienced that really makes me look in the eyes of a university's Registration Office.

I will apply to other schools this year; at the moment, all I can think of are UCSC, for the nice locale; Stanford, because I took Calculus C from a division there, so I may have a "Foot in the door," so to speak; and...that's all I've had time to think of so far. I haven't done what most of you did for college, and investigated any campi -- nor will I have time to do that as I study Computability Theory, work at LGAN, and play in OCO and SOGO for the rest of the academic year.

I hope all this being busy makes me look like a good applicant. I can see it easily tricking me into making a decision that would entail a much-less-than-enjoyable year.

Here's what I would enjoy: Not going to graduate school yet. I'd love to take a year off and work for Joe at LGAN; I've loved the work I've done this summer, and there's a lot more I could be doing, and a lot more I could've done if not for my irregular sleep schedule -- a side-effect of Java, if you'd pardon the pun. If I knew SAS, I would probably be doing back-end programming along with front-end. I'd love to take a year off of school and just work full-time. Note how I tried to make that sound like a vacation; it would be.

Unfortunately, business before pleasure (or business before business, in this case). Education, then career: That was my plan, and I should really stick to it. Otherwise, I might realize that I've been working too damned hard for the past three years and dash any chances of submitting myself to that punishment again for a Master's and/or Ph.D. In other words, (words I've used before), I'd better get myself off to Grad. school before I realize what I'm doing.

FDA and Anti-Depressants

This article was published on the bottom of the front page of today's Olympian:
http://www.theolympian.com/home/news/20040910/topstories/141385.shtml.

I'd really like to know why there is no reason given that the FDA blocked the ugly-for-business data. It truly just looks like government pushing along businss as it sees fit -- ESPECIALLY since some of the companies were considering being responsible and publishing the data.

I'm also not surprised at seeing Zoloft and Paxil in the list of ineffective [for children] drugs. I've gotten comment spam at least twice a day for two weeks now with those two names floating through it. At this point, I wonder if that spam is being generated by spammers who are maliciously manipulating Google for malice's sake, or if it's being generated by companies who really think that polluting the internet with their name will help sales. In either case, seeing that name in millions of places it wasn't expected or desired is really just bad publicity for the companies; I hope they all realize that at some point and knock it off.

For the Composer of the Rattler's Narrative

To regular readers of Forest-Shaded Howls: In writing about the events of Olympia Chamber Orchestra during my first year in the group, I was freely dealing stinking opinions of the contemporary compositions. I usually used The Rattler's Narrative as an example of something that made no sense to me and didn't seem worthy of praise; I used this piece as a negative example in seven entries. On the last entry, about 20 days after I published it, the composer found out about all of this amazing negative publicity for that piece, radiating from someone in the Olympia Chamber Orchestra. I don't give any doubt to his method of finding me -- I was, and right now still am, the only relevant Google hit for The Rattler's Narrative (at least, on the first page). Understandably, he had two cents to give, and wrote me a letter, located here, as the last comment on the page.

I saw that letter almost exactly a minute after I woke up the same morning. I got started on a response immediately, but was eventually sidetracked by work and school. I can't bring myself to write a word on an OCO update until I have this business from last year, that I rudely provoked, taken care of.

This is my response.

To the composer, Richard Burkhardt:

As you gave me the courtesy of identifying yourself right off the bat, I shall try to let you know who I am. There is a name here but it may jog your memory to let you know that I am the tall violist of OCO that volunteered to sing bass in The Rattler's Narrative. This may seem like I two-facedly gave you a slight stabbing in the back; however, I volunteered because of a lack of available performers, and I absolutely abhor a show lacking because of no performers' interest. I did my part to assure a smooth show; what the orchestra did and did not do, however, remains completely distinct of that, and really their own issue. So please understand, the only insulting orchestra member who wrote badly about the piece on the internet (myself) does NOT officially represent the opinions of anybody, save himself. I would like to note at this time that as this is a personal weblog, I really can't claim representing opinions of anybody but myself.

This weblog, as a [not-so] private journal, is my freedom to record my thoughts, to inform others, and/or to be a complete jerk. Every person on the internet is entitled to do any, all, or none of the above. I do apologize that I took this right far outside of polite context in quite a few cases, however. I had to check for myself to see if I did say you "sucked." I realize now that I did crassly throw you and Ms. Warde unto and under that adjective; that was overstepping my boundaries of discussion of people, and for that I do apologize. I had intended to express my sour opinion, once again, on the composition that parts of the OCO played. Some of what I said about your work also was uncalled for (citing myself, "Contempocrap"); I also apologize to you and Ms. Warde for those stinking excerpts.

What I wrote about the pieces was born out of an extreme clash of tastes. While I acknowledge that there are people, particularly yourself, who enjoy modern compositions, and who enjoy mixing politics and abstract music into them, I believe I have expressed many times on this weblog that I am not one of those people. (I don't suspect you to be a regular enough reader to know that, but I'd like to note that I have stated that before.) I personally believe that this music which is so far abstracted from the relatively "Simple" world of themes, melodies, and form is doomed -- doomed to be lost to archives of academia as the political themes evolve away; and as the few people intimate with the pieces either die (taking their familiarity with them) or forget, the music will be left behind like so much poetry, and difficult to approach without appropriate training and background. This belief may stem from my shallow inability to appreciate poetry and most other expressive arts from people I don't know that aren't wholly amazing or perfectly-enough written; that is also an issue of time vs. sheer mass of subject matter.

However shallow that may make me, I won't say I'm an automatic fan of fame. I did not look forward to Mr. Staebler's piece because he was famous. That may have appeared to be the case, since he was the only composer OCO commissioned with a compositional history introduced to the orchestra in the year I've been there -- I apologize if we were informed of your background and my memory has omitted it. The point is, Mr. Staebler's fame wasn't a hooking point of his work, but the point that he was invited back for more compositions in countries around the world showed he had a moderately received reputation. As for the piece he composed for us, you've already read what I had to say about that.

I've let my opinion be open on the internet, exposed to anybody who would view it. I take risks by doing that, as your fairly deserving letter shows. However, I take the same risks as a performing musician (somewhat riskier because I am a student of mathematics, not music). I am open to the public's eye, and they have every right to say I have a good timbre, a good volume -- or that I suck. That's the risk every artist takes -- to have some member(s) of the population think his/her work just, "Wasn't up to par," or however they may so decide to express that phrase. Of course, as the most vocal negative critic you had with that one work, I won't try to deny you your write to respond to what I wrote, over the last 7 months or now. I do regret writing critical words about you as a person; I actually happened to find you pleasant to listen to, in that interlude between concerts. So, in response to your letter, I will edit out what I wrote about you, but as for the rest, I believe it would be cowardly to remove what I bore. I will note that what I wrote on this blog are my own thoughts, independent of the OCO, and anybody who takes offense to my severity can read this (hardly brief) correspondence.

As for your two last questions, I have the quirky answer for the penultimate: A "Swing Jig" is a move in East-Coast Swing Dancing, where the two partners are chest to chest, slightly on each others' right, and rhythmically kicking through each others' legs. It is a move done when you're familiar and friendly with your partner, for obvious male security reasons. In a political setting, admittedly the Swing Jig doesn't exist, and serves only to suggest an intimacy of some degree with the social topic. That is an example of the less-than-stellar writing and phrase-coining to be found on my blogs from time to time. However, this is a personal journal, free of rigorous standards -- for better or worse.

And, on the ultimate question: Great experiences in a group, to be remembered, cherished, and retold (or reperformed), are probably one of the greatest things we can do socially. While I do hold that notion dear, I fear that the OCO last year wasn't the place for a "Cherished Experience," by your account. My less-than-friendly commentary on your work probably exemplifies that. I do admire that you at least tried to have one of those experiences in the far-off location of Olympia. I admire that, as a person whose enjoyed social acts happen to be almost solely within Olympia. I hope you accept my apology.

--Alex Nelson

XSLery 1.0

I've finished the first version of the photo gallery I've been working on. Actually, I haven't finished it in every respect that I wish for -- there are a lot of server-side features I'd like to learn to implement, none of which I have the time for. As a result, commenting for the moment is manual; leave a comment on this blog entry and I'll move it into the XML source when I see it.

Thanks to David, I've uploaded all of the files onto FallenEarth, and you can now see the project page here, though I should give a warning: I have no clue why, but FireFox won't read my web programming right. I can fix web code at my job all right, but making something from scratch isn't yet a forte. So, to see that intro page, use a browser that shows the top as yellow on blue, which is for sure Internet Explorer 6, and possibly Opera -- I haven't done any testing in Opera. The gallery itself probably has to be viewed in IE 6 for JavaScript reasons, though I don't know why FireFox wouldn't implement the JavaScript.

I employed quite a few technologies to do this project, few of which involved the programming. Thanks to Google, Kobar and David, I found and used these programs:

• Netbeans IDE (downloadable here), mainly for syntax-highlighting. This is otherwise my Java development environment.
• Easy Thumbnails is simple graphics freeware. It works well for mass-resizing/renaming and probably a few other things, but it doesn't offer the option of starting an index at an arbitrary number (always starts from one), which...well, so far is my only complaint with it, really. I would've used ImageMagick as per Kobar's suggestion, but I embarrasingly found myself without a C++ compiler. I'm still missing a lot of old programs from before that XP crash a while ago.
• PuTY is like Telnet, but safer, and can run off of a USB Flash Drive. It's an appealing little 300 kilobytes to carry around.
• WinSCP made uploading masses upon masses of files possible. I uploaded about 70 files for the Western Murder Mystery, which would've sucked to do by hand with the "Upload File" function in Movable Type. The Camping trip will see an upload of about 250 files. Again, a one-at-a-time upload would be a daylong exercise in Suckology.
• Though not technically software, the W3 School of XSLT was essential to learning XSL-Transform.

Cinematic Sadness

I had just put the finishing touches on an event plug for what I thought was going to be a great movie night: Amélie and The Yellow Submarine, back-to-back. Those two movie nights had...elemental difficulties (one of which cost Way Out West an alumninum screen frame). But! they said, There'll be a double feature night!

They said that too many weeks ago. Observe the red datum at the bottom of this page. Bummer.

Life of Alex: The 19th Year Ends

In one minute, I am no longer 19. I am no longer a teenager. I enter the wonderful, work-filled decade of The Twenties. I'm not scared of the work; that's what I've been doing for the past 3 years anywhoo. There's a guy I work with who is stuck with leftovers from his last job, so he has had 13-hour days for the past two months. Somehow, he isn't sluggish at the Ping Pong table. I don't look forward to doing that kind of work again (table tennis skill droppage aside), but if need be, I can, and probably will; I'll have a career to build.

I wonder what else I've done since I turned 19...

• I've dated! This was the first time in 3 years, and I wasn't expecting it to happen for another 10 or so. It's too bad we didn't last very long, though. We probably should've went on a date. I forget if going to dances counts, when we're both dancers...in any case, nothing was on unfriendly terms, and we still talk, so times are still good.

  I got a real, bona-fide job, where I'm producing code that state agencies will use. I am now, remotely, a part of the state's budget process related to jails. I feel refreshingly important. The pay probably stinks by most standards, if one considers the responsibility I've been given in this "Internship," but hey, I'm only twenty (today!), so I can't expect to buy a car on my own yet, or anything like that. I'm happy for the work that I get to do, and it'll look good on a resumé later on.

  I've found two penpals, one from Tacoma dancing and one from SOGO. I've fallen behind in writing to both of them, though; one's in Germany, so I don't feel quite so bad, but the SOGO writing buddy's in New Mexico. And she actually wrote a letter to me, not just e-mail like I evolved penpal correspondance to; so, I feel exceptionally lazy for not taking the time to write her back. I've gotta get on that.

  I've been on the second of what I hope to be many annual camping trips. Pictures coming soon, promise. The Western Murder Mystery will be up once I chat with David about appropriate shell commands to move 30 files onto FallenEarth.

  I didn't have a birthday dance this year. I was supposed to have it an hour ago, theoretically, but I've had a cough that only attacks in the dead of night for a bit under a week now; I couldn't sleep 'til 4 last night because of the coughs. I wouldn't wish that on a crowded room of dancers, so I skipped out. (...Nevermind that I'm a bit chicken about birthday dances. I stress out about dancing sometimes, birthdays much, much more than others.)

  I've given a pretty public speech. 'Bout bloody time. I wonder if I'll ever use my voice for anything else. I've been in one radio commercial (for SOGO, too), but I have no clue how that turned out, since at the time I never listened to the radio. I would love to talk on the radio, though, even if I'm just reading something. I heard a seasoned radio man at the Sample of SOGO concert warm up on the microphone with an exercise that focused solely on vocal inflection: The words he spoke had an even tempo and sounded normal, but they were completely random nouns and verbs. I'd love to learn how to do that; but, that's something I'll probably only be able to write in an entry titled "Life of Alex: The 29th Year Ends."

  I'm sure I've forgotten other things, but that's what this site is for: it serves well as a diary. I even changed some category titles around to better fit some of my content; I don't use this site as a log of neat websites, or topics of interest, often enough.