• Woke up.
• Went to the grocery store.
• Decided I really didn’t care about being alone.
• Listened to a IGDA presentation about video-game development. Lasting quotes of the presentation: “It’s all about the money”, “Market research”, “Kittens and chainsaws”, “Tic-tac-toe”.
• Bought a violin. It’s from Shanghai, so I’ll have to give it a Chinese name.
• Successfully tuned the violin, even though it doesn’t have fine tuning screws.
• Made an outline for my CSE 757 term paper.
• Watched The Royal Tenenbaums.
• Felt lonely.
• Contemplated my assertion of #3.

Planned:

• Do more unproductive things on computer.
• Go to bed.

Update: Just as I was resigning myself to being lame, Dan-O busts through the door with something to do and I had a great time. Once again, the terrorists were thwarted.

Earlier in the year, my friend Andy whom I was in an ill-fated band in two years ago Emailed me and asked if I wanted to record some tracks with his new band that didn’t have a bass player. Since playing bass with people is awesome, I did it up. Turns out now the tracks are on Myspace:

Viewers Like You

We’re playing March 8th at Ian’s place, wherever that is. Our ultimate goal is to play at Larry’s, which for some reason has a website. Turns out I may get $3.00 as well, although I’d just as well play for free, maybe we can negotiate that (“No! $0.50 is my final offer!”)

After upgrading my E-Mail client to version 2.5.90-scaryandkindofbroken, it has a pretty fancy “Publish as iCalendar” feature, so I decided to put it to work. 30 minutes in Panera Bread later, I’ve got a completely syncronized online calendar, courtesy of PHP iCalendar. It was suprisingly easy to install:

1. Decompress the source to a folder
2. Edit config.inc.php
3. Set calendars to upload to ./calendars

The site is up at http://paulbetts.org/schedule, check it out!

Well, after spending an entire day stuck in Detroit, eating some fancy food, talking to some British people, fixing a completely fubar’ed Shell function and demonstrating my complete ineptitude for algorithms, I am now officially working for the Microsoft Windows Core Serviceability team, specifically in the networking group. I’m definitely looking forward to the following:

• Spending the summer in Seattle
• Hax0ring the g1bs0n
• Making some money so I can do the whole “Stay in school” thing
• Perhaps visiting some other west coast places, like Vancouver and Portland
• Having other people visit me, that’d be real awesome

That week is gonna be hella busy though, basically how it’s going down is that I’ll be leaving the day after I’m done with finals / grad parties / saying goodbye to everyone leaving for other places, I quick move out of the 1611 and I’ll be spending a week in California with the family. After that, I get on a plane and head to Seattle; 3 days later I’m working. I get back September 16th, and I move all my stuff straight back into my place for Fall quarter. Craziness.

Man, now that I think about it, by the time I get back everyone I know will be gone except for Newberry and Kevin. That’s kind of real lame. I feel as if no one knows what will happen after we graduate, as if after June no one exists anymore; like it’s this big blackness of eternity. That’s mostly not true, but the fact is there are people that I’ll never see again ever, and that makes me sad. But as Calvin says, “It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy … Let’s go exploring!”

I’m back at school for Winter Quarter, and I’ll be really busy. I’ve signed up for 18 hours of classes, as well as grading CSE 560. I like all of my classes (except Statistics, but that shouldn’t be too bad), and I’m looking forward to grading this quarter. For those of you who are unaware, CSE 560 is the course in our curriculum where you end up writing at least 6000 lines of code and six documentation manuals. It’s a daunting task and I ended up pulling several > 9-hour coding marathons to get it all done. It’s a tough class, but it definitely makes most people better engineers for taking it. I’m looking to use QT/C++ for my CSE 655 class where I write an interpreter for a simple imperative language, that should be a good way to get familiar with QT.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get anything done over break that I wanted to, I got sidetracked by Real Life ™, as well as a rewrite of a program I never finished using Boo (which also isn’t finished, but it’s on its way). Currently, I’m frustrated by the lack of debugging / reflection tools on Mono, it’s a giant pain-in-the-ass to track down bugs; it’s only slightly easier than C/C++ which is sad because it should be a million times easier. Supposedly there’s been a lot of work on the Mono debugger, but I haven’t seen any tangible results, mdb (the Mono version of gdb) just throws meaningless error messages for me. Hopefully I’ll be shown to be wrong in the near future and the Mono debugger will kick ass and be usable in MonoDevelop.