Jeff

work

So I’ve been working the past week and probably will be working the next week as well. I basically built the base of Pac Man the past three days, I will have to get Breakout ready for Greg and polish off the other projects in the next few days. Then I just have to do the labs and the final project, which may mean I have a long night on Thursday of next week =. I still need to sit down and work out the last of the multi-core and hopefully get points for that. At some point in all this, I need to get shit together for Senior Design. But then I enter my final semester and in May I will be a Computer Engineer. sigh

I will probably post the finished Pac Man and Tetris in the next week or so, it depends on when we finish it and when I get around to deciding if I want to try and compile it into an exe or what =. At least the Java I can just make a jar… (nerd speak ends here). These projects are fun, I enjoy the challenge of finding an innovative and expandable way of implementing the games and then being able to add my own improvements and additional functionality. Like with Pac Man, I added wrapping a few hours ago, wrapping is what I call it when PacMan runs off one side of the screen and comes back in on the other side. It was kind of exciting, in a nerdy way.

I get to go in and talk to Exacq on Wednesday, I hope that goes well. I find them interesting and it looks like a fun place to work. I’ll have to put work on hold for a bit Tuesday night so that I can get some sleep before and not go in a zombie. I will probably get the big chunks of work in during the next day or two, get 462 almost done. Well, I better get back to code crunching =\

top 5 favorite

I just had dinner with my sister and she told me she asked my father earlier this week what his top 5 favorite songs were. I began thinking what mine were and realized I can’t name them. I struggle to think of 5 songs I always like or can always listen to. I jump between music so randomly and get stuck listening to things for long periods of time. I think if I were to name my top 5 favorite songs, not a single one of my favorite artists would sit on that list, because to be my favorite artist, I enjoy the entire album or albums. This means that no one song stands out above the rest, or not to the point where I can definitely pick it. I love Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen, but being asked to pick one song off that album as my favorite I just can’t do. It would mean demeaning the rest of that wonderful album. I then end up going to singles that are alone on their album, where the rest of the album falls far short of the mark set. I also find new and wonderful music on an almost weekly basis, just this past week I began obsessively listening to Muse. I have already racked up over 600 tracks listened to (just check my Last.FM) and I think I could consider one of their albums among my top 5 albums. But to have to go through all their tracks and look at one and think “that’s the one” is probably too hard. I also listen to a lot of trance, I like it to work to, not many lyrics and good melody makes for amazing background noise while I work away. I enjoy some of the tracks to just close my eyes and focus, no real words or expression. But would trance fall into the top 5 ? My most listened to song on Last.FM is a trance song (White Sand by Sunlounger and Armin van Buuren, its amazing). I like Beck and the Flaming Lips a bunch, but neither has one of those stand out songs.

I don’t think I can answer someone when they ask for my top 5 favorite songs, I can give them albums or artists, but I enjoy entire albums more than singles. I like the concept of an album. A complete album trumps a mix of great singles. A great album blends and builds up. It lasts for an hour and the entire album is unique, no repetition. A mixture of feelings and expressions that creates this fantastic whole. It gives you a mixture of up tempo and mellow, of heartfelt and casual, of emotion and thoughts. It really grabs you and doesn’t stop after one track, it takes the entire 12 tracks to finish it. My top 5 albums would have to be: Born to Run, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Black Holes and Revelations, Greatest Hits (Queen), and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Those are whole albums I listen to on a regular basis. It may change occasionally (like Black Holes is recent, like within the past month I discovered Muse, I highly recommend them). But again, I scroll through the other albums I listen to and can find another 10 or so that can compete for that list and I begin wondering if I should put them in, my mood can change just enough where one of these albums sounds better than one listed at that moment. It’s a challenge to name a top 5, because I have an attachment to many other songs and it feels sad almost to leave them out. I guess I’m just a sappy loser who doesn’t want to hurt the feelings of singles or albums…

What are your top 5?

senior design whoas

So senior design requires that we have teams set up and basically show we have a grasp of what the class entails. That being said, we have 6 people that need to form into 4 person teams. If you are having trouble doing the math, it means we need to split into two teams and find two more people ((6 + 2 people)/4 people/team = 2 teams*4 people) (okay I put more effort into that than I should have >_>). So we just met, the 6 of us, and basically threw around ideas and thoughts and have come to some realizations: + We won’t find any idea that everyone is excited about doing that is also easy or feasible to accomplish.

  • Greg and Cray both admit they plan on being the deadbeat of the group T_T.
  • It’s going to be a long semester…

The current team I am on is preliminarily Peter, myself, and Gerg. We are possibly doing the glove. The glove idea entails tracking the positions of fingers on both hands in a spatial sense and sending the positions to a computer to do whatever it wants with it, like interpret gestures into inputs from the keyboard or mouse. We shall see where this goes.

In other news, I am in the midst of waiting for responses from a few companies that I have talked to and interviewed with. I have lost some of the drive I always start off with and am really ready to get this semester wrapped up. I am just worn out from all the crap this all entails. I wanna go sit on a beach in Hawaii and not worry about anything for a bit. We shall see if I can survive to that…