Saturday, December 25, 2004

Tomorrow's Activities

I stopped by Future Shop to see what time they open early tomorrow morning and there were already 5 people camped outside drinking mini-shot bottles of Jack Daniels and playing Magic: TG hudling together for warmth. They were camped out with lawn chairs and a small camping table, one of them had been there since 3pm Christmas afternoon.

I'll be there tomorrow to make a purchase. I'm buying that P4 2.8GHz system. They've dropped the price another hundred dollars (from $1599) to $1399 and upped the video card capacity from 64 MB ATI Radeon 9000 mobile to a 128 MB ATI Radeon 9000 mobile. I had bought it online today, actually, but thought better of waiting the 3 weeks for it to come in by mail; I cancelled the order just after I got a confirmation. So I'm going to try my luck at buying it in store at 6am tomorrow morning so I can get home and format it (who wants a computer registered with the name "Future" anyway?) . My machines have manly names like "Goober" and "Baggy" (not really, but they rhyme with it).

I'll be up at 4:30am tomorrow, about 4 hours before my girlfriend wakes up to go to work.

-Dropping large wads of cash

Friday, December 24, 2004

Portable Computation

How does this nice little lappy grab ya? It'd come out to just over $1.5k, of course I don't have the money, and would be sweeeet. I've never done the Pentium thing, I've always stuck with AMD (and my Duron 750). So Pentium IV 2.8GHz, 512 DDR, 60GB HDD, 128MB ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 GPU ooooooooh. I almost walked out of the store with it yesterday.

Christmas Partying

Tonight is the Eve before Christmas and the same as every year before is a family Christmas party. Yet another excuse for friends and family to get together and drink themselves stupid (and drive home afterward :P dumbasses) but to eat and visit as well.

I've a couple more presents to wrap in preparation for tomorrow; I've got to dig out the stockings and lay them across the couch with care. And make a (hopefully) quick stop by the post office to pick up my parcel which came in JIT (just in time, like the Java compiler).

-I'll keep ya posted with Christmas goodies

Monday, December 20, 2004

School's out and it is proven

I'm at the University right now, monitoring the Library information commons area. Usually on a Monday at this time, I'd have had enough with the students requesting my help. Not so much that I don't like helping, it's the repetitiveness. However, I digress; Today it is eerily quiet. There 6 students sitting down at any of the 40 computers in this area of the Library, meanwhile the other part of the commons area is closed. It's so quiet in here, I'm almost falling asleep.

-Deitel Java Swing

Sunday, December 19, 2004

Programming Knowledge

I've written all my exams so they are out of my hands. Only 6 days to Christmas, wow. That's getting close. My birthday coming up here fairly soon, too. So now that the semester is over and the holidays are here I've found time to relax and do my own thing.

I've been playing with SuSE on my home computer. I've played through the original Half-Life and am now 3/4 the way through the addon, OpForce and will be playing through Blue Shift as well.

I'm also coding a toolkit for the game I'd been programming off and on since last year. I'd recently rewritten it with my knowledge of data structures and a new resolve. I read about serialization a couple days ago, combined the two and viola I can create my own database. I have tools that allow me to graphically create objects in my game.

-Knowledge is power

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