Last month was the second month in which I did not blog at all in the 20 months I have been blogging. When this occurred to me last night, I just about got out of bed to post something since it was not yet midnight. I respectfully declined and resolved to fix the problem. The past month saw me configuring a new computer about which I still need to blog, getting used to a new job, watching the Olympics, engaging in NHL 10, and simply spending time with friends and family. Read the rest of this entry »
How we define things is critical to communication. My friends have gotten used to me responding to their questions with “define ‘x’” where x is some key phrase in the question they asked me. This is usually either because my friends were ambiguous themselves or the phrased they used has become ambiguous thanks to society. Last night I got a slap in the face thanks to definitions. I was driving out to my meeting in New Hartford to discuss their website when I saw a toad on the side of the road. After arriving at my destination, I sent a text message to my girlfriend regarding it because I knew how much she loves toads. Her response was, “Cute! you[sic] should have caught it.” It was at this point that I put two and two together. My girlfriend thinks toads are cute. What does that say about me? Ouch… Fortunately, the heartache was short-lived due to a good meeting, US Open tennis, and my girlfriend coming to visit me after classes and homework.
While there are a lot of topics I would like to write on, I am trying to keep my head above water at the moment. Here is a list of things I have done in the past week:
- Discussed a job offer from the financial services company I have interned at the past three summers
- Worked on a website for a nearby community trying to rebuild after a tornado followed in the next year by flooding
- Spent time looking into helping another similar community overhaul its website, but as of today it looks like they only want minor HTML skills; so, I will likely skip on the task for something requiring a little more technical know-how
- Began talks about doing some consultant work for another web company
- Created a Windows XP on a virtual machine for some testing purposes
- Created an Ubuntu virtual machine for experimental development purposes
- Played tennis at least every other day
- Gone on two bike rides
- Attended my job for Information Technology Services – Network Services (ITS-NS) as a student programmer
- Gone to my two classes
- Sat in on a class in which I am not officially enrolled
- Met with my computer science undergraduate research advisor
- Done some preliminary research for my research project
- Bought tickets to the UNI vs Iowa football game coming up this Saturday
- Got my car’s ventilation fan motor replaced by my girlfriend’s father
- Other miscellaneous social activities including things such as watching movies, going out to eat, and bonfires
- Laundry…
Remember how I talked about having an easy semester due to a light class load? That was a funny idea! For starters, everyone else has yet to get heavy loads of homework. This seems to be true for everyone except for my girlfriend which is mildly disappointing. Thus, friends are always asking about going and doing things since they know I am the one with very little classwork to tie me down. However, when all of their activities are staggered, it can quickly fill up a day. I am almost getting worn out. I have always found classes to be rather relaxing. All I have to do is sit there, listen, and take notes. That requires very little energy on my part. Especially when it is compared to things like tennis and bike rides. Another habit is to monitor my water consumption by ensuring I drink so much water during each class. The result is I am getting tired and pushing myself to stay properly hydrated.
I would go into more details on all of the various activities, but that would take too long if I touched on each one of them. It is also getting to be 12:30 AM, and I have a busy day ahead of me. Already on the schedule is going into work a bit late so I can scan a Non-Disclosure Agreement as well as make a business call about my job offer. Then it is work and class. I have the afternoon open to work on the community website before meeting with a couple of their representatives to discuss some things. I will return here later at night to do some laundry and get to work on one of the projects on the list. I should probably also slide in another business phone call in the afternoon. My video editing projects have been put on temporary hold as I stay caught up on web development projects. I am beginning to feel like I am already working full-time. In some ways, it is kind of nice even if it means things are a bit busy.
So my sister has requested I write something other than technical blogs from time to time. This becomes a bit of a problem when I live, breathe, and eat code. It turns out if I buy the right kind of cereal, I can get some decent pseudocode going in the morning. Though, I will say it is difficult to find cereal with semi-colons and curly braces. For those wondering what I have been up to this summer, I currently have four websites on the table with negotiations still wrapping up for one of them. That does not count any of my personal projects such as this one. To make matters worse, I have come across the blogs of Jeremiah Grossman and RSnake, two elite web security specialists. The results of this has been me spending a portion of my time tonight reading some web security talks online as well as tinkering with Fierce and Nessus. Remember how I started this post by talking about how my sister wants me to talk a little less about geeky stuff? That does not mean I remembered it while writing this. Actually, I just meant this to be an update on what I have been up to lately and a lot of it is technology oriented. Call me a geek if you must.
What else have I done? A week ago I participated in my first United States Tennis Association tournament. I walked into the whole thing very tentatively. I have not played competitively since high school four years ago unless you count the poorly organized intramurals at college. I started to play semi-regularly last fall along with playing some this spring. However, I had not hit in a solid two months when I decided to register for the tournament. As a result, I chose the easiest skill level since I was not sure what I would be getting myself into, and I figured winning easily would be more fun than getting crushed. It turned out only one other person registered for my division and it was quite easy. I had gotten in a couple hours of hitting with an old friend on Wednesday. Still, I was hitting even better come the time of the tournament on Saturday. I managed to get a cool t-shirt, a nice plaque, and an instructor’s phone number to call about hitting sometime. All said, the tournament was pretty fun, and I am looking to go to another in Cedar Rapids this weekend. I will make sure to step up a skill level this time around.
This past weekend was a lot of fun. I drove up to Cedar Falls to spend some time with my girlfriend along with attend a wedding of a previous roommate further on down the road. Taking time to relax and watch movies with Jess was great and the wedding was a blast. We also got to watch some of The Open, Tour de France, and PBR on tv on Sunday. For those who dont know, The Open is the equivalent of the golf US Open but in Britain, Tour de France is bicycling, and PBR is Professional Bull Riding. To top the weekend off, we went out golfing on an amazing day. Needless to say, the weekend was over in no time, and I was back dabbling with computers in my apartment.
Tonight has been another moment of relaxation. I started with taking care of some apartment errands early on. Then I proceeded to dabbling in web security reading and tinkering. That was followed up with watching the Chicago Cubs look terrible again along with some light web development. In case you have not noticed, I have implemented a couple new themes and a theme changer to account for different reader preferences. Hopefully, I will continue to improve on this feature over time. I was able to catch up to July on Wallingford’s blog as well. Now I am finishing off the night with a little Sportscent on ESPN and writing this. With that said, good night!
I think almost every guy has dated at least one girl obsessed with remembering every possible anniversary someone might care about. These can include everything from first met, first date, first kiss, first ice cream, first fight, first first, first et cetera. To all those girls out there, guys tend to feel there are more important things to remember such as how to park a car. These are just relationship differences people for which people need to learn to adjust. One solution is to have the guy park the car while the girl gets all excited about their anniversary for the first car accident. The nice part about this one is the girl can also rave about their anniversary for the first time the guy let the girl drive.
However, one of my more preferred solutions is to get all depressed when the girl forgets the exponential month anniversary. In case a reader is wondering what that anniversary is, the formula is as follows:
<start_date> + 2^(<NPEMA>) * 1 month
In this formula, <start_date> is when you started dating and <NPEMA> stands for number of previous exponential month aniversaries. So anniversaries would take place 1 month, 2 months, 4 months, 8 months, 1 year 4 months, 2 years 8 months, … into the relationship. This has two benefits. Most women who try to remember every anniversary will fail to calculate the next one, and the anniversary occurs less frequently over the years so it is less of a hassle for the guy.
Be forewarned, this can backfire. The girl may just care about anniversaries enough to ask you to calculate when the next one is so she does not miss it. The girl may know how to calculate it herself which means you are really in trouble. She may also be exceptionally clever and respond with “I was just waiting to see if you would remember it!” This last one is very bad news because it means she most likely already has contingency plans for almost every trick up your sleeve. In other words, GET OUT NOW!
Last night turned out to be a pretty rough night to the point all I keep thinking is “did anyone catch the number on that bus?” It started out when I decided to play some Call of Duty 4 on the PS3. I have no idea why, but I was not on my game last night. There were a decent number of games where my team completely dominated, but I was fighting for my life in everything else. In case you do not know how I play that game, such struggles are usually rare. This was the first night I really got to play with the old crew I played with so much last summer. The result was me playing from approximately 9pm to 3am. I was already tired from not getting a whole lot of sleep during the week and putting in a full round of golf yesterday afternoon. That round of golf included two hours in the rain.
To make matters worse, my sleep was not amazing either. At some point in the night, I managed to rollover in such a way that I face-planted into my bed’s headboard. I recommend not doing that. It hurts. I had a dream that I went to Turkey with my sister’s family. We had a few guys hassling us, and once I got that resolved, I found out my girlfriend had hid herself in my backpack to come with us. How she fit and I did not notice a backpack that has suddenly gained the weight of a person, I have no idea. The unfortunate part about this was the need to figure out how to get her back into the United States. Her lack of a passport and the scan of luggage which shows up human bones were the prime source of conflict.
About at that point, I woke up only to find out I am extremely dehydrated. I decided not to open the window last night thinking it would be warm outside before I would want to wake up. I thought the cool apartment would be able to hold out despite having Ellinore running. The result of this was my apartment being very dry in the morning and a little warm. So yeah, fun night…
This morning I woke up with some lines from Tristan & Isolde in my head for no known reason. Here is my thought process:
- Tristan is a pretty cool name.
- However, Alexander might be one of the coolest names of all time.
- That being said, I would also like a kid to have the name Kyle.
- If I name a kid Alexander Kyle Sparks, his initials would be AKS!
- If he sins, he would embody the three-way handshake!
- SYN, SYN + ACK, ACK!
This is one more testament to why I should never be left alone in an apartment by myself for an entire three-day weekend.
I turned twenty-two today. My Ancient Near East professor jokingly asked our class what we had done with our lives when talking about Alexander the Great. The man was twenty years old when his father, King Philip II, was assassinated, most likely in a plot formed by Alexander himself. By the age of twenty-two, he was invading the Persian Empire and Asia. People always talk about turning over the reins of control to the next generation. I am seven months out from my collegiate graduation. I watch the fate of today on the news. I think about the fate of tomorrow when I go to bed. I have spent the last 17 years of my life studying in school for the day when I will look down and see the fate of the world in the palms of my hands. You can call me arrogant for thinking I will have such importance when that day comes. I will call you ignorant for not realizing the weight which rests on your shoulders. It is not about you or me. It is about us. The choices we make as individuals affect us on a whole. Whether we like it or not, we are in this together. Remember those classes in school when you were assigned a group to complete a project? It is time to pull those skills down off the shelf and dust them off. You are on this planet with the rest of us and we have to find a way to make it work. You can stand in the corner uncertain of what to do. If you do, I will climb up on the table and start to direct you. We might do everything wrong. Maybe we will do everything right. I am guessing we will make some mistakes along the way, but we will also get a lot of things right. However, in the end, rise or fall, I am determined to make it one hell of a story. Regardless, get involved. I do not care where or with what, but do your share to make a difference.
For my Perspectives on Death & Dying class, I had to write a paper on an experience with death. Here is my paper:
It was midday one Saturday in February of my junior year of high school. I was hanging out with a group of friends playing some games. It was the usual routine when we were not off on some school activity. My buddy, Chris, got a call. One of our friends had been shot in a hunting accident. It all seemed a bit surreal. Surely, he was going to be alright. We continued playing games as if things were not too shaken up, but phone calls kept coming. As the day progressed, the story changed. Our friend had committed suicide.
I have a thousand stories I could tell regarding that day and the week following. The Sunday morning church service was awful because he was not there. Sunday night, I was at Pizza Hut with people I had not hung out with in years. Monday night was a special church service which had more in attendance than I have ever seen in twenty one years. The wake resulted in a line of people stretching out the front door and down the sidewalk. There was a school gathering. A group of my friends walked out the front doors of the school in the middle of the day on Monday. We skipped the second half of Wednesday too. There were no repercussions. They still held class on the day of the funeral, but it was pointless. The cemetery was packed. There was an empty chair at graduation the following year.
Out of all of this, perhaps one of the most important thing I learned is suicide is not simply about the individual. I watched a town of 2,500 people come to a screeching halt in a single weekend. When the topic of suicide comes up in any sort of conversation, my mind starts looking at all the people around me who would be affected. Let me just say it is a long list that stretches across the continent. Not because I am important. Just because that is the effect it has on every single person we know. When I go home on holidays, I still have a few momentos sitting in my bedroom. When Chris and I hang out, I see our friend’s baseball glove sitting on his desk just below a picture of them. When I was home for Christmas, another high schooler had committed suicide. Everyone at church was expressing their sympathies. Turns out I knew his brother. Did I mention my friend committed suicide on his mother’s birthday?
The other major lesson I learned was how quickly it all happens. The expression “one minute they are there, the next they are gone” is not something to be taken lightly. I remember one night in junior high when a game of hide-and-go-seek had broken out on a city block. My friend and I hid out behind Chris’s house just talking about life because the game was not all that exacting. I remember baseball games, making silly videos, and the hours spent playing Golden Eye on the N64. Never even thought about the idea we would not graduate together. Quite honestly, up until that point, I had never thought about anything like that. I was too busy pushing through high school to get into a good college, build a career for myself, and setup the rest of my life. I guess you could say I learned to “stop and smell the roses.” It became alright if I was not playing my best during a tennis match. Taking time to get away from school work and play a few hours of videogames during a stressful week was not blasphemous. I still find myself buying a new videogame during finals week. I put off writing this paper on Monday night because my girlfriend and I had a carton of ice cream in the freezer.
I guess what I am trying to say is take a moment to look around you. When you find something you like, take the time to enjoy it. It will not be there forever.
I frequently have to write journal entries about things I have read for my Perspectives on Death & Dying class. This week we read Seven Choices: Finding Daylight After Loss Shatters Your World – A Pocket Guide by Elizabeth Harper Neeld. I have not written anything new in a while so here is my journal entry for this week:
“If anything, this time of Stumbling in the Dark feels worse than the original crisis-, the news of the loss itself.” (Neeld 2003 12) I thought the name for this phase was perfect. I remember the week following my friend’s suicide in high school. I could not describe it any better. It really was worse than the original day. The first day was not too terribly shaken up simply because I could not comprehend the news. The following days found me completely clueless about how to handle myself. The first day back to school was ridiculous. It all seemed pointless. It was as if I was just putting on an act. I really did not care to be there, but at the same time, I preferred to be there over sitting at home staring at my wall. My nights were filled with as many distractions as possible. Not one moment was dedicated to homework because that would have meant sitting down by myself. There was Pizza Hut, ping pong, movies, videogames, pool, and so on. A group of us took a couple half days off from school to just run around town. Many of these things we had never done before and would never do again.
Neeld mentions an “increase in accidents” as being normal. (Neeld 2003 12) There was a special church service one night that week. On the way there I was involved in a minor fender bender with a couple other classmates. It was not my fault, but I do not doubt for an instance that I would have been able to prevent it if I were more focused. We did not bother even stopping to deal with the accident. Everyone of us knew where the others were going. Once we got to the parking lot, we glanced at our bumpers, had a minor discussion, and left it for our parents to deal with.
It was the same night as the church service that I got into a fight with my girlfriend. She thought I should seek consolation and comfort from her because she was my girlfriend. I essentially stiff armed her in an effort to stand on my own. It does not surprise me since that is a normal reaction for me in my high school years. However, at the time, I was just stumbling in the dark.