If I survive till Wednesday, I'm a free man

School ends on Wednesday. With the exception of one short essay and one easy final, I'm done. Finally.

Even better news, its possible that I'll get my research from this last semester published. Not too shabby.

Shameless, I know...

Well, thanks to my own shameless plug (see below), my resume is now the first link if you google "Robert Van Dam". Not bad considering I'm competing (to some degree) with the now-vaguely-famous wrestler Rob Van Dam. In fact, the first few people to find this blog will most likely be wrestling fans. I know I get IMed by them plenty.

Somehow I think I might actually survive this semester and graduate. There might still be a few snags along the way but I'm getting there. In particular, it looks like I'm not going to fail my History of Math class because I've actually started doing a semester's worth of work about 4 weeks before the end of the semester rather than waiting till the last week. Way to go me!

Back to my torture...

How do they find me?

So I've had a resume up on a webserver that holds a bunch of files for me but that has no index.html file so you can just grab those files if you wanted to. I know its not very secure but if you're really dying to steal my spanish essays, be my guest. They suck anyway. So despite the fact that there was not (until now) a specific link to that resume file, two different people have googled me and asked me to tutor their kids. My resume's not even designed around the fact that I've done some tutoring, it just happens to be there and for whatever reason, it seems to be doing me quite well just sitting there inconspicuously. I love this. So if people find me even when I don't advertise, why do so many people spend so much money advertising?

Showing off

This is my second attempt to write this blog so it's bound to be crappier than the first crappy one. You'd think they'd have a mechanism for cacheing what you write so that if you timeout while posting you don't get screwed. But maybe I'm just expecting too much.

So I think I wrote a pretty good Spanish essay (about the book La Celestina) but I pretty much bombed my cs exam. I guess I doubt it was all that bad but it really wasn't all that good either. Just didn't bother studying enough really...

I've had this crazy idea for the longest time that I would write a version of Minesweeper (am I breaking any copyright laws here?) in every programming language I know as a way of both showing off my knowledge and fine tuning it. I was even gonna use it as an excuse to learn new languages that I ought to know like php or python. I finally got started with a cgi script written in perl. It actually was pretty easy and quick. I do have to get over my cowboy coding syndrome though but it'll happen ... maybe ... I didn't bother spicing it up with any inlayed javascript because I imagine I'll probably write one completely in js/dhtml.

I was remembering a stupid game I used to play as a kid. I was so absurdly bored in school that I invented something to do that would keep me busy endlessly. I drew a few quarter size circles on a sheet of paper and, pretending that they were planets, drew death rays coming out from them in random directions. If two rays intersected they cut each other off and both stopped at that point. Sometimes you could get three rays to constantly be intersecting each other. The first and second would intersect, then the first would be cut off by the third, releasing the second, which would cut off the third, releasing the first which would cut off the second, releasing the third and on and on and on. So I decided that i would call those black holes in my world. Anyway, I was thinking I could recreate it in Java or something. A weird bit of nostalgia...

wasting time, wasting time, down a ... road and i don't know where the hell it'll go

So I've found the best possible way to waste hours and hours and do absolutely nothing. It's called Pogo and its nothing but silly useless java games. And its the greatest thing ever invented ... unless you actually wanted to get something done in which case it may well be your downfall (as it has been mine).

First Post

You've gotta start somewhere I guess. Every time I've ever started working on my own website, it's never gone anywhere so hopefully this'll last longer.

I'm a little over worked at the moment. Gotta finish some CS (theory) homework by tomorrow, read "La Celestina" and write an essay on it by Tuesday, and study (hah, as if!) for a midterm on Monday. And here I was thinking that my last semester would be relatively easy. And I haven't even mentioned the math class that I haven't been back to since the third week of the semester.