Woot!

I went to Marin Ant Wars V yesterday and got first place in the antweight division. I went undefeated, thoroughly defeating (and destroying) some the best bots in the competition. We even saw a rainbow on the way back. After I got home, I laid down and got a full night’s sleep, which I haven’t got in 2 weeks. Yesterday was a good day.

It was a lot of work making the robot.. er making Joe make the robot. He went to the event also with his robot Ground Clearance, getting fourth place (although would’ve done stronger if he hadn’t lost a judges decision in a match I thought he won. Oh well. Hopefully videos of the event will be up soon (on the MAW website) for those interested.

I haven’t really done much the rest of my winter break though. I’ve been pretty lazy. My dad came into town over the break, and I visited with him and did the whole Chrismas thing. I worked with Joe on our robots for the event. I worked on Fortress Forever some, and did some consulting for a web site (i.e. making stuff and them paying me money for it, not really giving advice). School is starting next week so I have to prepare myself for that (ugh). Unfortunately, it’s got some of the classes I put off till the end because I don’t want to do them. I’m taking History (ugh!), Spanish (double ugh!), Stats (ugh!), Senior Project (UGH!!), and a computer graphics class (yay!). Hopefully I don’t get too sick of school this semester, and I pass all my classes.

I saw that link on a blog that I read in Thunderbird from an RSS feed, and I figured I should share it.

In other news, I was parking my car Tuesday (ya ya, I know it’s Thursday but I forgot about it) in the parking garage. Normally I go straight to the roof because it’s easier to park there and I need the excercise anyways. It was raining that day though, so I thought I should park on one of the lower levels that wasn’t the roof so I wouldn’t get rained on. And when I say wouldn’t get rained on I mean only get rained on for the 5% of the trek out of the parking garage. However, there were none. So I ended up parking on the roof anyways.

On the fifth floor however (roof minus one) I heard the nostalgic sounds of the CSUS drum line practicing in the garage. I can hear the bass drums booming (what I used to play), the snares clacking, the metronome beeping while they play their music. There is also an encore when they finish from the car alarms. Silly car owners who set their car alarms too sensitively. I mean, why should a car alarm go off when it feels a large percussive force? Sheesh.

School has started during the interim. Parking was only bad for the first week thankfully, and not near as it has been in previous semesters. I’m taking 5 classes this semester, and would probably be taking 6 if the last class wasn’t at 7-8:30pm. I got all of the ones I wanted for the most part. These include Math 110B (Algebra of some kind), Math 170 (Linear Programming), CSC 134 (Database/File Systems), CSC 196L (Artificial Intelligence), and History 17B (American: Civil War to present). I look forward to going to the AI class since it’s the most interesting of them and the projects are fun to do. The last one was implementing a program that used a minimax game tree to play a game called ‘Pawn Stop’ that the teacher invented. My program plays pretty strong and I hope to win the tournament he set up for it next week.

During summer I accomplished a goal I set to read the Xanth series over again. During the first week of school I was finishing up the last book of it (Up in a Heaval), that are in paperback at least. All 25 books of the series. That and reading I, Robot and On a Pale Horse, I had a lot of book reading that I did. I guess I made up for all the years I didn’t read at all unless I had to during junior high and high school. I’ve toned it down since school started and have only read Masters of Doom since then, which I’d recommend for anyone to read. I’ve also ordered a couple books to read in the future, which should be here this week hopefully.

My dad came in town for my birthday last week and we did a lot of things while he was here. First we went to Nationals in San Francisco. It was a lot of fun since I wasn’t a competetor at it and could just watch and relax. There were a lot of good fights during it and lots of carnage. My only complaint would be the inconsiderate people that were in the stands. Mostly people who let their kids do whatever they wanted which usually involved hanging on the bleachers and bumping into me and trying to push me out of the way. One parent had the audacity to tell their child not to get stepped on (implying that me, who hadn’t even moved a leg for at least 5 minutes when his kid crowded into a space next to me that didn’t exist). Another person literrally sat on top of the bag that was next to my dad that had his camera in it (there wasn’t that much space between him and the next person either!). Luckily the competitors are much better people than this, at least from what I’ve noticed.

My birthday came during the week and I couldn’t go to a traditional Black Angus dinner like usual, and instead just went to Baker’s Square for a lunch. I got a watch for my birthday, which I wanted to have since I don’t really like pulling my cell phone out of my pocket to see the time, and it’s akward to be without the time when I forget to charge my phone. I also got a 160gb hard drive that I haven’t gotten around to installing yet. I’d kind of like to build an SATA raid array, so I might use this for my pvr instead, although I’m almost out of space on my desktop hard drive.

On Friday we went to see Team America: World Police. It was pretty funny, especially the Team America theme song when they bust out of Mount Rushmore, and Kim Song-Il or whatever his name was talking in general. They sure get the Asian stereotype down .

On Sunday we went to the Sacbots event at CSUS, “Smackdown in Sactown,” as it was dubbed. I arrived a little later than I would’ve liked, since I had wrote a program to handle the brackets and display everything on the projector screen so that it was easier for competetors and the audience to see what was going on instead of having things mysteriously happen with brackets posted on a wall somewhere. There were a few hangups with getting the program working since I couldn’t seem to get apache running on my laptop (it was working fine on my desktop). I ended up running it remotely over the internet. A second thing was that my digital camera was taking pictures significantly larger than the pictures I was using to test out the program, so my computer nearly locked up every time it tried to render everything. I ended up turning off images and running it without them until the break and then scaled them down using a program Joe recommended and uploaded them to the program. It worked great after that, and people even complimented me on it .

Since I entered a robot into the event, my dad handled getting the bot ready to fight, which was pretty nice because I was handling the bracket system and never had to worry about my bot since he took care of it. I did pretty well this event. Upon Steve’s (Fusible Link) advice, I ran copal 50:1 motors at 22.2V using two 3-cell LiPoly batteries connected in series. Coincidentally, my first fight was against him. However, he has since upgraded to the mythical maxon 17:1 motors which are impossible to get anymore and was much faster than I was. Much faster. He beat me pretty handedly. After that I fought Wild One and won in a record 7 seconds (he said one of his motors wasn’t working). Then I fought Shark Bait and won, and then beat Hurricane. I don’t remember the details of either fight, other than I won. Then I fought Havok and lost. His drum didn’t really do much damage to me, but it had enough oomph to lift me up in the air a little bit throwing off my traction. I kept trying to get him towards the pit but in the end he caught onto me and pushed me in instead. Oh well, 3-2 is a good record for me, since I would’ve been going against Grilled Fajitas next (Ross Hironaka’s Flamethrower), which is a really good robot and ended up getting fourth place, losing to his other robot, Mean Burrito (also a flame thrower). Here are thebrackets of the entire tournament, along with pictures.

Finally, I’d like to pimp out a few programs I use regularly. Firefox web browser, which is a much better program than Internet Explorer in that it has much better security, more features (tabbed browsing, find toolbar, popup blocking), and I like it better. Also is HydraIRC, which is a better IRC client than mIRC in my opinion. It is much better looking and seems to be faster and more responsive in general. It lacks some things like scripting, but other than that it has more features like the channel monitor and docking tabs. Also the channel list is much better because it’s a tree instead of just a list and that makes it much easier to be on multiple IRC networks/channels compared to mIRC.

My schedule is kind of messed up right now though. 3 of similar Math classes (I can only take one of the three) are offered this semester. Ideally, I would have my first choice which would be adjacent to the other classes I’m taking, but this class is full and there’s no chance of me getting in. On the first day to register I couldn’t even get in, so I opted to go for the second choice at the time which is a teacher I don’t really want to be in the class with because I don’t really like the teaching style of the professor. The third choice is a class that conflicts with a class I signed up for and is only offered in the Fall. I think I’m going to have to take it next fall with the way things are going unfortunately. I’m also trying to get into a History class, but they’re all full and I lost the lotteries to get into them, so I’ll have to check back in a week. Otherwise I’ll have 12 units and no safety net to drop a class that I don’t like (and I might not like two of my classes because of the public speaking in them). Oh well, hopefully the rest of the semester goes well. It’ll be the first one with nothing on Friday, so I’m happy about that.

Finals are done, and that means school is done too. When I started writing this, I had
just finished school, but now it’s a few weeks later and I’ve already got my grades back.
It was a fun semester and fairly easy because 3 of the classes (MATH 108, CS 028, and PHIL 060)
were very similar to each other, with each going over most of the same stuff at the
beginning as general knowledge and branching off to their respective areas for more detail
with MATH 108 going into more detail on proof, and then set notation and then more
detail on functions. And then CS 028 going into a tiny bit of set notation followed by
computer science related concepts like logic circuits, and recursive functions, and
langauges (i.e. regular expressions, finite automata, and grammars). However, PHIL 060
didn’t seem to go any furthur. It seemed the entire class was learned the first 3 weeks
in MATH 108, but with different symbols. MATH 102 was fairly easy because I had already
read a book about Number Theory before, and it was much similar although I didn’t understand
the book and taking the class made me understand it much better. CS 130 was also an easy
class because I had read The
Algorithm Design Manual by Steven S. Skiena, which is very in depth and the CS 130
class was a subset of the book. I was actually surprised that the class didn’t go farther
into detail on problems like NP-complete, and things like that. If you care about the
teachers I had, I thought Taylor (MATH 108) was a really good and entertaining teacher,
although I’m sure the dynamics of the other students in the class helped with that. Also
she gave good lectures, but I’ve heard that she’s hard (I didn’t really think so though).
Krovetz (CS 028) was very organized and a good teacher overall.

One thing I thought was interesting about CSUS was I thought I might see some people I
haven’t seen since high school, since I went to American River while most of the other
people in my class went either to Sierra or directly to CSUS. The whole semester I
didn’t see a single person from my High School at the college. I only saw one person from
American River that I had in a couple math classes there. Other than that, I did see someone
working at a place I regularly go to for food that went to High School with me (and I like
to think we were friends). Perhaps next semester will be better.

I finally got my PVR set up, and I ended up moving it into my room without a network cable.
My dad brought some long rolls of cable from Utah that don’t have ends on them, so I’ll
need to get some connectors the device that crimps them and feeds the wires in. I also
had to get a Svideo -> RCA connector at Radio Shack for $20 (wow!) since HSC didn’t have
any, and I didn’t want to make one myself. It actually works pretty good now that we
get more channels through Comcast since they converted service in our area (again), so
I’m really only missing out on Tech TV, a few others, and the movie channels without making
the IR blaster.

I’ve also been working on a new map, which I’ve tentatively called fry_laser2k3. Basically
the intentions of it were to make a 9on9 version of fry_laser, but I don’t know if I’ll be
able to do have all the gameplay additions without making the map too unbalancing for
offense or defense. It’s shaping up pretty well, with having almost all of the base
constructed except for the spawn, and potentially another small “buffer” room. So really
just the midfield and cloning the bases after that, so it shouldn’t be too hard.

While I was at work, I bought a motherboard and a processor (AMD XP 1800+) with my employee
discount for the PVR box (mentioned below). I got home and assembled it using the
case from my
old computer. So far I haven’t turned
it on yet because of the shelf (mentioned below) made it hard to plug in cables, so I’m
waiting to get some more free time and run it in the other room.

So I get home around 11:30 and decide to watch the Stargate episode my mom so graciously
recorded for me. It was really good and makes you wonder about the ramifications of
precognitive abilities in the universe. Likely not possible, but it *is* just science-fiction.
I don’t want to spoil too much for those that haven’t seen it, and for those who don’t
even know what I’m talking about, you should watch stargate. It’s on Sci-Fi Channel
on fridays at 6:00 and 8:00 pst. Or maybe 6:00 and 8:30. Check your tv listings . I
then go to bed since I’ve got to take a stupid writing test tomorrow that I need before
graduating from college. I awaken Saturday morning at 7:00 since I have to be to the
place by 8:45 in the morning. On a Saturday no less. Who schedules these things? Obviously not college
students like me who like to stay up late. I get to the test and after trying not to
fall asleep proceed to follow the instructions and fill in the bubble sheet so they
can accurately demograph how stupid white people are. Of course I fill in “prefer
not to state” in the race/ethnicity form, so I’ve foiled their attempts! Mwahaha!
IMO race/ethnicity shouldn’t matter on anything. The fact that English isn’t your
first language should matter, but not what colour your skin is or whether you put a
u in color. So I read the essay prompt and realize that it should be simple for me.
I have to write about whether community provided by the internet is beneficial and
useful. I immediately disassemble all my thoughts that fly through my head and establish
what I really believe on the subject. I remember things posted
on one of my [ex?]-coworker’s site, as well as
a
book I read in High School, and had to do a book report on. Personally I think
that the Internet is a good resource and is very useful, but I know how bad it can
be to your personal life. I realize how bad of an essay it would be to sit on the
fence so I decide to write a mostly negative essay. So I start the outline I usually
do and write out “introduction,” “everquest,” “intentions,” “the net,” “brainstorm,”
and “conclusion.” I notice I have 6 points and that one of them can be used as a
nice hook for an opening paragraph so I start off by mentioning Sandra Bullock and
the cheesy movie she was in claiming it could happen to anyone. My second paragraph
cites “evercrack” and people whose vain girlfriends leave them. For the third I cite
that IRC sucks for emotion and people that lie claiming they are girls when they are
in fact not. Fourthly I acknowledge that the internet can be good for brainstorming,
and then conclude with a conclusion. I know it’s recipe-like, but it works and is
[hopefully] all you need to pass these tests. Some of my paragraphs were a bit
jumbled together, much like the flow of this paragraph here, but this is just my silly
blog, so who cares! So I proof-read my paper and decided it was good enough so I
put my jacket on and handed my stuff to the proctor and left. Fun stuff indeed.

Then today (sunday) I was driving to my grandmothers house on I-80 and on the way I
noticed this sign with blinking lights saying “High winds.” Hmm I think to myself,
and then I notice what looks like a hay bail spining around up in the distance off
the side of the road. I guess the sign was right, but what an odd place for a tumbling
bail of hay. Upon closer inspection of my thoughts, I realized what I was looking at.
It was not in fact a bail of hay, but a smoking tan car rolling off the side of the
road and into the ditch. Uh oh. My mom in the passenger tells me to slow down because
she realizes what is happening before I do, so I do and slam on my brakes and make
the tires squeal because of this, although I really don’t have to because the car
ahead of me is at least 50 feet ahead of me and he wasn’t slowing down that fast, but
I just paniced. So I pull off to the side of the road since I saw it and notice that
the car is smoking really bad like the engine is out. My mom tells me to call 911.
Right I think, now how to I turn on my phone. In my paniced state it took me a while
to remember, so I did, and the hold-9 for 911 thing didn’t work. About this time
I see a guy run from the car a couple ahead of us down to the smoking car in the
ditch. So I dial the actual numbers and hit send. But all the lines are busy so I
have to wait. I notice that there are no people inside the car, and my mom mentions
the people got out and are walking around. How is that possible I think to myself.
So finally the 911 person picks up about a minute later and she seems a bit rude to
me and I tell her that a car flew off the side of the road and is smoking and she
says “on I-80 and reed?” and I say “no, before reed on the other side of the river.”
and she responds that help is en route. I say thanks and hang up. So anyways just
shortly after that I see the highway patrol/chp pull up behind me and the group of
people gathered behind my car looking at the smoking car in the ditch. Somewhere in
here a guy walks up to my window and of all things asks me to back up so he can get
his toy that his kid dropped underneath it. After this we realize that there are
more than enough witnesses that saw more than I did since we were at least a quarter
mile back and just saw it falling off the road, and if the CHP needs my witnessing
they have my cell-phone number since I called 911 with it, and my license plate #
since they have cameras in the dash and he was directly behind me. One thing I want
to know is if the 911 people get the location of the cell-phone tower that is being
used to accurately pinpoint where people are calling from so that they can have
people on response faster. So anyways, I turn off my emergency flashers and turn on
my blinker and I pull out onto the freeway again after a minute of waiting for the
outside lane to clear enough for me to get enough speed up the hill. Anyways,
dinner was great as it usually is, even though we quite literally had to go over
the river and through the woods to get there.

Wow this was a long post. Hopefully I will make more frequent shorter ones in the
future so I don’t take this long to do them. Anyways I need to get to bed, so thanks
for reading!