Pug’s Place

Last night Theresa, E, James and I watched Saving Private Ryan, played Fluxx and et tacos. Tacos provided generously by James and some of me. Audio experience and movie provided by me. Humor provided by everyone. Fluxx provided by humor and Theresa. It was nice to break from the maudlin, touching-and-excellent Saving Private Ryan to play two and a half hours of a game with ever-changing rules.

Oh Fluxx, how can one fully describe you? That’s part of the fun, really. Flux is a card game that, to be fully described, must be played many times. Since the rule-book is very small and the card deck contains most of the rules. Basically, the next time you see someone with a Fluxx deck, ask them if they want to play poker. When they say “No, let’s play Fluxx” you just cry out “I go first!” That’ll make them respect you. Or stab you - either option’s pretty good.

I’ve been playing some Freeciv lately. Nothing like being Sauron of the Mordors, cranking up the luxury rate and (nearly) falling out of your chair in hysterics when you read: Your citizens celebrate We Love The Dark Lord Day in Barad-dur!

Off to class!

Resmiranda now has a 5.1 surround sound system. And it was good.

James and I watched the ending of Star Wars II: AotC and adjusted the channels to a fairly nice state. It’s nice to have discrete directional audio for high quality movies. So cool.

I’ve completed a full 37% of the special effects! Yay!

Probably one with a horizontal scroll wheel. And as many buttons as I can find… yessss….

Yes. YES!

In other news, my new speaker system will be delivered today, and I’ve found I need to buy a new mouse - my good ol’ Logitech iFeel Mouseman Optical is giving me spurious double, triple or quintuple left clicks instead of single clicks, and that’s starting to bug me too much. Yes, I’ve cleaned it — there’s something more wrong with it. It’s been a good friend for 3 years. RIP.

Gonna go visit a used DVD place here in Gainesville and see if I can buy Saving Private Ryan. James and Theresa must see it with a 5.1 surround system, and then Katie eventually needs to see it too. And Katharine, if I remember properly.

Back to roto-scoping.

That’s 22% for those of you who don’t want to do the math yourselves. Not too shabby. From 17% to 22% with about 4 hours of work might not seem all that impressive, but I’ve finished the part where Theresa walks slowly around Stephen and I — the part where the blade kept being partially obscured by Stephen’s head for four hundred frames. I did frames 465 - 500 in less than 20 minutes. That’s about 40 seconds per frame - back to a good number!

Maybe I’ll be done before Labor Day, in which case maybe I’ll be able to get to Choctaw and splice in the lightsabers

*dreams*

I’ve completed the necessary fixing-upping of Liz’s cover art / movie poster for Pizza Delivery Jedi. Basically I just recolored the lightsabers and redid the text, but doing that sort of thing at massive quality (to allow for massive quality prints!) takes a bit more effort. Take a look on the Pizza Delivery Jedi website.

Last night I beat Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic as a light Jedi (thanks, Jay!!), since I really didn’t want to be tempted to play it during the semester. It’s a very cool game, with a very addictive story line. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes RPGs. Highly. So cool…

With that out of the way I was prepared for the start of classes today. I’m taking:

1. Mathematical Probabilistic Statistics
2. Computational Linear Algebra
3. Data and Algorithm Structures
4. The Glory that was Greece

I’ve been to the first three on that list; TGtwG is Wednesday evenings. Initial impressions are all good. The statistics course is not a rehash of my statistics last semester, but it also should not be hard for me anymore (for those joining late, I took a difficult ‘introduction’ stat course in the spring: Engineering Statistics). It’s all about games of chance, baby… Linear Algebra is a “this is heavy math. Here’s a programming language. Let’s make a computer solve a system of 20000 equations very quickly. Hurray!” course. I’m sure there will be plenty of normal math problems too, but having a focus on computer stuff is nice for me. Data and Algorithm Structures is taught by the chairman of the CS department and should be another difficult in-major class for me. Difficult to remain awake in, that is. I kid, I kid!

There’s another rain storm coming into town now… stopping me from getting dinner… I guess it’s soup again for me tonight! We’ll see, it’s a small storm. Though they’re getting hail 20 miles east of here…

Speaking of storms, I decided this afternoon that I needed a radar picture on my cell phone. Sprint provides such a service for $5 a month, but I’m cheap. So I replaced theirs with a very small shell script. If you live in Gainesville, that updates every 30-ish minutes and is small enough to display perfectly on at least my web-enabled phone. Feel free to bookmark it on your cellphone if you want.

This will be my first full day back in Gainesville. Jennifer (my cousin, now a freshman/sophomore) wants me to give her a tour of where exactly all of her classrooms are, so we’ll do that sometime this morning. James wants to go to WYSIWYG, but I’m not sure I want to… I’d rather stay here and play Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic!

So this week I’m going to finalize my graduate school pre-admission stuff, start volunteering at the Machine Intelligence Laboratory, go to a few of my classes, and find Erle.

Oh, and continue roto-scoping, probably.

Now… Help me get a free iPod to replace my now dead Archos.

Updates later.