Silas Mousehold's Journal

I mentioned to someone that it's hard to come up with interesting post here, since nothing that I think is terribly interesting ever happens to me. School is a terribly boring thing to write about.

I spent much more money than I should have this past week. I purchased TextMate for my Mac and Orange Box for my XBox 360. I suppose I ought to try working part time while going to school.

The best thing that has happened lately was my discovery of a great coffeehouse settled out of the way from most of the businesses around my university. It seems quite popular--the outside tables were all filled in spite of rain--and has a variety of drinks from coffee to chai to fresh squeezed fruit juice. I have to force myself not to go there every day, because it's quite good. I'm working my way through the menu, but so far my favorite is the hazelnut hot chocolate.

Two midterms, homework, and a date. All due by Friday at 7 PM. Oof!

Blargh! Midterms. And I'm behind in most of my classes. I really should start being responsible. I blame bad genetics.

Unfortunately bad weather--rain, followed by an early snow--canceled all my fun outdoor plans for Saturday. But one good thing happened. While on campus I noticed an announcement for job openings. The computer science class I'm taking will qualify me for a position as a web developer for the university once I've completed it. That would be a great job, and it's one that I'll sure I'll be able to get for next semester.

I completely disappeared from existence at approximately 12:01 AM on September 25, 2007. I had pre-ordered the legendary edition for Halo 3 and picked it up with one of my best friends and his semi-ex-sometimes-girlfriend at the midnight release. We then played until 3 AM (his girlfriend left at 2 AM). We tried to go to bed at that point, but instead played until 4 AM before crashing. I woke up some 7 hours later and, skipping all my classes and foregoing any meals, proceeded to beat the game. At that point I was allowed to resume my normal life.

It was worth it.

P.S. My 'gamertag' is WMouse.

I just returned from a road trip back home to Las Vegas late last night, which is part of my goal to visit home once a month during the school year. Unfortunately I haven't been feeling well for a week or so, and I spent my Saturday night being sick. I had gone out to eat with my friends and ordered food only to find that the smell made me want to vomit; it didn't help that I also had a head ache. Fortunately my dinner was still good the next day, but my body still complains if I eat more than a few bites of anything. Other than that and a light cough, both of which are passing, I seem to be back to health.

Perhaps worse than being sick is being behind. Getting sick caused me (being as lazy as I am) to get behind in some of my classes. I have a program I need to finish up for my computer science class on discrete structures due days ago, and a lot of reading I need to do for Biology and American Literary History. It's unfortunate that I had so much work to do the day before Halo 3's release. Oof!

On the bright side, I've discovered two fun 'apps' for OS X that have made my user experience that much more enjoyable. (Yes, I found these by reading chipotle's LJ.) The first is TextMate. It's a commercial text editor marketed towards programmers, but without the K2-esque learning curve of Emacs or Vi (although they are free). While not a full-fledged IDE, I will probably purchase it when my trial is up. VoodooPad Lite is the second, and it functions as a simple text editor as well, but with all of the features of a wiki. Each document is broken it up into different entries, which can be opened in individual tabs, and each entry automatically links its text to appropriate sections of the document.

No sooner had I posted yesterday than did I recall all of the things I forgot to write about. I loathe doing more than one post per day, so I'll just cram in a few posts back-to-back over the next few days.

There was one other great thing that happened to me over the summer that I forgot to mention: the release of the anodized aluminum iMac. I purchased the stock 24" model on the evening of its release, marking my entry into the world of Apple and OS X.

At first I felt sick about it; it was very expensive and I didn't technically need a new computer. My notebook computer, while slightly dysfunctional, would have continued to work just fine for school. I kept wondering for a few days if I should have downsized to the 20" version and saved some money. It would have been faster for games, too, because of the lower resolution.

But now, a month and a half later, I don't regret it one bit. I've never been happier with any computer that I've owned. I won't say it works perfectly and that Windows doesn't have its perks, but overall I feel like I get a far better experience using my Mac than I ever did any Windows PC.

I have Windows XP installed, and while I would frequently switch between it and OS X for the first week or two, I just never find the desire to do so anymore. I thought I would miss PC games, and while there are a couple that I will no doubt have to use XP for, it turns out I do the vast amount of my game playing these days on my XBox 360. "It just works" seems to apply to consoles as well as Apple computers, and it's a nice ideal when properly put into practice.

Money is still Apple's bottom line, of course, and it shows sometimes in the high costs of some of their hardware, like the black iBook, Apple-certified memory (ouch!), and cinema displays. But the prices for most of their computers are, in my opinion, very competitive.

The only bad thing about Apple is iTunes. While the iTunes store is a great way to get music, there is a lot of annoying proprietary and DRM red tape that destroys the "it just works" mentality that the rest of Apple's software has. One study suggests that music is more important to Americans than food is--which means a lot, given America's problems with obesity--so it's no surprise that both Apple and the music industry are in a mad dash to implement martial law.

I just wish I could mess with DRM-protected files without having to record them to a standard audio CD then rip them into an unprotected format, or that iTunes 7.4.x would allow me to burn non-MP3 files to an MP3 CD without having to manually convert them and then delete all of the duplicate copies by hand. If it's possible to do in a long drawn-out manual process, why can't they make it easy? Le sigh. It's a good thing I'm a gourmand and not an audiophile.

iTunes aside (I hate to end a happy post on a bad note about one little thing), I plan to stick with Apple for a while. We are getting my mom a Mac Mini to replace her recently deceased PC; it will be connected to her brand new HDTV in her bedroom and work as a part-time media center. My dad is a musician and photographer, so he plans to make his next computer a 24" iMac as well.

Say what you will, but as long as Microsoft is trying to force crap like Windows Vista onto the PC market, I'm going to stay far, far away. Sure it works for some people, but it's exploded more than one of my friends' computers. Apple's OS X is always stable upon release; you never have to wait a year for them to get that first service pack out before it is worth purchasing. And did I mention OS X costs less than a third of what Windows Vista does?

I am, indeed, still here.

Part of me says that I should simply give up on keeping a LiveJournal, blog, or anything of the sort. I managed to avoid posting for Far Too Long, and now I don't whether I should leave a black hole in my life or try to summarize what's happened over the past few months. At the very least I should probably follow chipotle's example by making some personal writing time in the mornings before class. I've long known that fresh ideas come to me most easily in those waking moments. If I want to get any quality writing done, then the early morning is the best time to do it.

By some miracle I managed to pass my last semester with acceptably good grades in all of my classes. I'm off to a rough start this semester, but I suspect things will start to smooth out next week. I was quite pleased that my university opened up a minor program in computer science. I began my studies as a computer engineering student, and I am only two classes away from qualifying for the CS minor. It will be nice to put all those credits to good use. I'm not quite sure how English and CS go together, except perhaps for technical writing, but I'll figure something out. I still plan to apply for law school after graduation, which, if I am accepted, means it really doesn't matter too much what I got my degree in. English would probably be the most beneficial degree, however.

My summer itself was, except for an enjoyable excursion to San Jose, long and slow. I made an attempt to get an internship with a public relations firm where a friend of mine works, but they never got back to me after my interview. I was somewhat disappointed, because I knew that they were in need of help and didn't actually hire anyone instead of me. Eventually I learned that they have an extremely high turnover, which gives me the impression that it would not have been a very nice place to work anyway.

I received the Pell Grant from FAFSA, which covers my tuition and then some, and that is very nice. It really eases the financial burden of being a student, but my bank account is beginning to run low anyway. I'm at the point in life where I strongly dislike having my parents funding my education, even if they happily do so, and so I'm currently searching for a job that will pay rent and--this is the hard part--contribute to my sad resume in a meaningful way.

So I guess I underestimated my group paper. Our professor finished grading them and left them outside her office door. One of the girls in my group picked it up and emailed everyone our grade: we got an 86%, and I'm thrilled about that. Normally I think an 86% would only deserve a "that's nice," but considering that I was sure it was a complete disaster, I couldn't be happier. Now I can go back to being joyous and cheerful again.

I'm terribly guilty. A whole month has gone by since I last posted. I should probably change my icon from a mouse to a sloth.

So what's happened? School. Mostly. Nothing terribly exciting or great, but plenty of bad.

I'm passing my classes, although I'm struggling a bit with my British literary history group. We did well on our presentation on Joseph Addison's Spectator article, "Wit: True, False, Mixed," but failed our first paper. Fortunately we are allowed to drop one grade, as my professor is exceptionally tough and many groups do very poorly on their first paper. Unfortunately some people in my group didn't quite "get it," and I'm positive that, despite my best efforts, we just failed the second paper too. We'll see how that goes.

I also have some independent study courses that I've been procrastinating for a very long time now. I'm embarrassed to say how long, and I'm afraid it is entirely my fault, unlike the group paper. If I can't get them finished or the deadline extended... I don't even want to think about that. If worse comes to worse, I might be able to get a partial refund.

That take-home test went well, by the way. I passed it, unlike the first test. It was for my British lit class, which is my hardest class this semester. It takes up most of my time and creates the most stress, but I also enjoy it very much. My professor is very good.

Games take up the rest of my time. I finished Rainbow Six: Vegas. It's a great game, especially because it has split-screen cooperative play, but the ending really sucks. I downloaded Magic Workstation and started playing Magic: The Gathering with it. That's fun, but I'm not very good at it. I'm not familiar enough with all three dozen thousand cards to put together a strong deck.

Mostly though, I've been getting back into EVE Online, because they offered me a three month subscription for the price of two. Normally I loathe MMO-type games because they reward time over talent, but it's different enough that it doesn't bother me too much. I've been playing with my friends, but most of them play in high-security "care bear" space. One of them doesn't, and I'm planning to join his corp and move out into the lawless fringes of space where all the action and danger are. If that's not exciting enough then I'll probably stop playing once my short subscription is up.

And finally, Ghost Recon: Advance Warfighter 2 is tempting me with its promising four-player, split-screen, cooperative play. I'm a shameless social gamer. I'll rarely touch anything that is single player or only one player per console.