October 2004 Archives

At 1:14AM EST on October 31, 2004 I was issued my first ticket ever by Lt. Randall of the North Carolina Highway Patrol. I am currently in a very mentally distraught and anti-driving mood. The ticket is for going 85mph in a 60mph zone. I will appear in court on December 10, 2004 at 9:00am. I can't believe I allowed this to happen... I am so stressed about this right now....I dont want to be on north carolina roads now, but unfortunately I have class tomorrow and I must...

Nothing horribly eventful today. Went to classes, took some tests. Almost fell asleep with Dr. Naieini and his derivations of momentum equations. I had no extreamly brilliant thoughts today, just more of being relaxed and not too tightly wound.

I did come across something that I just found extreamly humorous, the joke itself isn't internally dirty, but with the proper:

A boss, faced with a business slowdown, had to lay off one of two equally good employees, Debra and Jack. He decided that whoever went to the water cooler for a drink first would get laid off. Debra went first. The boss told Debra, I have to lay you or Jack off..."

I don't know if I could get any sicker of scaled grading at the moment! I am attempting to make GITI calculate my final course grade for all of my classes based on the many scaled grading systems in use. This should have been a non-issue and very simple to accomplish. Only one problem, the theory behind each instructor's scaled grading on the syllibis assumes that all grades for the entire semester are already availible. At the current time I am using my physics grade as a sample to compare to. WebAssign (the utility for the course) calculates my grade to be 97.003%, whereas GITI in its current capacity (holistic, all scaling = 1) gives me a 99.029 and a sample spreadsheet I used to test the math of the situation and simulate the grading system came up with 99.33 or 98.62, depending upon the treatment of the tests as all being 30%, or as each being worth 10%. GITI in the end would use the 30% for all method most likely, unless I decide to assign percentage values per-assignment (wouldn't that be a bitch?). I have always sucked with math and as such it is difficult for me to make GITI do what I want with my grade information. I will apply my theories to GITI throughout the semester and if everything comes out right with the final grades being the same based on the sample spreadsheets then I will finalize the code in GITI and let it help me keep up with scoring. I am not overly anal about scoring, it is ok if GITI is off by a percentage point or two, as long as it is roughly correct. Different instructors keep track of grades different ways, and I can only realisticly do it one way in GITI (while retaining my sanity). What really scares me is that I am going to have to implement some javascript into GITI if I want my assignment manager to be as clean and user friendly as I envision it to be. Selecting a course has to reset the Assignment Type field to show what types are valid for that particular course.

I have class in a few minutes and should probably be thinking about that instead of thinking about GITI, but I guess I have to think about something in my spare time.

Random thought while in Barnard Lab - I really should invest in an MP3 player device. There are sounds and topics in this lab that I really do not want to hear. Music lets me into my own little created world where there is no need to discuss who screwed who over the weekend.

For the second time in two weeks Dr. Presler is not availible to teach her class. Today there was an exam scheduled, and most students arrived fairly early for the exam. A few minutes ago we were all informed by the department secretary that the exam has been moved to Wednesday and Dr. Presler isnt on campus.

This means I am now again stuck with just being with myself to do a lot or not much at all depending upon my mood. I was so impressed with myself earlier for getting on campus so early and being able to go to the exam without rushing. It would be nice if Dr. Presler would like send an email or something before she is absent, so I can get an additional hour of sleep. I exited McEniry a while ago to the sound of the Belk Tower singing the alma mater. It is not unusual for me to enter the building under that same sound at the same time of day.

At the moment I am having mixed feelings, I am glad I am not sitting through a boring lecture that Dr. Presler might give, but at the same time I was looking forward to the Logic exam. I am ready for the exam and I wanted to take it today. Oh well, I can't always get my way can I?

UPDATE: Dr. Presler was spotted on campus at 2:50PM, aparently healthy and able to be on campus.

Yesterday and earlier today I did something that I haven't done in a few weeks, I cooked because I wanted to. Last night at about 7 PM I started one of my slow cooking pasta sauces. I started with a very basic tomato based of crushed tomatos, tomato sauce and some fresh tomatos. I followed up with a lot of other vegtables and spices. There is something very relaxing about having something cooking in a slow cooker and stiring it about once every hour or so. This evening I completed the other half of the meal, the meat and the pasta. I decided to go with my normal fried chicken component. For once my fried chicken actually came out perfectly, golden brown, done throughout and not lacking pieces of its fried shell. Normally I would cut the chicken and arrange it on the top of the pasta, but because of the way the chicken looked this time I decided to leave the chicken pieces whole and serve them on top of the pasta as-is. This is one of those times when I am glad that I only fry with whole breast meat. The final dish was the following: fettucini base, sauce on top, mozzarella cheese sprinkled about, then chicken placed on top of the hot melting cheese.

These burst of creativity when I am cooking make me very happy. I don't have many of my hands-on hobbies left, and it is nice for me to be able to enjoy the ones I do have. I have decided that I really do need to find some additional things to cook though, I am about to the end of my availible modifications to this one dish, and now that I have had the chicken come out like it did, I feel like I have perfected it, and as such it is time for me to move on. I stick to pasta dishes too much, I need to escape from them and try something new, something I have never thought of before. Anyone have any ideas?

My biggest restrictor is my ingrediant list. I have a lot avaiible to me because my mother and I run a template kitchen, we have a base set of ingrediants which we require to be on-hand at all times. One big disadvantage to that is that we hardly ever add new ingrediants to our collection and a lot of fresh ingrediants don't store very well for long periods of time. Perhaps I should just start going to the store when I have creative urges and pick up whatever grabs me. I have been watching Food Network for a long time and there is a lot that I could be using that I don't. Either way, now is not a time for culinary regrets due to things not attempted, it is a time of culinary celebration for dishes (and in this case, techniques) perfected.

Sometimes in my life I take myself to a lower level of functioning than is normal for me. I do this without realizing it. I take myself from being extreamly productive to being quite slow, lazy and just not as vibrant as my personalities have the ability to be. I am realizing this through some events that occured last night, events which reintroduced me to just being sporatic and doing what feels right instead of what is determined by my very predictable pattern.

There is one major flaw in the ultimate plan of GITI - everything is planned. If events in my life are planned months in advance and there is no detail left unwritten, then I am going to become bored with my life. Each evening when I get home I look at GITI, even if I know there is nothing there that needs my immediate attention. This habbit was formed from my habbit of doing the same during the first few weeks of the semester when there were always things in GITI that needed to be attended to. Now the course work is a little less strenuous and the assignments a lot more predictable. The predictability is probably what kills my motivation. I like to have courses where instructors are dynamic and their teaching style is always adapting and doing something new. Lecture, Scantron, Lecture, Scantron may work for some people who just want to get through their courses, get their hours and go on with their lives, but as I hositily pointed out to my "peer advisor", that just isn't for me. I am at this university to learn material that I want to learn, in addtion to the required dulldrum material of course. I don't care if I get out of here in 2 years, 4 years, or 5 years. I just want to do what I know is best for me, which is to persue the education that I want. I know what it is that makes me happy when in an educational environment, I need to seek that out, not become bored with it and excel as I am expected to do.

After last night I am feeling a little better about things as far as my life in general, hopefully this will hold to be the same result after a few days go by. I really want to return to feeling the same way I did in the first few weeks of the semester.

How do I always get stuck with the nuts? I admit that psychologically I am not the most normal person on earth, but the people who seem to have levitated towards me in the past few weeks are more messed up than I ever thought someone could be. The best example of this is one that just occured a few minutes ago. One of my friends from high school had an issue with her boyfriend earlier in the week and as a result decided to stay in his dorm room until he would talk to her about what was bothering her. To vent frustrations she threw a tennis ball at the wall repeatedly for a period of a few hours, this annoyed the boyfriend's roommates. The situation escalated and ended up with the police and the Residence Advisor both being called and her being given a choice of volentary mental insitutionalization or going home until a psychological evaluation could be conducted.

In my abnormal psychology class there are several people who have one or more of the studied disorders who decide to take a liking to me. Why is this the case? I know my personality is non-threatning to people who may consider themselves to be "different", but I just dont see why everyone around me tends to be nuts. Can I just have a few sane people once in a while please?

As I have gotten older I have began to fulfil more and more of my goals in life. Somehow each of these "accomplishments" leaves me empty in the end. I remember in 7th grade I aspired to be Microsoft cerified, and now I am and it doesn't really mean that much to me as an accomplishment. I feel somewhat satisified with myself because I had a goal and decided to persue it. Things in my life that are out of my reach seem like such great accomplishments until they are in my reach and then they are meaningless and hold less value than they once did.

I used to want to be a beta tester for a long time, until I became one and the group membership wasn't as special as I thought and no significant adjustment to my level of happieness occured. Now I am gradually falling off the whole beta thing and sticking with things that work. Since Microsoft has changed their beta practices and communication methods it hasn't been the same and I no longer value my "beta rights".

One of my past goals was to become a college student, because in my view college students were so independant and successful with things. I am now finding that as a college student I haven't changed from my original situation. Instant changes would likely have more of an impact on me, but nothing in life is instant, everything is gradual. I expect that I will gradually mature while in college. I also expect that my independance will gradually come and will be finalized by me moving out of my parents' house permenantly.

I can't do anything about this problem with me achieving goals and feeling indifferent, but I must keep setting goals and accomplishing them so that I don't become depressed and have no goals and no functional life. Any goal is better than no goal.

Interesting quote of the day (from an email list): "Men who are sensitive, caring, and good looking are never available - Because they already have boyfriends"

Aren't sterotypes fun?

OR Preparing To Intergrate with the Hive Mind

I have spent a great deal of time in the great complex that is the Active Directory Group Policy utility over the past few years. Now it is between me and that utility for me to become an MCSE. I have been looking over the test-prep tools for test 70-217, and not finding much comfort in them. I think for once I am going to hone my knowledge by improving the in-place-network practice that I have. If there is something I should be doing for the exam, I should be able to do it on my network for a similar purpose and have it make sense. One of the most unusual things I have run across so far in preparing for the test is modification of the schema to include custom objects. I have never done that before, nor have I felt the urge to do it. I'm not sure what I can be practical about adding to my domain schema, but there must be something with the way I like to over-organize things. Perhaps a listing of a "database" object to keep up with the changes I make to my MySQL databases, something which currently cannot be tracked using AD (unless I use MS SQL). I consider myself highly knowledgeable of Windows and Active Directory, but there is a lot I still need to learn about it. I want to learn this material and be able to become a competent Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, not just a paper-certified moron incapable of performing what he has been certified to do.

I now have a Linux system present in my native network environment, this causes some oddity, but also a great opportunity for me to learn to get Linux (with Samba) and Active Directory to work together.

My final two exams are both on Active Directory, so I need to learn this material well and know what I am doing. I want to be able to enter the 70-219 (Designing Active Directory, my final exam) feeling just as confident as when I entered the room for 70-215 (I, A, and C Windows 2000 Server). It has been a long time since I began this journey, starting back on April 10, 2003. I had thoughts of stopping with my MCP certification, because that was the easy thing to do. I didn't take any other exams after I had exhausted my supply of exam vouchers for over a year until I was challenged by my school's network administrator to complete the next certification by the time I graduated. On May 19, 2004 I recieved the status of Microsoft Certified System Administrator. I shouldn't have had to rely on an outside challenge to get me to finalize that goal in my life. I am usually so much more self-motivated than that. This time I am going to be self motivated and pass both of my remaining exams on the first try (especially important for 219). I am this close to my certification goal, I can complete the goal in 2 exams and then close the Microsoft era in my life forever if I decide to do so.

More certifications are likely in my future, but not in the Microsoft realm.

ALERT THE MEDIA!

I will be volentarily going for advising in the next week or two. I am a little nervous about it, but I realize that I must do it because of various things that have come up. I considered going to the advisor and just getting the needed signature for my CAEC registration, but now that I have exchanged a few emails with my advisor I am feeling a little more comfortable. I will be discussing the actual CAEC registration as well as other topics with the advisor. One of the primary things I will be discussing is the proccess for selecting a minor. I am pretty sure of my major already (Management Information Systems), but am still having difficulty finding the perfect secondary area of interest for myself. I have decided that I will also be going over my planned Spring schedule with my advisor, just to double check my intentions.

One sad thing about UNCC that I have discovered, because of the way the bussiness department is structures I will change advisors once my major has been officially declared. At the present rate I should be declaring my major at the end of Fall 2005 semester. I could declare it before then if I were to take Summer courses, but I have decided based on advice from friends that I will not be doing that again next year. This summer the courses were probably beneficial because they kept me focused on something semi-academic most of the time, so I didn't go totally nuts upon entering UNCC.

I don't know why I avoid advisors so much, they aren't such bad people. I used to not have any problems at all with Alice Williams at Gaston College, I actually looked forward to seeing her. With her I guess it was based on the fact that she was always willing to help me make my educational dream become a reality, she wasn't focused on pushing me through "her" insituation as fast as possible. When I meet Kristine D. Hopkins for the first time I will probably make my first judgements about her then. I am not capable of being forceful in situations like that, so I will have to leave small hints that I am not just some clueless Freshman (or 1st year Sophomore) seeking a clue.

I will post information about my meeting with my advisor at the end of the advising session.

Early this morning at around 6am, before I went to bed I began rethinking the GITI v2 project.

I have decided that the best thing to do is to change the focus of the project and bring it back to being primarily focused around me. I am a fairly unique person and so far am the only one capable of seriously using GITI. GITI started as only being able to support a single user, ME. Through the development of what has become known as GITI v.1 the focus went to being a multi-user system that could possibly be released as open-source. I think this decision was made because I didn't see GITI as being a valuble use of my time if it was only for little me. Well, little me has some pretty substantial life issues as well as some odd compulsions that can only be answered by GITI. Because of this I will be refocusing GITI v2 to being for me and based on the concept of making my life easier and more managed.

One of the major things that confirms that GITI isn't for anyone but me is the way I adapted the Education module to handle college level assignments and courses and not high school level once I began having college courses. If GITI is my private utility, then I can advance it without fear and let it further be an expression of me. I guess GITI is sort of like art, it reflects the mood and vision of its creator (me).

I know I sound extreamly selfish in this post, but oh well, this is my life, my blog and GITI is mostly my code (im not that great at PHP, had to steal some from Chris ;-).

Ever notice that in your life you can't quite see everything at all levels all the time?

I recently started working on my life analysis/diagnostic outline as I mentioned in a previous entry. As I have gotten deeper into it I decided to look back on my previous analysis, there are drastic differences in what the goals look like. This time the goals are a lot more future centered instead of here-now centered like the old analysis. In the current analysis I focus on things like graduating from UNCC with my degree, this is at least 2 years away and as many as 4 years away. The older analysis is more "me" centered, it goes into things like my personality and the level of stress I was handling at the time. The difference between the two documents is huge, but when i look back, so are the situations. There is a notation on the older document that states that I was handling what I considered to be "chaos" at the time, which would tend to make me more here-now focused. I am not sure why the current document is being constructed, I guess I feel that my priorities might be a little unclear and in need of analysis.

Another thing that is occuring with me in the new analysis is that I am not as involved with my academic career anymore, this is because of the change in academic format. There is a lot less day-to-day stuff to handle. I am now just responsible for learning the material and being able to repeat it for a test. I felt much more involved in high school, and even during my Summer College education sabbatical where I did electronic courses requring me to learn information by myself. My original passion for learning I had in the Spring with Interpersonal Communication and Intro to Ethics has not fully returned yet. Some components of the environment have not yet been met. I need an environment where it is more than just lecture. I like dicussion based courses where I truely feel involved and like I have a reason for being in the room. As much as I have a problem with being in social environments, I love being in a classroom where I can know all of the students and be able to have intelligent discussions with them. High school had a feeling of administrative pressure, and the ever-present peer-judgement. I still love learning, but I am having adaptation issues in my present life and I need to figure out what is truely right for me.

I will continue working on the analysis document for the next few days and try to see what I do need to change in my life. I am pretty certain that it doesn't involve me getting a job or leaving UNCC. The major aspects of my life at the moment are pretty much set in stone and I am happy with them. The minor things need some work yet, and thats probably why I can't get the analysis down to that level yet. I need to drill further in my conciousness to find where my problems are and where my goals are hiding.

My four day weekend has begun!

This week I have snapped at more people than I think I have in my entire life. Usually I can attribute my harsh outburts like the ones this week to some unusual mental occurance. This time I cant, because the cause is way too visible to me. I have become jelous of most people I know. I feel like I am being self-supressed. There are some people who I consider to be superior to me (instructors, Chris, etc) who I don't have a problem with being more accomplished than me, but people who I consider to be "peer" or below who do more with their lives than I have done make me insanely jelous. At the current time people who have some type of technological superiority (real or implied) and people with jobs are the main components that set me off. The primary person with a job that pisses me off is my father. He has a job and eagerly throws that in my face as often as he can. Other people do it more subtly and don't get a verbal assult from me as quickly, this would be people like Jake (in CA) and Tim (at UNCC). They don't realize what they are doing to me emotionally until it is too late. There are yet others who can talk about their work all day long and not bother me, this would be people like Ryan (my lab partner) who don't gloat and are more laid back than I am. I guess for this problem the best solution is just for me to actually get a job. I have plenty of spare time in which I could work, I just choose not to, because I feel that I can do better on other things in my life without working. This is definately an internal issue that will require some life change to resolve though. I am getting too bored and getting too jelous of people who have jobs and are better at anything than me.

On the more positive side, there is now a plan of action in place for me to complete my MCSE by Marth 4, 2005. Microsoft Exam 70-217 will be scheduled for Thursday, December 9, 2004 at around 2PM. Exam 70-219 (my much feared design exam) will be on some day in January or February, or in the event of me getting behind in my scheduling I will take it on my March 3rd or 4th (my birthday). I don't know when I will upgrade myself to MCSA and MCSE on Windows 2003, but it shouldn't be too long after I complete my Windows 2000 certifications. I will likely upgrade MCSA by summer 2005 and not worry too much about MCSE. I have decided to work on my MCSE because I need to focus on something other than purely normal academic stuff. Chris continues to remind me that I am blinded by my education and dreams of doctoral graduation, he is very correct. I let myself get too involved in anything I do. My excentric personality is always what leads me to a dead end. My life isn't as simple as I try to make it sometimes. I need to spread my mind wider and explore more of my life, not just opperate in tunnel vision all the time.

Paradise is only a state of mind, Chaos is the state of reality.

I just arrived on campus a few minutes ago, prepared to go to Deductive Logic, and sort of excited about it. Upon arriving at McEniry 122 I discovered a note stating that class was cancelled due to Mrs. Dr. Presler being ill. I now find myself with an hour of free time before Physics. My first instinct here was to begin finding things to fill this time, such as take care of registering for my credit by examination a few hours ahead of schedule, but then what would I do in that block of time? It is my natural tenancy to want to schedule things and fill blocks of time simply because they exist. I am finding that at the moment, doing nothing (grabbing a soda, being in Barnard and wasting time) seems to fit this time nicely. There are other things I could be doing now, such as going to the gym, running around the track, reading additional material for my classes, or any number of things for the excersizing of my body or mind. At this point though, I think it is best for me to just chill and enjoy one of the carefree moments I have while on this campus.

The rest of my day is still scheduled to be mostly normal I believe. Dr. Naeini is on campus today, I don't know about Betsy but I would assume that she is here also. Between Physics and English I will take care of my registration for credit by examination with the College of Bussiness Administration. I originally planned to get the registration done on Monday, but that sort of fell through.

I have been very lax about blogging recently, but I don't particularly care, this doesn't have to be a once a day thing, I just like doing it occasionally, such as right now when I am inspired to write something.

It has been a few days since I last posted. It is likely that this blog will end up not serving the purpose of documenting the best times I had in college, because so far whenever something fun or exciting happens I end up not being at the keyboard and don't feel like writing much about the event when I get back. Friday after my classes I went to see my best friend, Chris. We went to do a few things he needed to get done, then we went to the mall and did some other stuff. Not an extreamly exciting time for the typical college student, but I enjoyed it. Saturday was spent on sleep recovery and cleaning up my living area a little. Today (Sunday) was spent with Chris again, but this time at my house. We set up a linux server and reorganized my closet. Sometimes with the way Chris and I interact I feel like I have known him my entire life. Best friends like him are hard to find.

The point of this post which I was eventually going to get to was: when the blog gets quiet, there is no reason for alarm amoungst the loyal citizens of the Internet. Between entries I live, if I live through an entry period, then I am doing better than is usually expected.

Curtis's Daily Checklist:
- Eat
- Sleep
- Breath
- Blog
- Homework

It seems that simply living isn't on my list of priority items for each day. Perhaps I need to schedule a time to reevaluate my priorities. Where would that fall on my daily task list though?

Who decided that 24 hours in a day were enough, and that humans require sleep?

Sleep is inefficient and a waste of time. We musnt sleep, FIGHT THE UNCONCIOUS MENACE!