Halloween In Madison

So this weekend was Halloween. What's this mean? A crapload of stupid highschool and college students from out of town come, get wasted, and fuck up State Street. Do students get involved? Nope. Wandering up and down State Street drunk (or not drunk) is no fun at all. Besides all of us have schoolwork to do.

This all tends to reflect badly on all of us students here since on the news you hear stuff like: "On halloween students at the #3 party school, UW-Madison, rioted on state street..." Of course what news places don't mention is that 12% of the arrests over the entire night were actual students here. That's really, really low when you consider there are like 10,000 students here in Madison. A large majority of all the trouble makers come in from out of town to riot/fuck up Madison.

So what does this have to do with me? Not much except all these people PISS ME OFF. Do to them they locked the dens here for the entire weekend which annoyed everyone I know as people wanted to use them for homework. This also forced a bunch of us to sit in the hall and have a small pizza party around 12am as we couldn't eat in the den. As after 12 is "quiet hours" so in theory we shouldn't have been in the hall. Of course everyone on our floor was there so I don't think anyone minded. In any case a couple of Housefellows (one inebriated) came by later and nice told us all get out of the hall since it was quiet hours.

GRE Done

Well I'm done with the GRE so that's out of my way. I got my scores on the Quantitative and Verbal parts right away as I took the test on the computer. Assuming I didn't write down the wrong scores I did pretty well. Of course I'm afraid I wrote down the wrong score as I can't believe I did that well.

GRE Test

My plans for after getting out of here include heading off to graduate school. About a day ago I realized if I want to apply to any graduate schools I need to cram a GRE in before the end of this month. So in a panic I managed to score the last possible test time I could get this month. 1:00pm in Milwaukee of all places. So now I get to rent a car and go on a road trip.

This wouldn't be all that bad except I went and took some practice GRE's in a GRE study guide. After looking over how I did I've freak out I'm going to fail the damn test. Maybe I should actually have studied for this thing. Most of the schools I would like to apply to expect you to have scores in the 90th percentile for math. I got a range of 60-70th percentile. I'm so fucking screwed. I have the wonderful problem of getting stuck on an easy question because I can't focus on the question at hand. I haven't felt this way since taking the ACT and SAT.

I'm afraid I'm going to totally fuck up and screw myself over.

Ahh well not much I can do. JD will help me feel better :)

(Well if I fail this test I can only hope my Visit to the Googleplex goes well)

I'm still safe

Well it's been awhile since my last post. My Interview out in the Seattle area went terrible. Prob the worst I've ever done at coding and problem solving. Anyway I got free trip and to see some friends and relatives. Nothing like buying some food as MS's expense. I even think I may have seen Mt. Saint Helens erupting from the plane.

I will now go back to my Microsoft disliking self and continue on my quest to convert everyone over to Linux. (Except me since I play games :)).

Dum, Dum, Dah, Dum, Dum, Dah, Dum, Dummm

Today I take off to Seattle where I will have a grueling day of interviews with the Empire. I'm both excited and slightly nervous. What if I'm given some problems to solve that I can't figure out? What if they give another damn fractal? Ahh well. I'll just take this free trip and enjoy myself. At least I can see some relatives in the Seattle area.

Finally, is it even ethical to work for them? (Well enough money might help :).) I totally disagree with their business practices. Even after employment I would prob still encourage people to use Linux.

Jon's Theorem of Internet Audio

I subscribed to X-Box live this weekend since I had a free trial about to expire. After playing online for a bit I've been forced to pose the following Theorem for eveyone to ponder.

If someone uses voice chat that person is guaranteed to be less than 17 years of age.

This comes from much observation of voice chat in Half-Life, UT 2004, and now X-Box live. I don't think ANYONE over the age of 17 has EVER used a microphone to chat in a videogame. I am really sick of 10 year olds crying "Ju n00bz0r h4x0r, st0p w4ll h4cking. u r so g4y". That's right I can even hear them speaking in 31337 speak. You can just feel the use of numbers instead of actual vowels.

This isn't just a CS phenomenon. I've had this talk in every FPS that has a voice mode, and now with X-Box live "Splinter Cell", "Mechassault", and even "Project Gotham Racing". As old as I am I feel like I shouldn't be gaming 'les someone think I'm only 12 and playing games out of my basement.

CS 520 is the Devil

Well I must come to the conclusion that CS 520 is evil pure and simple. What's CS 520 you ask? It's a course titled "An Introduction to the Theory of Computation". What a mouthful! This course is a "joy". We are learning about fun stuff like Finite State Automata, Regular Languages, and Regular Expressions. While this stuff isn't so bad the assignments are a pain in the neck. We get to prove obvious stuff like r + s = s + r where r and s are regular expressions. This proof is either really hard or trivial to the point it's stupid.

The homework this week only has like 20 problems in which you need to rigorously prove a bunch of stuff. This fact leads me to the theorem;

"CS 520 is the Devil"

Now if I could only come up with valid proof...

Mircosoft

This weekend I got a call from Microsoft. Microsoft would like me to come out to Redmond for a job interview this month! I'm pretty excited since a free trip to Seattle is hard to pass up. Of course working for the Evil Empire has its own ethical/moral issues; but a chance to work on something like Windows would be hard to pass up. (Yes I know I hate Windows and 90% of the other stuff MS does.) Of course if they want me to work on something like Microsoft Money or SQL Server that would suck. Maybe I'll get damn lucky and they are recruiting form Microsoft Games! In any case I don't know who I will be interviewing with or even when. They need to get back to me and filter through the dates I gave them.