Merry Chrismahanakwanza

Merry Christmas to you all.

Cold

It's way, way to cold outside right now. According to Trillian it's -9 outside right now. It's so cold I'm keeping a gallon bucket of icecream frozen by my window! I stuck a Big Mikes Super Sub by my window last night to keep it cool, instead it froze and I got a frosty sub. Took a minute in the microwave to thaw it. All my pop on my window sill froze solid too. It's so dang cold that when I headed out for breakfast I almost got frostbite on a two minute walk.

This is the type of weather that makes you go. WHY IN THE HELL DID ANYONE STOP IN MINNESOTA OR WISCONSIN? Was the east cost to warm? Gave up going all the way to sunny CA? Speaking of CA Trillian tells me its a warm 50 in Mountain View right now. Makes me want to head back out there.

Finals Done!

Finals are now over. I have finished all those annoying tests and papers! My CS 520 final went terrible, I thought I knew what is was like to fail. Well now I know. If I'm lucky I'll pull off a 40%, I'm really, really, hoping the curve pulls up my grade otherwise I can say goodbye to good GPA and grad school :(.

Theory of Computation aside my other tests went pretty well. Apparently I got an A on my 7:45am final! Yeah!

Two Down One to Go

Well I finished my two finals for the day. How did they go? Easy as easymac (btw I've never made these crappy things). I put in a whole 20 minutes of studying for my second final, and boy I thought it was easy. Either that or I failed it.

One Down Two to Go

Got done with my ECE553 final around 9:25 or so. It turned out to be a lot easier than I thought it would. I look at my notesheets like twice, and even then it was just to confirm something I already knew. Of course the T/F section at the begining probably screwed me over especially as I changed an answer to something incorrect. My ECE 551 final is coming up soon at 12:25. Maybe I should study or at LEAST make a notesheet for this one.

Test Time

I've finally reached that point in finals week when I actually have a test. That's right starting at 7:45 am my tests begin! I know, I know that's way to early to go to class let alone stay awake and think. But do I have a choice? Nope, I just lucked out with such an early class aren't you jealous?

Considering "finals" started Thursday evening you would think I'd be all studied up for the test. Guess what I'm not. I started my studying today and maybe got in a good 5 hours for ALL my classes. So in reality I really haven't studied at all. Ohh well go figure. I hope I get up early enough tomorrow. At least final number 2 isn't until 12 tomorrow so I have time to make a notesheet!

Finals

Well I'm supposed to be studying for finals. Guess what I can't get anything done because I am easily distracted. It's really really annoying. Can anyone suggest a decent way to keep on task? Because I certainly cannot do that.

Finals Week! AKA Game Time

Here at Madison, we have entered Finals Week. This is the time where many students get all stressed out about exams and stuff. Me? I play video games instead of work.

In an ironic twist of fate KotOR II: The Sith Lords has come out. Why is this ironic? This time last year KotOR came out and basically ruined my GPA. It is solely responsible for a B I got in AI as I played this game for about 3 straight days instead of studying (Yeah, Yeah a B doesn't "ruin" your GPA but it does mine). Why does God hate me so?

Probably my most hated class is stupid Afro Am Studies? Why do I hate this. It makes me write a papers. Papers are an evil that I have avoided since freshman year and so I am TERRIBLE at writing them. Not to mention the fact I need to try and come up with 10 pages of stuff to write on. This isn't easy for Engineers.

Where's the Snow

Well it has been awhile since me last post. Nothing like being way to busy to do anything. Most of my grad school apps are now in, all that's left is for some people to submit some letters of recommendation.

In other news it looks like all those Job Interviews were a waste of time. Sure I ended up with offers from all (except MS, Google) but I think I will do the grad school Thang. I even declined Oracle making me an offer. God I feel stupid now but it's not like I really want to develop software apps. I want to be a little more low level, and designing software for missle Wing-Extenders for Lockheed didn't really appeal to me. (Florida is to hot).

Austin?

Well I'm in austin texas. What is there here? I'm not entirely sure. After the fun of a day of interviews I had the chance to see what part of downtown Austin is like. More specifically what a couple of bars are like :). Did anything exciting happen? Well not totally. I got to know a couple of the current employees of National Instruments better and another UW student. From talking to these people NI sounds like a fun and challenging place to work. The only downside? I've been railroaded into a software engr. position. This has been the case with every dang place I've applied. I don't think any company will overlook my double major and let me do hardware design. It doesn't help I haven't done any design since last semester and would prob mess up part of the interview. Ahh well not everyone can be perfect. Seeing as how I devote little effort to actually accomplishing anything I prob should just count my blessings.

Ohh one other thing. While in my interviews I got a whole two calls from VMWare wondering if I was still available for employment. Ohh to be wanted by so many and yet have basically no offers to show for it. Ahh well I will just have to live with my mediocrity. I know people less technically able then me that have job offers from companies such as Microsoft. It makes me really think about what they are actually looking for in an employee. Maybe I failed because I didn't want tto be a wage slave. (Who knows?)


P.S. Guiness? Not so bad....

Deep in the Heart of Texas

I'm off to Austin, Texas that is, for an interview with National Instruments. This is my 5th and final out of town interview for the year. I can't do this anymore as it's hard to get stuff done for class when you miss most of them.

When I get back I'll let everyone know how "cool" Austin is.

There and Back Again - An Interviewies Tale

Well I made it back from sunny Florida on Friday. After 75-80 degree weather coming back to the bitter cold of Wisconsin was quite a shock. Luckily I will only be around for about a day. Tomorrow I take off for San Franciso where I will be visiting with Oracle. I'm actually getting sick of flying all over the place. Hopefully I can get a good seat on the plane like an emergency seat so I can have some extra leg room.

Planes In the Sky

Well I'm off again on another Interview adventure! This time I am heading to exciting Orlando Florida to speak with Lockheed Martin. What do they have in store for me? Who knows! But whatever it is requires a Top Secret clearance.

Googleplex

Well I'm out in sunny Mountain View, CA and am now relaxing in my hotel after a long day of interviews at the Googleplex. That's right I scored an on-site with the great Google. Google has got to be the coolest place to work. After touring it I really, really want to work here.

Let's see what they have. There are Segways (those cool 2 wheeled things) anyone (who is trained) can just hop and and drive to another building. The work env is awsome. Everyone has twin 20" LCD monitors in the coolest offices ever. Complete glass. 3 people share class walled office which is pretty huge. Since you work on projects in groups of 3 you basically just share an office with your entire team! It reminds me of the team work areas in a CS lab. Seems pretty cool. Finally there is all the free food. The cafeteria has a huge variety of stuff and all of it's free. Microsoft touts their free soda but it's nothing compared to Google. Google has coolers of every soda imaginable. I mean everything. Coke, pepsi, mt. dew, bawls, even and a ton of other specialty beverages such as bottled root beer. They also have plenty of bottled water (normal and "smart").

In addition to drinks Google has tons of food with every drink cooler. They have chips, fruit, candy, cerial (yes boxes of cerial), and random granola and other bars. This is part of the 100 ft rule. That is you should never be more than 100ft from food. Google holds to this religiously.

All the people I spoke to were very excited about their work. There are some sweet things going on out here. I also had a chance to sign up for google's Orkut network. (This is some sort of secret community thing.)

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.

Mod-Box

Over the summer I had the brillant idea to softmod my X-Box. I went out and got a USB memory stick, and a USB->X-Box adapter (free PSO one from MS). After a bit of research I found out it wasn't going to work. Why, you may ask? Because I went out and bought the Halo Edition X-Box, which just happens to have a newer kernel than the original ones. This kernel was "mod proof". Key word here: was.

As of this writing I've soft-modded my X-Box. The reason? Because I could. After messing around for a bit I installed XBMC which has got to be a killer app for a home entertainment system. It can be used to stream music (from 'net or pc), watch DVD's, stream movies, and watch divx/mpeg4 videos. It's a mini multi-media center! Why Microsoft just didn't include these features in the X-Box escapes me.

For all of you who don't have a softmodded box let me tell you it's about as easy as possible now. You just download a special game save from the 'net. Stick it in your X-Box and load it in one of 3 defective games. This wonderful installer asks you a few questions and automates the rest. Soooo easy. I really recommend you give it a try. (Warning: In theory you COULD fsck up your X-Box so it doesn't work. Warning 2: Don't go on X-Box live with hack installed 'cause you'll be banned)

Pocket PC Goodness

Yesterday I went to a Tech Talk on security/encryption sponsored by Microsoft. I mainly went for free pizza that was to be given out at the event. Well, no such luck. The FLUNO center catered the talk. This means we got some fancy Hors D'oeuvres, and pop. Not exactly the pizza I was promsied. I would be upset but they raffled off some prizes and I got lucky and got the big one. A HP iPAQ pocket pc! Which is really a glorified calendar book, (or nes emulator!). If anyone has any suggestions on uses for a pocket pc (no I'm not giving it to you) let me know. Or if you can think of any cool games I can throw on it.

Fable

Well I broke down and bought Fable. The only thing I can say so far is wow. It's actually fun so far. It currently appears like there is a game invovled, unlike Black and White where they tagged the game on in the last month of development. My only complaint is the fact the game is made out of many small zones. When I say small I mean small. Some of these zones are like 10 feet across. In many cases you can run across the zone in less time than it took to load the zone. They should have done some dynamic loading or caching like Diablo II, World of Warcraft, or Dungeon Siege. Either that or made some of the zones bigger (some are actually a decent size). Even with this annoyance the game is enjoyable to play. If you're looking for a hack and slash RPG for XBox give it a try. The tagline in the commercials, "Every action has a consequence" is mostly true.

Free IPOD!

Well I've recently found a site where they are giving out free ipods. Sounds like a scam I know. When I first heard about it I just dismissed it as crap. But after doing some research and reading some articles in actual news sources it sounds like the whole thing is legit. Now I just need 5 referrals and I'm good to go. If your interested in signing up please use this link http://www.freeiPods.com/default.aspx?referer=9360016. If you want more info first check out freeipodguide.com or this wired article http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,64614,00.html?tw=wn_2culthead.

WoW Is a Time Eater

I go to play WoW for an hour maybe two to relax. Now it's 12 :20AM and I'm just getting done. Boy does this game suck you in. I haven't lost track of time playing a game in awhile, not since KOTOR have I wasted spent so much time playing a game.

Busy Busy

The first week of classes is done (we started last Thursday), and boy am I busy. I've got plenty of homework but that isn't taking up my time (haven't even looked at it yet). I've spent the last day or two trying to get a student org organized and ready to go for the new year. This involves tracking down all sorts of forms and people.

The biggest hassle is that our server appears to be messed up. It's not BROKEN per say it just happens we've had some random IP that wasn't registered with the College's network Admins. Don't ask me how that happened, my understanding was they gave us the IP in the first place. So now our org's network is cutoff until CAE get's back to me with updated info.

On top of the cutoff hassle they have decided to block all external port access into the system. Since our group has been hosting our own website we're now stuck. I spent some time trying to track down some webspace were we could host a dynamic site to have a basic registration page. Turns out all the U sponsored hosting really wants you to just use good old static html. Of course this doesn't make for a very good system to get new users registered. I finally had to host the thing on my home server over my cable connection.

My Gentoo system managed to get screwed up so I need to rebuild that too. It's busily compiling a bunch of system packages and will hopefully finish in the next day or so. A 600MHz machine takes awhile to compile GLIBC and GCC.

Well I'm sick of working on computers so I don't feel like working on my verilog homework. I think I'll go play some World of Warcraft.

Schedule

Quick post with my schedule:
M 1:20pm-2:10pm, 2:25PM-3:14PM
T 9:55AM-10:45AM, 11:00AM-12:15PM, 1:00PM-2:15PM
W 1:20PM-2:10PM, 2:25PM-4:55PM
R 9:55AM-10:45AM, 11:00AM-12:15PM, 1:00PM-2:15PM
F 1:20PM-2:10PM

I'm registered for classes in Theory of Computation, Hardware Design using Hardware Description languages specificially Verilog, Testing and Testable Design of Digital Systems, An Intro Antropology course, and a course called Black Heroes and Villians in Film. I plan to drop one of these classes but haven't decided between Anthro or the Heros and villians one. Antro seems easy but boring, the other class sounds more interesting and the prof is great. I only have to write several essays (big deal for an engr. student who hasn't written a paper since freshman year).

Whomami?

Well just in case anyone takes the time to read this I thought I'd mention a bit about myself. The name's Jonathon and I'm a Computer Engineering and Sciences student at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. When I'm not busy with schoolwork I like to read, play games, listen to music and GASP! spend time doing stuff on the computer.


[Music on Winamp: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony 4th Movement AKA Ode to Joy]

First POST!

W00t first post!

Just kidding well it is the first post but not in the slashdot "I'm a loser who needs attention sense." I decided to oneup my friend Nate with a much cooler blog than his. That's about it for now. I'll post some more as I think about it.