Fall 2008 Semester: The grades are in!

Woot, the grades turned out better than I expected. 19.5 credit hours of doom, complete.   Now to just figure out what I can do about the INCOMPLETE for Color and Light..

CRN	Subject	Course		Course Title		Final Grade			GPA Hours	Quality Points
21214	CG	314		PROGRAMMING CONCEPTS		A-			2.000	7.40
21215	CG	321		DSGN & AUTH INT MEDIA II		A-			2.000	7.40
21216	CG	341		3D MODELING AND ANIMATION		A-			2.000	7.40
21220	CG	344		HISTORY OF ANIMATION		A			3.000	12.00
23025	CG	346		PRINCIPLES OF ANIMATION I		B-			1.500	4.05
21709	CG	351		STORYBOARDING & STORYTELLING		B+			2.000	6.60
21223	IL	302		DRAWING FOR ANIMATION I		A-			2.000	7.40
2157	PE	141		FITNESS TRAINING		A			1.000	4.00
23035	SC	032		COLOR SCIENCE LABORATORY		A			1.000	4.00
23710	SC	332		COLOR AND LIGHT		B			3.000	3.00

Winter Vacation, To-Do List Placation

Well, the madness of the end of semester is over.  An uneventful (which is good) Christmas has passed – all I did was sit back and watch Slumdog Millionaire, which is a surprisingly awesome movie.

It feels as if I’m making no progress at chipping away at the long to-do list of things I wanted to catch up on during this vacation..  I’m suspecting that to-do lists really do not work.  It seems like, despite the fact I’m barely working two days a week right now during break, I still am falling behind.  There’s so much to do on my list and yet, bam, suddenly tons of bills come, birthdays, holidays, other responsibilities, etc.. The original ToDo list just sits there and pretty much now there’s a NEW ToDo list of more urgent tasks.

I need to somehow pay for tutition which means generating $1k in two days which doesn’t seem possible – this would not have been a problem if my winnings from QuakeCon 2008 QuakeLive had been what they were supposed to be.. They told me that I won $2000, but the check that arrived in the mail was $1000..it’s hard to complain since it’s prize money but still I was really counting on that money for school.  Oh well, guess it’ll be a high interest payment plan for this semester.

I need to learn Adobe AfterEffects well enough to start a level 2 course even though I’ve never taken level 1.. I suspect that during my sleep deprived final two weeks of classes I managed to totally forget to go to my Science of Color and Light final and so I recieved an INCOMPLETE.. Ugh, so disappointing, don’t know how..I thought I went.. I did.. didn’t I?  I don’t remember anything really from the last weeks of school.  It’s kinda frightening.  Next semester I need to make sure that I sleep no matter what happens.

Anyway, so the good thing is I’ve recovered my home built desktop computer from it’s neglected, virus riden state.  What really did it under was a virus that I aquired during an epic two day attempt  at installing the patch for  Resident Evil 4 / Biohazard.  This is a patch that is necessary since the PC port of the game was a total hack job and should never have been released without more work.  I failed miserably in the end at patching the game (trust me, building a computer and setting it up as a headless linux server is easier than patching this game).  And well.. the good news is, now the computer is all fixed up again as a dual-boot machine with a minimal install of WindowsXP sp3 (just for games) and LinuxMint 6 (for everything else).  It’s still not tweaked as nicely as my old Ubuntu Studio setup, but it does the job for now and I found this FlickR group of 360 degree photos to use for the fully rotatable skybox.

Well.. time to enjoy some gaming at long last.. Enemy Territory Quake Wars and HalfLife: Episode One (FINALLY!)

Super Size My Monopoly Money

The following is an excerpt from my essay on Super Size Me, for fitness class:

American public schools provide American children with terrible food that is basically the same as fast-food. This is because large food corporations have payed lobbyists working for them in the government and probably even the educational system. These lobbyists help ensure their patron’s wishes, such as the position as primary food provider for a school district, etc. This allows their corporations to sell low quality food to our children at high prices with government educational funding taken from our tax dollars. Various huge companies have a monopoly on the industry, such as Aramark – the company that produced horrible lunches at my high school way out in New Mexico and continues to produce horrible lunches at my college all the way in New York – there is no escape! I spent a brief period here at FIT working with the Foreign Films Club (now shutdown due to bureaucracy) and was really frustrated by the fact we were forced to pay Aramark for food during our movie showings. We were forced to spend over $12 per person for crappy Aramark boxed lunches, while we could have purchased high quality natural food from a small local restaurant for significantly less.

The terrifying thing is that this sort of corporate bureaucracy exists all the way up in all aspects of today’s global society. Not only are we forced to eat unhealthy food, but little by little human beings are losing more and more of their personal freedoms. We accept that we are in a rush running to school or work and can only spend a few dollars on an unhealthy McDonald’s cheeseburger. We don’t bother trying to customize our sandwich just like we don’t try to order customized shoes from Wal-Mart or a customized car from Ford. We accept it as it comes because we know we cannot change it. Fast-food is assembly-line cuisine and we live in an assembly-line society. With every generation a little less personal freedom becomes the accepted norm, and the eventual outcome is scary. We live in a world where the machine of humanity is so large that the individual gears are of little significance, as long as we spin and spend our money the machine can and will continue to give us the little dirty drop of oil that we need to survive. And when we get sick from it’s impurities we go to the doctor and make the medical and pharmaceutical industry gears spin – in sickness and in health we will make the machine run, even if it kills us. The end.

Giving wordpress a go go!

Well due to extreme time limitations, between classes, work and moving to a new house, it seems apparent that I’m not going to have time to fix my web server any time soon.  Eventually I will, but until then, this wordpress site will have to do the trick.  I hope it is possible to export a wordpress.com site in the future so I can host it locally, but I’ll worry about that when the time comes.  For now, this will give me a sound CMS for one section of my final website project..

Yes!