For any friends of Derek's that have come across this blog:
http://derek.idratherread.net/

My dream fulfilled once again!

It happened again! I am now sitting at home, and getting paid to do nothing. I love snow days!

On Monday I had my first Neural Networks class. The class seems like it should be pretty good. The teacher seems to be quite good and the whole idea of the class seems interesting. The teacher spent about half of the first class talking about philosophy and why people started trying to mimic a real-life neural network as a mathematical model. It's pretty interesting. He also assigned a first homework assignment that focuses on basic math concepts (beginning linear algebra, calculus, etc.) because, apparently, many of the people that take this class haven't had a math class in several years (or that's how it has been when he taught this class previously). I was supposed to have my first Discrete Math class yesterday, but it was canceled due to snow.

Today, woot.com is selling a laptop for $300. It comes with Linux installed on it. I've been thinking about getting a laptop for a while (mostly for school), and I've also been thinking that I should try to get somewhat familiar with Linux, so I went ahead and bought one. Now, though, I need to come up with a little project so that I will actually do stuff with my Linux computer. The first thing that I'm going to do is join it to my home computer network and figure out how to create various users with various permissions. That'll probably take a few hours of messing around, which will be good, but I also want to come up with a nice project that would be useful for me to do and also serve to make me educate myself about Linux. Any suggestions?

"You're probably not even an Aries then!" "You know, you're right. I used to think that astrology was just a bunch of crap, but, more likely...

...I don't know my own birthday!"

So often nowadays, as I read through various news websites, I never see any good news. Luckily, on FridayI found this story.

At one point, I briefly considered going to see the presidential inauguration since I live so close to DC (on the weekends it takes between 45 minutes and 1 hour to get there from my apartment). Then I started hearing reports about how many millions of people are supposed to show up for the event (the last estimate that I heard was 2 million). I then decided that it would be way too much of a hassle. Maybe I'll go to the next one.

Let's see, what else is going on? I start school a week from today. This semester I have one class on Monday (4:30 - 7:10 PM) and one on Tuesday (same time). I hope that this will be better than last semester when I had both classes on the same day. That was annoying.

I haven't started working out yet. I've still been doing my push ups and pull ups, but I haven't forced myself to go to the gym yet. I should probably try to get into that habit before school starts, or I might not ever be able to make myself go.

On the plus side, I learned that a couple of comedians that I like are going to be showing up at the DC Improv soon. Eddie Gossling is going to be there in early February and Christian Finnegan is going to be there in early April. This past weekend Kevin Nealon (of SNL fame) was doing his show. Unfortunately, I didn't hear about that show early enough, so all of the shows were sold out a couple of weeks ago. Oh well, maybe I can catch him next time he comes through. Over the Christmas break, Todd Barry did a show that I wasn't able to catch either (stupid family, getting in the way of me going to see stand-up comedy shows).

Movies I'm excited about:

January

• Inkheart (Hooray for fun, family adventure movies!)
• Killshot (Who among you has not dreamed of getting trained as an assassin?)
• Outlander (Vikings, aliens, fighting. Who wouldn't want to see a movie that can boast these keywords?)
• Underworld: The Rise of the Lycans (Sacrificing story to make a cool action movie about vampires and werewolves. Sounds good to me! After all, you all know the slogan that I live by: Why pay for a story when you can just buy cool special effects for hundreds of millions of dollars?)
• Taken (When his daughter is kidnapped, Liam Neeson decides to get her back. This looks like the kind of movie that I wanted Ransom to be)

February

• Coraline (The book was fun/quirky. Hopefully they don't screw it up too much.)
• Push (A bunch of teens get cool super powers a la X-Men)

March

• Watchmen (The ending in the comic book was stupid, but this should still be a decent movie)

May

• X-Men Origins - Wolverine (I'm very excited to see Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool!)
• Terminator Salvation (Christian Bale as John Connor fighting robots in the future. Best movie ever?)

Are there any movies that I'm forgetting?

Descriptive Title

It’s time, once again, for my year-end roundup! I know what you’re thinking: “Derek, what do you mean ‘once again’? You’ve never had a ‘year-end roundup’ before! And it’s not even the end of the year! Isn’t it a little late for this?!” Allow me to fully address each of these concerns as they were raised: Sure I have and shut up!

2008 was a pretty good year for me. I had several accomplishments that I am quite proud of. Therefore, I will now compile a list (in order from least to most important) of everything noteworthy that happened to me in 2008:

1. I finished up my first semester of my second Master’s Degree (I got a B and an A). Only 4 more semesters to go!
2. I now have the internet always at my fingertips because I was stupid enough to pay some ridiculous sum of money each month for my iPhone
3. I convinced myself that it is possible to buy happiness, so I purchased an HDTV and PS3 (I was so right, too).
4. I was able to con my credit union into giving me a car loan (suckers!)
5. I fulfilled one of my lifelong dreams by getting a cat, and then discovered the amazing joys of getting another cat and having the two of them vie for my affection (which I very jealously give only to the victor)
6. And finally (since I can’t think of any more noteworthy events), I was able to lose 110 lbs. At the beginning of last year, I weighed 300 lbs and I had a 44 inch waist. I now weigh 190 lbs and I am currently at a 36 inch waist.

Hopefully, 2009 will also be a great year. My goals for this year are (in order from least to most important):

1. Become the “all-being”, master of time, space, and dimension
2. Build the two computers that I mentioned a couple of months ago in my blog
3. Get automatic feeding, watering, and littering devices for my cats (so that I can leave them alone for 5 days without a problem)
4. Figure out everything that I need to do/have (such as money) in order to buy a house
5. Take 4 or 5 classes (depending on if I take a summer class or not) and get all A’s
6. Go sky-diving
7. Get BUFF! I hope to get a 34 inch waist and be able to lift more weight than I was able to lift in high school (my bench press max in high school was 250 lbs). I also hope to be able to run a decent distance without dying (something like 3 miles or so in under 30 minutes)

What about the rest of you? Do the two of you that actually read this blog have a Top 6 list of accomplishments that you would care to share with me and (potentially) other people by posting the list as a comment on this blog?

Clever-er Title!

Let's see, the most exciting thing that happened to me recently is that my pay-as-you-go phone no longer works. I either finished up the minutes on it, or Chronos thought that it was edible. Either way, it no longer works. Also, I can't get to my contacts list on the phone, so I no longer have anybody's contact info. Please send me an email with your contact info. Oh yeah, I decided to correct the problem by getting an iphone.

I'm pretty excited that school is finally finished. Unfortunately, one of my finals (the final for the class that I was not worried about) turned out to be much harder than I was expecting, so I'm not sure what my final grades turned out to be. Luckily I should be able to find out within the next week.

I'm going to be heading to New Mexico next week. I haven't managed to con anyone into watching my cats yet, but I think that I can convince somebody at work. Apparently there are also "cat sitters" that wander around to people's houses to watch cats while people are out of town. If I can't trick anyone into watching my cats for free, I might look into doing that. We'll see.

Well, that's about it. If you happen to miss the melodious sound of my voice, send me an email with your phone number and I might deign to give you a call. Hasta luego (I meant "talk to you later" not "see you later". Unfortunately, I don't know how to say that. Maybe "habla luego" or something.)

That's not ironic, it's an oxymoron. You know, like "swiss cheese".

Well, I've already fallen behind on my goal for this blog (of writing a new entry every couple of days). Oh well. I blame...hmm...let's see...we'll say Kat. How could you?!

I've got finals coming up next week. It kind of took me by surprise. I knew that they would be happening soon, but I wasn't thinking about how soon. That means that I'm going to be spending the weekend studying, so you might have a little bit of trouble getting ahold of me (ha ha, do you see the joke? You always have trouble getting ahold of me! So why did I mention it?! Hilarious!).

I got my PS3 up and running again (just in time for me to ignore it and study). If you recall, when I tried to install the latest system update, the PS3 froze on me. The warning was there on the screen "Do not turn off the power to this system until it has finished updating", so I was at a little bit of a loss for what to do. Finally, since nothing else was working, I restarted it. This didn't appear to hurt the PS3, but it also didn't fix it because the first thing the PS3 did when it turned back on was to retry to update the system software (it conveniently erred out at the same place as before, too). After emailing Sony customer support and receiving no reply, I shut down my PS3 and unplugged it. When I turned it on again, later, it started up and did not try to update the software. Now I'm scared to try updating the software anymore.

An interesting note: I bought my ticket to go to Albuquerque this morning (I'll be there from Monday (12-22) night to early Saturday (12-27)), and it cost almost half as much as I would have had to pay if I tried to buy it earlier this week. I wish that I could predict things like that. Ah well, such is life (I'm on fire with these little philisophical notes and sayings! That's one in a row, right there!).

I'm Baaaaaack!

Well, I got back from Thanksgiving break at my parent's house. It was a lot of fun. I got to see all of my family (including Heidi and her kids, who I normally see once a year). I went to Weck's Monday - Thursday, and Friday - Saturday (they were closed on Thursday, the jerks). I also brought back some green chile from there that I'm going to use to make breakfast burritos for Wade and me (since Wade was nice enough to watch my cats. I'm not going to lie, I was very tempted to just be utterly selfish and only use the green chile for myself, but I'm not quite that big of a jerk. Almost, but not quite). My cats apparently did pretty well while I was gone. I really need to automate everything so that the cats can survive for a week while I'm gone and nobody has to check in on them. Unfortunately, that's going to be very expensive. The automatic litter boxes that I've seen sound like they don't work very well, except for one: The Litter Robot. Unfortunately, that one costs $330. I will also need to get two automatic food dispensers and two automatic water dispensers (each about $50). That's a lot of money. If these products last the entire time that my cats are alive, they're probably worth it. I'm afraid, though, that they will give out on me far too early for my liking. Oh well. Time to start saving up.

So, apparently, Fade is just a stupid cat. I thought that she was smart, but apparently she can't tell the difference between a litter box and the floor (that she has strewn with litter). When I got back to my apartment yesterday, the bathroom floor was covered with litter (because she's a digger), but she hadn't urinated on the floor. I swept the floor last night and went to bed. During the night, she dug some more litter onto the floor and then decided to urinate on it. I was very upset. She does this on a semi-regular basis. I don't know what the problem is or how to fix it. Also, apparently, my cats don't understand what I'm doing when I discipline them. After Fade peed on the floor, I yelled at her and stuff, and then Chronos ran away, scared. This got me thinking, if Chronos can't tell the difference between my disciplining him vs my disciplining Fade, that probably means that Fade can't tell the difference either. That probably means that they think of me as some kind of big guy that shows up occasionally in their house and is mean or nice to them based on what mood I'm in. I wonder if there is a more effective way to get my point across to them.

The other exciting thing that has happened recently is that my PS3 had trouble installing the latest system update. I am now without a working PS3. I sent an email to the Sony people, so hopefully they can resolve my problem. We'll see.

Let's see, anything else? Well, the Transporter 3 was pretty bad (I know that all of you are very surprised after the gem that was Trasnporter 2). It had a few decent fight scenes, though, so I'll probably pick it up for $5 at Wal-Mart at some point. I think that that's about it for right now. I've decided that I'm going to try to udate this blog more often. I think that the biggest reason why I wasn't updating it is that I always seem to think of lots of stuff to say as I'm writing the blog and so it starts to get over-long (and, thus, take a long time to write). I think that I will start trying to write shorter blogs every other day, or something. I didn't really follow that advice this time, so starting on my next blog there will be shorter posts. Until then...