September 2009 – Steve Dougherty's Blog

Dream

I have two dream fragments I’d like to share:

In one, Mom, Dad, and I were standing in the living room at Mom’s house when we heard a distant rolling which at first sounded as if the cats were doing something mischievous in the basement. It got louder, and we realized it was coming from outside. I ran to the door and pulled aside the curtain over the window. It was dark, and at first it seemed a single skateboard was rolling in from the west, but a group of 50 or so followed in a tight clump. Two kids ran up onto our porch to get a better look, and I turned on the porch light. As it can be in dreams, I was sure they were involved. The skateboards rolled out of view, but the spectacle was not yet over. Two cars came in from the east, and rolling in a clump around them were many large, perhaps half-scale or more, model cars. One of the driving cars looked like Waluigi’s from Mario Kart Double Dash. It was this one that somehow hit something and went flying, flipping end over end, barely missing the fence, and landing upside down in the backyard. When I think about it now it doesn’t make any sense – even if a car could go flying from an impact Hollywood-style, it’s much too far and there’s not even a good line of sight from where the impact was.

The second is more of a concept: Half-Life 2’s fast zombies, without eyes, hanging onto the back of doors you shut behind you. You just enclosed yourself in a small space with a horrific creature. Would it growl after you took a few steps into the room, or jolt awake and howl when you slam its hands in the door, then rip its rotting hands off and attack you with the stumps?

Sick

My nose is congested and I was sneezing yesterday. I got up around 2am because I was having trouble sleeping. I think taking Psych is messing with me, as I to some degree harbor irrational fears that I exhibit symptoms of whatever mental disorder we covered last. It’s a really interesting class. If I had more time I’d gladly upgrade to AP. The current Psych assignment is annoying to me, as the podcasts we have to describe a study from seem to discuss a phenomenon in broad terms rather than talking about a specific study. I found an interesting article on conditional love.

I read about Steve Roberts, who seems interesting.

School has been overwhelming. I’m taking two APs: AP Computer Science, which teaches Java, and AP English Literature. AP Computer Science is at least currently pretty easy, as it apparently assumes no coding experience, which I find strange for an AP course. I wonder if it might be improved through an entrance exam and skipping the easier stuff, with the intro being instead in the existing Intro to AP Computer Science? As I haven’t coded Java before, although it is very similar in syntax to C++, it might be good that the class starts out lower-level.

One of the things I find about coding is that I seem to be unable, on my own, to think of reasons to program. My current line of thought is that simple games might be boring: they’re simple and will probably be clones of Pong or Tetris or something. When we actually wrote simple games in Advanced C++ Game Development at CAEN in 2008, (I didn’t go back last summer; they took away the dorm option so we didn’t get to spend evenings on our own machines.) it ended up being fun anyway. It could be fun to rewrite my maze game… The next problem I have in this is that I don’t have much free time with my current class load, so I’d have to sacrifice browsing reddit or something. At least it would be more productive, and perhaps more educational. Qualifying many of my statements seems to make my writing more verbose… (See! I did it again!)

AP English is satisfyingly rigorous, and I have by no means been able to complain that we aren’t doing enough. I’m going to a University of Michigan campus visitation over today and Monday, and I’m going to bring Hamlet and attempt to annotate during downtime; Act I Scenes 1-3 are due Tuesday.

I am told Computational Physics is equivalent to an AP, although it doesn’t seem bad at all in contrast to APE or Precalc. Relativity is really interesting, and the equations aren’t bad; it’s the logic I usually get tripped up on. That’s not to say my algebra never utterly fails. I really like Olstad. His website is very impressive. He is very careful about definitions, and on the first day (or so?) we discussed the differences between schooling, training, and education. After listening to our definitions, Olstad defined schooling as what goes on at school, training as specialized refinement of skills, and education as longer-term outlook for learning. He frequently calls schooling “the game,” (which makes Irfan lose often) and not the point of being there; I find this appealing. He also likes semicolons, calling them yield signs. This has influenced my semicolon use in this post. I’m not sure whether I’m overusing them.

Precalc and AP English give the majority of my homework. Precalc assigns homework consistently, even when the Seniors are gone, as I have learned the hard way. Now that I’m aware of that, hopefully I will manage things better. Pline has an evil genius chair, and I have yet to determine why.

Adam Nevells

Adam Nevells is dead! It was a car accident.

I’m having lots of trouble processing this; it’s so sudden. I knew him from middle school, and had classes with him at OHS. I worked with him at Okemos Channel events and even saw him at the scheduling meeting on the 31st.

This shows how tradgedy can strike anyone, not just “someone else.”

Driving Test and CSS

I’ve been trying to learn some CSS and HTML, and in doing so I have found why people prefer PHP and MySQL for lots of pages with consistent layout: it is easy to change something on all pages. To be sure, my theme uses CSS, but if I wanted to change the footer text, CSS would be of no help. That said, I’ve found excellent resources, and I think it may prove to be useful later on. As a less resource-intensive solution, which I’ve set up with wp-cache, is to have WordPress output saved as static pages. This gives good response time and easily edited content.

I’m taking my driving test tomorrow and I’m intimidated. I read the booklet, and I hope I pass.

Cats

It turns out that Koga (also spelled Qoga) had to go back. The person who gave us the cat apparently got the wrong one, which explains the incorrect information. When we first got Koga, he was extremely scared, and spent most of his time hiding up in the rafters of the basement. He slowly got used to it, and we noticed he could not purr correctly, sometimes stopping to gulp or make a strange wheezing cough, one of his eyes appeared watery, and he never meowed. The certificate of good health was quite wrong. At the vet, our suspicions were confirmed that Koga was male, not female as we had been told. This wasn’t a huge deal, but was still strange. They also found he had severe gingivitis, and that something was wrong with his voice box, which they would investigate later. Then blood tests came back with a strong positive for Bartonella, and we decided it had been enough and was time to give Koga back. We’re back down to four cats now. I’m sad to see Koga go, but he was challenging Wally’s authority, at which point Wally started spraying things, which was nasty. Four cats is quite enough.