My VB final, however, which is the highlight of my Thursday afternoon, is going to be cake, I think. I can make that guess because the test isn’t going to be cumulative. Non-cumulative tests = hooray.

Luckily for me I don’t have to bust my ass studying for calculus. Hooray!

I started a private journal in which I write in Japanese. It’s probably riddled with errors, but at this point I just really need to start thinking about the language more. I feel like my study of Japanese has become stagnant over the past few months, and video games aren’t helping me. I keep coming across the same words over and over again and still have no idea what they mean. Maybe if I actually write every day in the language it will help me with my reading comprehension. At least I hope so.

Speaking of working on comprehension, before I got the idea to make a language diary I decided another excellent idea would be to see if I could understand any unsubbed anime. I decided to try one that I had already seen, although I saw it a long time ago: Pokemon! I downloaded the raws of the first two episodes, and to be honest, I understood more than I thought I would. Additionally, the show is a lot more childish than I remember when I watched it those early mornings before middle school. Oh well.

I just.. I don’t know. It seems to me that I’m not going to get much better unless I actually go there. And I can’t do that until I graduate with a four-year degree. And I can’t do that until I pass calculus.

You know, all three years of it.

I’m not exactly off to the best start.

Still, if I can manage to pass it over the summer and then two more consecutive years, I can still theoretically graduate at some point in the 2009-2010 school year. It’ll probably also require me to take some sciences courses over next summer.

I’m excited about my classes for fall semester ’08. I get to take operating systems, which is gonna be great. I don’t know what it’s going to be about, but I’m sure I’m going to enjoy it for two reasons: one, it’s an interesting subject and I’ve always found low-level computing really interesting, and two, the class is taught by the same teacher who taught my Java class, and I enjoyed her teaching style. Also she is a really cool professor.

That’s just about it for me tonight. I’ll update later. Probably tomorrow, as I have zero finals tomorrow. Zot!

So today in Calculus (well, technically yesterday but really shut up) there was a test which I looked at for 50 minutes and then threw it away and quit the class. Looks like I’m taking Calc over the summer along with Public Speaking.

That + the fact that I have no idea what I’m going to do for money this summer = an awesome time.

Okay, so we have been talking about binary trees recently, and our project was to implement one of two different kinds of trees. The example he gives us was a red/black tree, which is actually pretty cool. Without getting into too much detail, the red/black tree’s nodes are either red or black, and there are rules that, when followed, balance the tree. For example, there may not be two red nodes in a row in any downward path from the root to a leaf, and each path from the root to any leaf must have the same number of black nodes. And so on. When one of these rules is broken, certain fixes (called rotations because you have to rotate the tree or some subtrees around certain nodes to fix it) must be executed.

As for the two kinds of trees, he assigned 2-3-4 trees to every other person in the class and the rest got AVL trees.

AVL is very similar to the red/black tree, except that instead of using colored nodes, it uses a number to determine if the tree is balanced or not. There’s a lot of reusable code there.

As for 2-3-4 trees, they are nothing like red/black trees or AVL trees and we have gotten zero hints about how one would be implemented.

Guess which one I got?

I spent about three hours in the AI lab today and decided that was it. I will turn in the 236 lines of code I have puked into the keyboard and hope that I get a 5/20 on the project. I have an A in the class so I’m not too worried about it.

Not to mention that my practicing didn’t go well at all. Bleh. I need some video games.

See, Wednesday night is always pizza night, because on Wednesdays, Dominoes sells a one-topping medium pizza for $3.99. And if I eat sparingly, it lasts more than one day. Score.

I’ve been playing a lot of Earthbound recently. I should be playing it in Japanese, since I really should be studying it at every possible opportunity, but I have two reasons I don’t feel too bad.

The first is that in Japanese, it’s all in kana. For people unfamiliar with how the Japanese writing system works, let me assure you that all kana is obnoxious. The Japanese language only has 48 syllables, so that means that there a whole heck of a lot of words that are absolutely identically pronounced. That’s not necessarily bad for people who are completely fluent, but as for me, it takes a lot of time to figure out what each sentence means.

Secondly, and more importantly, I have a different game I’m currently working through to study my Japanese. I’m not sure very many people are familiar with it since it was never released in the United States, but it’s the very first Star Ocean game, for SNES. Its sequel was released in the U.S., for Playstation, but the original never was.

Star Ocean is quickly becoming my favorite RPG of all time. It’s a bit Star Trek-ish, but it’s still a lot of fun. It combines technological aspects of science fiction with the awesome storyline stuff of fantasy.

It takes me a while to look up each kanji that I find. Well, the ones that are unfamiliar at least. Which for the time being is pretty much all of them. Sometimes I’ll find ones that I know what they mean, but forget their readings (for example, in the screenshot I included, the 地球 means “Earth” but I totally forgot how it’s pronounced; for the record it’s “chikyuu”).

In any case, video games are a lot of fun and I think everyone should play them because they’re both amusing and educational!

Now I’m going to do my project that is due tonight before midnight and then possibly practice trumpet. Or maybe the other way around, I don’t know.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.

Yeah. I hate to say it for fear of sounding ridiculously elitist, everything about this quote seems ignorant and plain dumb. First of all, computer viruses are nothing like life. Secondly, viruses are not purely destructive.

Thirdly, and this is the point that I find hilarious: he’s saying we have created something that is purely destructive and asserts that we have created it in our own image. I understand that it’s probably more of a word choice problem, but honestly. Honestly.

He sets up a completely flawed premise that viruses = life, then mangles it further just to say something overly pessimistic about human nature.

Created purely destructive life in our own image. Right.

We had Algorithms and Data Structures today and to tell you the truth it was absolutely ridiculous. The people in that class completely over-think everything ever and this of course confuses the crap out of our professor. We spent about 10 minutes in class completely befuddling the professor and about half the class after one kid argued semantics. Semantics. It was so annoying.

I tried to return the Beauty and the Beast book to the high school today, but failed miserably because the building is locked down tighter than Guantanamo. I guess I’ll have to tie it to a brick and fling it through the cafeteria window or something.

I’m kinda bored. At some point I should start on my Data Structures project but at the moment I kinda just don’t really care. I guess I’ll start it over the weekend if I feel like it (most likely not) but probably won’t get very far because I don’t work well not under pressure. If that sentence works, that is. If it doesn’t, whatever.

I must say, I really do enjoy this editor. It’s a lot of fun. Lots better than Blogger’s. Plus, I can do crazy stuff like ∞ and ¾ with a little menu thingy. It also allows me to paste text from Word, which I assume would make things a heck of a lot easier to fiddle with because it doesn’t have to worry about Word’s wacky formatting. Though I haven’t really tried it yet so who knows. Additionally, they have ♣, ♥, and ♦, but they don’t have a symbol for the spades. That’s kinda sad.

I’ve been trying to get into Linux more. I installed the newest distribution of Debian, but it’s ridiculously difficult to get the drivers for my wireless card because they’re apparently “restricted.” Whatever that means. Ubuntu just barreled through all my restricted drivers but Debian doesn’t like it. I’ll have to mess with it some more.

I’m bored. There’s not much to do. Tim went to turn in his deposit and application finally, so that’s always good. I’m happy about that.

Maybe I’ll play a little Wii.

The only thing I don’t like about it is that I can’t embed iframes in it, which means no Google Calendar. But oh well. That thing was kinda obnoxious anyway.

So unless something else comes up that I hate, I’ll probably keep my blog here until further notice.

I wonder what I was doing yesterday that didn’t allow me to update.

Oh, right! I went back to Cranberry yesterday to bring my car to my dad to see if he knew anything about why it was being so weird. Turns out it was a pretty decently easy fix, so I’m now car-ful again. Sweet.

There was something I was gonna write about, but I totally forgot it.

Oh, there’s a weird semi-”project” due today. He gave us one of those new Excel spreadsheets (*.xlsx) full of fictional grades for fictional students (who absolutely suck, by the way), and the assignment was that we were supposed to write a bunch of macros that compute the averages of everything and then give a final course grade where tests and programs are each 40% of the final grade and homework and quizzes were 20% combined. It didn’t take me too entirely long (about an hour) and it’s pretty nifty. It’s still not as fun as the animation project he gave us.

I don’t think I ever wrote anything here about the animation project. He gave us all these little cat icons (called “NekoCat”… shudder) and we had to use them to animate the cat doing something. I kinda went overboard.

You can click where you want the cat to go and he runs around… you can make the cat jump up onto the newspaper dispenser thingy… to demonstrate depth he can run behind the pole… and if you click in the right place on the pole he can wall jump off the pole onto the newspaper dispenser. There are idle animations (pictured above) and clouds, and if you press escape a menu comes up and you can look at the about dialog or the hints dialog, both of which include animation and transparency.

To be honest, I didn’t realize that VB had that sort of funkiness to it. I guess it’s .NET, really, but everything’s completely smooth because it automatically uses double buffering. You can just set forms to automatically be double buffered. I didn’t use a single picturebox; every sprite is blitted directly to the form. Nifty.

Anyway, sorry. I’m a huge nerd. Oh, but the program won the contest thingy in the class and I got a nice little bag which I’m now using for my music and mutes. You know, so I don’t have to use Tim’s anymore. And stuff.

I guess that’s all I have for today. I might update later tonight if I feel like I need a break from the Algorithms and Data Structures project. Hahaha… right, like I’m going to start that before the day before it’s due.