robglazebrook.com

This entry has no point; therefore, I’m not even going to run a spell checker on it. :)

Busy, busy, busy: Moving sure takes a lot of time / energy / caffeine. In the past two days, I’ve had at least four pots (pots, mind you, not cups) of coffee to myself. I’ve had one to myself in the last four hours alone. I’m hoping it’s enough to keep my awake for the drive to Ames [damnable snow! you chose now?], and perhaps even long enough to remember where I live now. I’d say we’re 40% done moving in. We’re setting up as we’re moving though, so the set-up percentage would be similar.

Interesting happening of the night: I was in Ankeny, packing up some of Sandy’s (my sister’s) furniture and stealing it to use in my new place, when her ex-roommate (whom I met for the first time a few minutes prior to this) said something quite interesting: “I like your website.” ~thinks~ That’s why I never know what to say, or how much detail or explanation things on this page need. I’ve audience entities I’ve never met before. *grin*

Because they said we couldn’t: rumors are rustling on the ‘net that my phone (Motorola T720c) is soon to be hacked. For those of you with unnecessary negative mental images of hackers, this hack is a good thing. Verizon distributed a crippled version of the phone [probably talked about this before, ah well, I will again] created by Motorola: you can only use software owned and distributed by Verizon (including backgrounds, browsers, games, wallpapers, sync tools, etc). This is only true for the version of the phone distributed by Verizon. All other versions but ours are fully capable of downloading ringtones, backgrounds, games, tools, whatever… from anywhere. At least, at the moment. :) The rumor mill says there may be solutions to this pesky lil’ problem within the next couple of weeks. Which would make Robby a much happier camper.

I have to pee: and so I’m going to cut this short. *beams*

Because Dani did it: Danielle’s last entry sported a pretty kitty picture. And because she has done this, and because -I’m- forced to know such things, I will now show you The Popular Version of Super Kitty, which has been floating around on the internet for a little bit now, thanks to the lovely people at Fark.com. It was even my wallpaper for a while. *grin*

That is all.
-Namaan

Note: I lied about the spell checker after all.

Well, it’s Wednesday. The numbers are all in and the votes have been tallied. And really, most of my classes look like they’re going to rank pretty-darn-tolerable on the Pretty-Darn-Tolerable-O-Meter. My Rhetorical Theory class is taught by someone who doesn’t have an English degree and is teaching English for the first time, and as such, is planning on having the course be fairly flexible (as far as Rhetorical Theory courses go, at least). The reading for my Grammar class last night was downright interesting: morphemes and allomorphs and homophones… oh, my. :)

My French class will be fun, but also difficult. My last French teacher had a rather heavy Bostonian accent. This French teacher, on the other hand, has a heavy Southern accent (we’re thinking Texan). She seems perfectly fluent in French, so that isn’t my complaint. My complaint is with my ears. They suck. When I’m listening to someone talk, I also watch their lips forming the syllables and keep a running textual sentence (i.e., I picture the print-words) going in my head to help translate the muted tones I’m hearing into real communication. And so I spent all last semester learning French by memorizing the sounds the words made through a Bostonian accent and mentally associating those sounds with a textual word, before associating that textual word with a symbolic meaning (because that’s the way English seems to work in my head (without the east-coast-dialect part)). Now, the sounds are different, so my mind isn’t making that sound->word->symbol connection nearly as quickly. Now, I hear the word, come up with a few French-word variations as to what sounds my ears might have heard, pick the likeliest combination I can find among the choices, and ~then~ divine meaning from the leftovers. And to make matters worse, this teacher speaks faster than the last one, and so I can lose whole parts of sentences due to her soft-edged southern accent while I’m trying to interpret what it is I just heard. Before last semester ended, I was fairly close to comprehending French as well as I do someone speaking English with an unfamiliar accent. Now, I feel like I’m almost all the way back to square one. The only reason I call this process ‘fun’ is that the teacher seems to be a truly good instructor, and I think that may help me through.

And then, there’s my Multimedia Design class. It’s nothing like what I was expecting, and you’ll recall that I was initially expecting something quite good. It appears we’ll be learning a great deal about lighting, and storyboarding, and scripting, and various filming techniques. All of which is surely interesting in its own right… but that isn’t multimedia. That is good, old-fashioned media. And I have no real interest, and particularly no talent that I know of, when it comes to the old media. The only reason I can see for the “multi” portion of the title is that we’ll be editing the movies we produce on a computer. I signed up for this class because the flier distributed about it last semester (it’s an experimental course, not in the catalog) featured Flash. I ~do~ want to learn Flash. I’d planned on using the experience I gained in this class to develop the Flash menu I’d envisioned for this site. And now, I dunno.

Regardless, I’ll probably stick with the class, for no reasons other than I like the instructor, and it will apply towards my Technical Communications minor. And so as long as it doesn’t eat up fast swaths of my time outside of class, I’m not going to have a problem with it. English 350 (Rhetorical Theory) will probably use enough of my free time as it is.

—–

Friday is the Big Day. Well, the Big Moving Day. I don’t know if it’s particularly Big in any other respects. I’ll be getting up in the morning around 6:30, showering (bathing, likely; the shower’s acting funny), studying, and going to my classes before coming home shortly after noon, picking up Megan, and then picking up the keys to our new place. Then, the [fun?] begins. My mom, last I heard, was coming up Friday afternoon to help organize / be anal on move-in forms. My dad should be coming up that evening to help start moving Tha Big Stuff. And then, it’s just whatever our schedules allow, which isn’t a whole, honestly. I think I’m forgoing sleep this weekend. *g*

I think that’s it for today. I’m not in the mood to talk about WapJaw or Photoshop or anything else that you didn’t want to have to read about anyway. :)

Two classes down, two to go. Yesterday, I had my first encounter (which is actually what they call it here in the Registrar office) with English 220 (Descriptive English Grammar) and French 102. I already know four or so people in each class, that that’s an immediate bonus.

I laughed, and then tried to hide the fact that I laughed, when my English 220 teacher walked in the door. She fulfilled every inkling and mental predisposition my brain had regarding what a grammar teacher should look like: an older (fifties) woman with shorter, well-groomed silvery hair, a straight spine whether she stood or sat, and wearing an ankle-length flower print dress. I don’t know if she was intentionally shooting for the cliché or not, but she rammed it head-on.

The class itself doesn’t sound as horrible as I’d thought it was going to be. The professor (Ms. Hagge, in case I start referring to her by name later in the year) swears that this class isn’t going to focus much on correctness of grammar. Instead, it will be taught as a linguistics course. Meaning, instead of learning what we should do with our adjectives, we’re going to spend more time learning why people use them the way they do. Which I think could be an interesting learning experience, indeed.

French was interesting, as well. My prof. in that class is likewise an older woman with silvery hair and a better-than-average posture. However, she’s a bit more relaxed than both my Grammar teacher and my previous French teacher, so it should be fun. She’s horrible with names, though. Yesterday, I was Rob, Chris, Erik, Phillip, and Michelle. ~grin~ I don’t particularly feel like sticking out in her mind quite yet, though: French isn’t coming back to me nearly as quickly as I’d like. I’m going to have to try to cement the old stuff in my mind over the next few days, because she’s switching tense on us now (from present and near-future to past), and she says it’s a pretty big change.

In an hour, I’ll start my Rhetoric class, then I have French again (it meets every day but Thursday, from the sounds of it), and then I have a two-hour break before my Multimedia Design class starts at two in the afternoon. During that break, I fully intend to head over to the bookstore and spend a bunch of money I can’t afford to spend on a bunch of books that I’m going to dislike to read. ~grin~ Well, except the Design book, probably. I still keep my HTML book from last semester very close at hand, and I’m guessing that this book will be no different, assuming it’s anywhere near as helpful.

—–

Random Things

1) WapJaw now takes you to an “Under Construction” page, but the lil’ cartoon guy is still there. In case you didn’t get a chance to see him yesterday. I’m proud of him. But I think I’ll talk about why later.

2) Danielle’s last entry was a stream of consciousness which I found quite beautiful. I’ve always wanted to try one of those as an entry. I’m also quite afraid to, for some reason. Maybe I should try one on paper, first, before I share with the rest of the world.

3) Sim City 4 comes out today. If ever there were a game which had the ability to distract me for hours/days/weeks/months on end, Sim City is one of them. And now it’s totally revamped. Every minute I spend thinking of the game, though, my GPA drops .001 points.

4) Megan and I move in three days. Anyone else excited?

—–

I’ll post more later, when I’ve taken all my classes.

Classes start today. In roughly an hour and a half, for me. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays aren’t so bad: I have a class at 9:00, an hour off before my 11:00 French class, and then I work from noon to 5:00. Then again, Tuesdays and Thursdays aren’t so horrible, either: my first class is at 9:30, then it’s straight to French at 11:00. After French, I have a two-hour break to do [some activity, likely homework] before my web class at 2:00. At 3:30, I get to go home. :) I don’t entirely understand what it is about this schedule that makes me happier about this semester, and of course it’s far too early to tell what the classes will be like, but I have a good feeling about the coming few months.

If only I were already moved in to my new place, though. Part of me wasn’t thinking straight when I decided to move one week into the new semester. Sure, I have that extra day off the Monday after for setting things up and getting used to the new place, but still. Megan and I are having a tough time packing early, and my classes are a major part of it. I finally gave up and packed a lot of my books Friday night, on the hope that I wouldn’t need them for any of my classes. We can’t pack clothes early, because we have to wear them. We can’t pack dishes early, because half of them are dirty and we’re going to use the other half (not before we clean the first half, of course (I hope)).

And I’m going to have a week of getting used to going to my classes before I turn around and change my whole morning schedule. Right now, I’ll be leaving the house about 20 minutes before my first class, driving most the way to a large parking lot on the north side of campus (Hawthorn, for those of you who know the town - lots of extra parking most days), and then walking the rest of the way to my classes. Starting next week, I’ll be leaving the apartment 30 minutes or so before my first class, walking 150 yards or so to the bus stop, and waiting for the bus on the route I’ve never before ridden (blue route, again for those of you who’ve been here). Then again, I haven’t ridden a ~bus~ in two years or so, which is going to be awkward in and of itself. The bus will drop me off on the south side of campus, and I’ll walk the rest of the way. Really, the bus takes me closer to my classes if I’m willing to wait, but I could probably cut across campus faster than it could drive the perimeter.

And until my classes actually begin, that’s all I have to say on them.

—–

Web stuff:

WapJaw is ugly right now. It’s going to undergo a major site renovation, but it’s going to take some time. I’ll likely put up some “Under Construction” page in the way of potential snoopers in a few days. Until then, check out my cartoon-guy on my WapJaw page. He took a few hours to do, and a ton of memory: I had two different computers complaining about the memory I was using on him. I had something like 18 different layers going at once. There’s a reason his arm is reaching across himself: I originally had his other arm attached to that hand, before I realized that his hand was facing the wrong way. *grin* I had put his left hand on his right arm. And since his hand took way more work than his arm to get to look decent (his hand is three layers unto itself: main hand/forefinger, thumb, and other fingers), the hand stayed and the arm went.

Time to go shower. Have a good day, all. :)

There are days, and today is one of them, when I feel it would be incredibly beneficial if there were more than one of me. Not necessarily more than one physical-me (though that would come in handy for compilation purposes)… just a few mental-me’s who could think my thoughts through, look over and develop my plans, and leave notes in the margins.

It started this morning. Around 7am, I was checking my email and browsing my favorite blogs (M’ris is back, by the way), when I suddenly decided to make a ‘quick change’ to the color scheme of my website. Half an hour later, I realized two things:

1) This was going to take much more than half an hour to complete, meaning the last site’s layout did have some benefits I’ll miss, and

2) I should have taken my shower already, and now, I was behind schedule.

So I gave up on most of the color changes for now (you’ll notice a small change in the upper-left, maybe) and took the one-me upstairs to shower and get ready for work. I was only ten minutes late, and I think Dwight (my boss) was only eight minutes late, so it turned out alright.

While at work, I had a bit of free time, so I started to plot out my ideas a bit further regarding WapJaw. Somehow, the one-me became momentarily distracted by a bit of PHP code, and started writing a tic-tac-toe game. The idea behind this one is to develop an interactive turn-based WAP game for cellular phones. I figured I could start with tic-tac-toe as a learning aid, as there would only be nine real options to choose from. If I could do tic-tac-toe, it would just be a jump in complexity (and not comprehension) to do checkers and so on. I focused on that intensely for about half an hour before the one-me had to go work on something else somewhere else.

Through all this, I have come to the conclusion that I am a rather focused individual. When I focus on something, my mental energy is like an intense, narrow beam of light. Unfortunately, however, that beam is being produced by an apparatus attached to a demonic washing machine with an unbalanced load. I focus intensely… but my focus never stays anywhere long.

Which is why it seems utterly ridiculous to have just the one-me. If there were more than one mental-me, I could have showered while the another-me plotted out the color change to my website. When I got to work (early, or at least before Dwight), one-me could have used my spare time to focus on WapJaw, while a different-me thought about the feasibility of programming turn-based games for mobile devices.

With multiple-me’s, I think I would be a successful novelist, teacher, web designer, graphic designer, songwriter, journalist, and e-business entrepreneur by the time I was twenty-five or so. And maybe an architect and a computer programmer just for kicks. With just the one-me to work with, however, there are days when I literally get cold sweats worrying about whether or not I’ll ever be able to pick the one thing I want the one-me to do for the rest of my life. I’d love to get WapJaw up and running to the point where it could pay for itself (and maybe my rent… *g*). I’d love to sit down like I used to, put my pen to paper, and let my stories out of their cages for a while. I’d love to write for a living. I’d love to design websites for a living. I’d love to run my own business. Will I ever be able to settle down and focus long enough to see any of those thoughts to their final destination? That, I don’t know.

Maybe it all just takes time. Four years ago, if something didn