As I'm trying to finish up one of my programming projects, I was scanning through some of the code I had written and found something that was rather... interesting.

Normally, I consider myself a good programmer, but sometimes I have to take shortcuts and cut corners.

Here is a snippet from one of my recent projects in my CS 375 Compilers class:

/* Increment the index and return the next entry 
   we can use as a label. New entry should be 
   validated as well and safe for whomever wants 
   to peek at it. */

int GetNextLabel ()
{
    return 3;
}

The amount of code like this seems to be proportional to the margin of time between the due date and the time I actually finish the assignment.

Hmm...

Monday marks five weeks since the first post on this new blog platform of mine. At that time, hardly anything was working and the layout was borrowed from a previous site. I've made some progress!!

It's also been almost a week since my last update, as getting back into the swing (and by swing I mean shitfest) of school was more difficult that originally anticipated... of course due to my joy of doing nothing. This is hardly a 'real' update, so hopefully I'll write something more interesting soon. But until then, here are some interesting stats about my site, collected by Google Analytics:

• The majority of visistors from referring sites (ie they got here via a link) come from Facebook, followed by digg, and then the least come from other friends' blogs.
• Only 10% of users get here via a search engine like Google. The others get here directly (typing in the address or via their favorite list), or by referral.
• Over 70% of visitors use Firefox, 17% use IE, and the rest use something else.
• Though almost 93% of all visitors are from the US, I've had hits from all over... almost all of Europe, Russia, China, Indonesia, Australia...
• My "visitor loyalty" sucks... 43% of visitors never return, the rest average 10-20 visits.
• My most popular entry to date is (sadly) the how-to post regrading playing cnc3 online.
• Some of the popular search engine queries people have used to find my site include "brandon valosek" and "ok sign below the waist game" (lol).

That's all... a real update should follow soon...

It seems like the airport harbors a more widely distributed demographic than any other place. No where else does it seem like there is a completely random distribution of all ages, colors, and wealth all around you.

It makes sense because everyone needs to fly (almost), it's not that expensive (sorta), and since there's not an airport every 50 feet, location bias doesn't really come into account.

It's just... refreshing and interesting... considering I live in west campus in Austin TX, so the average age is 21... with a standard distribution of like... three. And in the 2006-2007 year, 55% of the population was white, and only 4.2% were black¹.

It's fascinating (to me, at least) to think that every person that you just happen to pass by, all the hundreds of people you just see for a fleeting moment, have full lives of their own; All with their own crazy dreams, friends, family, drama... everything. Everyone's life is just as complex and extensive as yours. And to them, you're entire life and experiences are just a fleeting moment to them. Perspective!

Some of those fleeting moments are more interesting than others. I sat across from a man on the plane, whom I will dub Physics Fun Man. I first took notice of the awkward, choppy conversation he was having on the phone with somebody. A dead give away that this guy was going to be interesting.

Anyway, Physics Fun Man was so called because he was holding in his lap a book entitled 'Quantum Phase Transitions', and another one about percolation theory, which I've never even heard of.

So this guy was obviously pretty rock'n... but the image was complete when, as he got up at the end of the flight to get his bag, I noticed that in his shirt pocket (that was stuffed with misc. notes and random shit) also held a TI-83 graphing calculator.

You know, just in case you need to solve a system of linear equations or bust out a few trigonometric graphs at a moment's notice.

My life sucked just a little bit more however when I told my roommate this story, and the first thing he said was,

"Dude that is totally going to be you someday... that is your future."

Really?!

Nothing-- no projects, homeworks, deadlines, assignments, work, or other collegiate responsibilities. At least temporarily.

Temporarily spared from waking up at any certain time (mostly), from walking 20 minutes to class, and from sitting in long lectures meagerly listening and longing to do...

Nothing.

Of course I ought to be doing... something. Like said projects, homeworks, and assignments... but there's just something very therapeutically relaxing about just forgetting all that stuff and taking in the moment.

New Orleans has been awesome so far. I haven't taken any pictures at all unfortunately, but even without the proof I have been having a badass time. In a few hours, I'm going to a craw fish broil, and then Nicolle's orchestra concert tonight. They'll be playing Beethoven's Fifth (sweet).

So I will continue to hold on doing nothing for as long as I can, because at some point, I will eventually have to start doing something.

So I've completed everything I had set out to do for this website in the blog section, it only took a few weeks. Writing a website in PHP was SO much easier than writing it from the socket layer up in C++, and maybe even more fun (ha maybe).

Now I have a pretty good understanding of MySQL databases and PHP, and my CSS design skills have also gotten better too (I personally get crunk on the Dallas skyline in the new layout). I can also stop working on it as frequently, becase now my site is fully functional, including the new archive view (on the sidebar and the blog archive page) and the integrated Google site search.

And with a full-featured WYSIWYG editor for me (thanks to TinyMCE) and a nice drafts/publishing system, updates will be so much easier than they used to. Hopefully I will keep updating this thing!!

I still want to add more content, such as a flash-driven music section and stuff like projects/school/work/resume stuff, but for now, I feel accomplished.

For a more detailed list of crap I've done (and crap I want to do later), check out the Feature List page, it's always up to date.