Fixing the problem almost always leads to thinking “Damn, I wish I had done that earlier”. Why do people do that? Maybe everyone has a tolerance for putting up with life’s miscellaneous  annoyances and thus never really find it necessary to fix. Maybe it’s just the false perception that the time and effort required to alleviate the problem isn’t worth the 1 second inconvenience caused by the problem.

Venturing away from the abstract leads me to think of one of the most illustrative examples I can think of. My ex-roommate had a small fridge in his room for his own personal stock of beverages, eggs, and other random shit. This fridge sat on a rug which in turn naturally sat on the floor. Well actually the fridge sat right in front of the rug. The preposition matters because the door was blocked from opening by the edge of the rug… so you had to step on the rug a certain way in order to let the fridge door pass over the top of it.

I watched him struggle with that for two years, for no reason. The solution? Taking 30 seconds to put some old magazines under the fridge to prop it up enough to give it clearance over the rug. Problem solved.

Take the time to evaluate the integral of annoyance over time. Compare to the effort required to solve said annoyance. Reflect, act,  and continue with your life… only better.

Can’t really blame people, though. Acoustics play a large part in it, especially in large venues. But even still people should understand the speed of sound matters once you get far enough away from something, so scratch that… you can blame people.

What absolutely kills it is when the piece features tempo changes or ritardandos at the end… you hear the audience struggle and ultimately give up as their feeble understanding of musical time and temp falls apart around them like a lean-to in a category-5 tornado. I can’t imagine what would happen if they tried to clap along with an odd meter song like The Ocean by Led Zeppelin or Take Five by Dave Brubeck…

Besides, clapping along to music is just about the corniest method of music expression out there. Shake your ass, dance, fist pump even… just don’t add your own cacophony to the performance en masse with the rest of the musically challenged audience.

Pick up the shampoo or toothpaste, procede to read the back.

Prove me wrong.

Anyway, so I’m reading up on the MAX5154 12-bit DAC chip that I’m planning on using for one of my labs and I decided to bust out my 80 GB Zune. The Zune, by the way, is a seriously underrated MP3 player; I like the interface better than the latest iPod. Also, the display uses a highly reflective screen background with white text, so even in the horrible glare fest that is a Texas afternoon, the display is perfectly legible.

Back to tutoring– the tutors sit at a huge 30-person conference table and wait for students to walk in and sign up. Even with only 20 people or so, the room quickly gets VERY loud.

So I queue up T.I.’s latest album (Paper Trails) and unroll my headphones. As I bring the buds up to my ears, the buzz of activity… tutors talking to students, some guy drawing on the whiteboard, and a few frustrated freshmen all instantly disappear… replaced by the phat production of ‘Paper Trails’ slamming into my eardrums at 761 MPH. I ceased to be part of the room.

I no longer have any ability to effectively interact with anyone else… all I can do is look around the room and imagine what is going on. Like watching a TV show… everything is so one-way and inaccessible.

After a few hours of listening to music… it’s time to leave. Popping the buds out of my ear, I return to being part of the world. Turns out the token stoner EE guy has been bitching about not getting a sandwich he ordered an hour ago from Jimmy Johns… and of course those frustrated freshman are 10% closer to switching their major to liberal arts.

And so for two and a half hours, I wasn’t part of their world. Nobody talked to me… I couldn’t hear them anyway. Their stories and interactions served as nothing more than a slightly-out-of-focus backdrop to my life while I starred at this screen.

I wonder if I really missed anything?

The thing is, there’s no excuse for doing your job poorly… but especially if you have an easy-ass job. For instance:

The movie ticket-taker person: An exhaustively simple job, free from any real stress save standing around for hours at a time. Take the tickets, tear the stub, and say “left” or “right” to direct the movie-going patrons to their respective theaters. Can’t really mess that up right? Wrong. The other day, I went to go see Wanted with Anita… and our ticket taker SUCKED. Not only did he not greet us (kindly or otherwise), he struggled to tear the tickets (slowly)… and then left it to our own deductive abilities to determine which side of the theater to go to. It was rough.

Another popular variant is the fast-food cashier that not only rings your order up incorrectly, but then seems upset when they have to get the manager’s authorization to rectify their mistake. The best is when you ask for extra ranch sauce and they act like it’s the most arduous task ever… sauntering over two feet to the “sauce rack” (or whatever) and laboriously selecting the requested flavor packets before disdainfully slamming them down on your tray.

“Will that be all?” they ask. Yes. That is all. THANKS.

It also had 4-wheel-drive (courtesy of the rock-solid NP231 transfer case) and a beefy straight-6 motor… which lent itself not only to really bad gas mileage and frequent fill-ups, but also to a respectable amount of torque and offroading abilities. I also could burn anybody off the starting line… until about the 35-40 MPH mark. And when shifting into the all-balls, crawl-licious 2.72:1 low range, the entire Jeep would lurch from the drive shafts slamming into gear and rob the planet of just a little bit of angular momentum… reminding me of what a powerful force I wielded. And who could forget nerdgasmic addition of a manual shifting circuit I built by hacking the shift-control computer.

Needless to say… I had a badass time with that piece. From offroading in remote forests in Rockwall and Rowlett, to throwing mud around and doing pointless donuts in random fields… to just driving all over the damn place in it… I loved it.

Unfortunately, I think the end of it’s glory days is in site. There’s really no reason to have two cars in college, especially when the Pathfinder is in MUCH better condition than the Jeep: The Jeep’s brakes are all but dead, there’s a loud leak from a crack in the exhaust manifold, the rear differential leaks sometimes, the AC compressor seizes when the car isn’t moving, the tint is molting off the windows, and there are tons of bumps, scratches, and broken shit on both the inside and out. There’s even a gaping wound with wires and connectors grotesquely visible where a stereo ought to be.

I never realized what a piece of junk it was until I drove it for the first time in about a month the other day. The first thing I noticed was that it felt so much more powerful than the Pathfinder… a small price to pay for better gas mileage I suppose. It also felt like it was about to fall apart… it was so loud, creaking, rattling, and old feeling. I loved it though… and felt a sense of betrayal when I reached for the shifter and missed… having become accustomed to where everything was in the Pathfinder.

It felt like the last time I would ever drive it…

I took the long route around town to where I was going, and peeled out whenever I had a chance. Using the manual shifter, I would floor it at green lights and let the familiar sensation of acceleration and a couple hundred horses wash over me. Do I really have to sell it?

I’ve always had a strong attachment to this jeep… maybe just because it was my first car and all. There’s just a lot of good memories with that beast, and it will hard to let go. Of course, the cool $K-spot or so will be nice though.

I feel like I’ll act like the concerned dog breeder selling puppies: ensuring that the new owner will love and cherish it just as I did. I don’t want this to be some old granny’s shuttle to happy-hour bingo and senior-citizen movie nights; I want it to go to somebody that will let the true spirit of the Jeep out where it belongs… in the dirt, in the mud… and in the wild.

So I guess this is goodbye for you and me, Jeep… we had a good run together. I hope that where you’re going, you can spend your last years doing what you love to do best; I only hope your new owner can give you things you could only dream of when you were with me. Maybe that lift kit we would always talk about… the after-market exhaust… a new windshield even?

Don’t think the Pathfinder is replacing you– no car could do that… especially a Nissan. There will always be a bright-blue Cherokee-sized hole in my heart that no other vehicle could fill. It’s been great.

So drive on Jeep… and don’t look back.

But this summer and last, I had a chance to see what life might be like working a typical 40-hour-a-week corporate job for a big company. It’s all there: the daily commute in shit traffic, the infamous cube farms, the meetings, and all the bureaucracy and processes you would expect to see in a Fortune 20 company with over 90,000 employees worldwide.

Corporate culture is funny to me, though. Everyone seems to have this personality they put on when interacting at the office– almost like this faux-casual way of talking, but in such a way as to not offend anyone or say something too non-PC.

There’s also the semi-awkward closeness you can develop with people you work with on a daily basis. You interact with these people every day… maybe even go out to eat lunch with them and joke around some… but in reality… you aren’t even remotely close to them. Though you might spend more time with them during the week than some friends, you don’t have even the slightest idea as to what type of music they like, what their hobbies are… their dreams, hopes, fears.

From this sort of distance that you can put yourself from your co-workers coupled with the need to work well together to be an effective team, a very weird relationship is formed. Your team is basically a bastardized family unit; everyone has his own role, status, and importance while their “real” lives back home are immaterial.

At the office, everyone is expected to do their job without outside factors effect them. Regardless of background, emotional situations, family, race, gender… anything… the second you swipe your badge and step into the building you become An Employee, with all the accrued emotional and personal baggage you carry veiled behind the business-casual attire and 5′ 10″ cubical walls.

This isn’t to say you can’t have real relationship with people at work, or that you can’t ever get to know people and develop good friends at the office… it’s more of just a reflection of the general type of interactions I’ve noticed. If you never got to know anybody on a personal level… I’m sure work would seem like an emotionless hell-hole.

And who would want to work at a place like that?

To wrap it all up, the new bar in West Campus, Cuatros, was playing some very chill summer music… and then (in the most cliché way imaginable) two midriff-bearing and very cute girls run by listening to their iPods. It was like the beginning scene to some shitty summer movie… where an impossibly high number of interesting things happen in sync along the main character’s path for 5 minutes while nothing important occurs so the movie can have the intro credits roll.

Of course, this picturesque scene was rudely interrupted by my own annoyingly acute awareness that I have two finals left to take before I can even remotely pretend it’s really summer. The jarring context switch that was falling out of my day-dreaming state was the mental equivalent of getting sucker-punched in the dick.

Anyway… I’ve got a final in 1.33333333 hours and I’m camped out in an abandoned classroom getting in some last-minute cram time whilst longingly looking out the window at the multi-million-dollar Gregory pool complex. Time to get back to studying…

My sleep schedule will slosh around throughout the week… stretching inevitably towards an unbelievably out-of-phase cycle that might more closely resemble somebody’s day in China than it would a person’s in Austin. Even for a college engineering student, the last glowing digits I see from my alarm clock as I finally get to sleep mockingly remind me how screwed up my circadian rhythms are.

I also eat like shit the majority of the time… and I feel this is largely due to my impressively unpredictable schedule. When you get hungry at 5:30 AM, 90% of the time you’ll end up eating something that exchanges nutritional value for taste and/or ease of preparation. Some days, I’ll realize rather indifferently that I haven’t eaten anything all day, and then proceed to superficially satiate my hunger with some less-than-healthy meal, or half-assedly eat a small snack only to perpetuate my permafucked eating schedule for a few more hours.

My regularly scheduled workout routine from last semester has all been for not… as my infrequent and irregular visits to the gym serve only to unabashedly remind me that I am a fatass.

Yes… I have a shit ton of work to do. Yes, this is the most work I’ve ever had to do for school… ever. But there really isn’t any real reason as to why everything in my life has to been so shitty.

Regardless of the reason, I can only hope that the summer will bring change. Working a 9-to-5 will help regulate my sleep schedule, and unless I want to emerge at the end of August as a fat, pale, all-too-true-to-an-engineer’s-stereotype BITCH… then my fat ass will get in gear at the gym and the pool. With nothing to do besides work, I have no excuse to stand idle and let my life continue to be a chaotic mess of tangled biological absurdities.

The summer (and change) cannot come soon enough.

Four three-hour slots that would be spent hating my life and wishing I had learned more during the semester, as well as hours and hours of studying and cramming at the last minute… times four. Four finals sounds pretty bad.

My VHDL design class has a policy for exempting the final… but I just narrowly missed the requirements. My test average had to be a B or above (check), I had to be making a B or above in the class with all 3 tests averaged in (check), and had to make a B or better on all the tests (whoops… damn you test #2).

So I played the numbers game of making an Excel spreadsheet that let me plug in numbers for my final to see what my semester grade would be. With my average being what it was, and the final only counting 25%, I would make a B in the class if I made anywhere between a 68 and a 100. GREAT.

Anybody in college has experienced the phenomenon of selectively throttling their effort on the final. Basically… the probability of the last test raising your grade a letter should entirely determine the amount of effort you should put into studying. The situation in my VHDL class is a perfect example… when a C on the final will get me the same final grade as a perfect score would… why study my ass off?

I was continuing to dick around in Excel when I got an email from the professor revising the final exemption policy… and it was like music to my ears.

“You are eligible to skip finals if test average is 80 and no more than one test less than 80%.”

SWEET.

And then there were three.

My status? Well, with ¾ of a Red Bull making its way through my guts, I’m continuing to charge ahead into the uncharted territories of compiler code generation and processor pipelining simulation (2 of my 3 final projects). For the last few days, all I have been able to see has been a sea of C-code, expanding before me like a vast and endless ocean of line after line of absolutely unintelligible shit like:

int GetPointerSize (SYMBOL s)
{
   /*
   ** let's hope none of these are null...
   ** or we are completely FUCKED
   */
    return s->datatype->datatype->datatype->size;
}

It’s so hard to even care at this point… with the enticing allure of care-free summer days creeping into my mind, the last week of school seems to be waging a losing battle for my attention.

However, if given a small enough time frame, almost anything can have the appearance of being important. Right now, these projects are consuming my life, and are soon to be followed by four mind-blowingly difficult finals, but 5 years down the line… how much will all of this really matter?

Nevertheless, I’ve got shit to do.

And now that I’ve finished the Red Bull, it’s time to wrap up this post. If Red Bull really gave me wings, I’d fly away from my computer to an island where the only trees are things that grow out of the ground and the only risk for storage leaks comes from old rusty containers.

The concept of entropy for anybody not familiar with it, is that everything in the universe will tend to a disordered state over time, and that any system with a high amount of order is more than likely going to turn into chaos soon. Basically– order is fragile and unlikely.

An example is a pyramid stack of crystal wine glasses. The system is highly ordered… and thus it takes only a small amount of energy input before the system reaches a state of high entropy (in the form of shattered glass on the floor). Also, we would never expect broken glass to fall into the shape of stacked wine glasses; entropy is a one way street.

In fact, on of the bleakest potential fates of the universe what’s known as the “heat death”, in which the universe enters state of maximum entry… basically perfectly distributed heat in all space. With no perturbations, there is no potential for information or information processing, so no life of any form. But you’d have to wait around for another 10⁴⁰ years… when all protons will have decayed and all that’s left in the universe is black holes.

Anyway– I say I’m a fan because… order is boring. I also have the 10-year-old-kid tendency of doing my best to help the universe out by adding my own entropy to things. For instance:

I like to knock over, spill, break, destroy, and generally mess up lots of things. I never really grew out of that I guess? But also– order is boring in regards to people. I like to stir up people’s ideas and long-held ideals by challenging them to think about why they think certain things. I don’t like to persuade people to change their minds as much as I like to just poke around their brains a bit.

I also enjoy saying things in conversations purposefully to get people rilled up. All in good fun though… nothing that will deeply offend anybody (usually), but just enough to set about a chain of events that will lead to a slightly more interesting outcome than if I had stuck to the norm.

Why? Because order is boring. So do your part in helping the universe along its destined path and add some entropy to your life!

Backing up a bit further to set the scene: Derek, Anita, and Nate are in my room jacking around, horse playing, etc. on my bed. I get a phone call so I step out to the living room to try and escape from the childish yelling and screaming.

My desk… was a great deal at the time. Twenty dollars via craig’s, and it fit exactly in my room and exactly for my equipment. Unfortunately, it had the structural integrity of a straw hut in a category-5 hurricane.

So anyway, I hear a spectacular crash from inside my room, and quickly the three of them fall silent. When I walk in, my worst fears had been realized…

And that would be the aftermath. Actually that’s the next morning, in the process of cleaning up… this picture is the real aftermath. My room is supposed to look something like this, but somehow somebody got thrown (?) into my desk hard enough to cause the middle section to collapse, taking my stereo amp, mixer, PodXT, PS2, picture frame, etc. with it.

Luckily, nothing was damaged besides a few scrapes on the equipment and wall. And yes, I was pissed. But like I said, nothing was really damaged, and I took the opportunity to take all of my crap out of my desk and dust/clean it before reorganizing it.

The moral of the story? The robustness of your desk should be proportional to your friends tendency to be rambunctious.

Lesson learned.

The thing is, it would overheat within minutes after turning it on, so I replaced the fan because it would never spin up.. and it worked! When I first got it from him, however, I was messing around with it and re-installing the OS, and the only way for me to get that to work without it turning off due to the processor overheating was with a very creative use of my floor fan.

Everything was significantly easier once the new fan arrived, obviously.

In a completely unrelated event, I randomly starting bleeding from my forearm the other day. I was talking to my roommate when I felt my arm was really wet, and when I looked down I saw that it was soaked in blood. I ran over to the bathroom and washed it off, while trying to find where it was all coming from.

There was no cut or gash or anything, just a small pin-prick sized hole from which blood was gushing out. And it wouldn’t stop for about thirty minutes. It wouldn’t bleed if I kept pressure on it, but even after leaving pressure on it for about five minutes, it would continue to bleed. A LOT. Eventually it stopped, and the only reason for it that my roommates and I could come up with was that a bee had stung me (we were around a lot of bees earlier… this isn’t entirely random), and the stinger had just come out, and that maybe it hit a large vein.

I am completely aware that that sounds extremely improbable, but there really aren’t any other good reasons as to why I would just start gushing blood out of my arm.

In parting I leave you with a YouTube video that’ll make you laugh, about buhLOOD! (it’s funny, not gross you wimps).

I hope the lack of nutrition I’ve experienced for the past 2.5 years of my life won’t have any lasting consequences extending past the short term, because all I eat is shit. The usual college limiting factors of time, money, and laziness take their greatest toll on my eating habits (mostly), and I find myself either eating way too little or way too much.

I wonder if there will come a distinct turning point in my life in which the allure of free food will cease to overcome the normal barriers erected between yummy and yucky; because everyone knows that right now, food tastes the best when it’s free.

If you haven’t guessed already from the necker-cube-esque title or the inane preceding paragraphs, this entry has absolutely no point whatsoever.

Continuing:

When I was a kid, I used to love mac and cheese loaded up with black pepper. Ever since then, I have been doing the same, but the amount of pepper required to reach my optimal level of seasoning has increased through the years.

I don’t know if this is indicative that I now have a larger area of taste buds that require more stimulation, or if I have basically fried my gustational abilities by over-saturating them a ridiculous amount of black pepper. My roommates love to think it’s the latter, and give me crap about it.

Anyway, I think I have done enough rambling. Due to cramming for an exam, my sleep schedule is out of phase by just about 180 degrees, so I might be up for a while.

Put more than two engineers in the same room for a short amount of time, and without fail, the conversation will eventually turn into the classic engineering equivalent of a penis length contest.

By that I mean, the untold competition that is having the most amount of shit to do in the next week or so. Example:

“Dude, I’m so fucked. I have a lab on Tuesday and then a test and program on Wednesday.”

“Dude, whatever man. I have three tests on Monday, a lab due Wednesday that I haven’t started, a project due Thursday that my partner won’t do shit on, and then a homework assignment due Friday.”

“You guys have it easy. I broke both of my wrists and have to type with my  toes now, my computer crashed, my apartment burned down, and I have 4 tests next week and 3 programming assignments.”

Of course, at some point a business major might chime in about how he has “work” to do that is “hard”.

However, everyone will eventually stop laughing at him and continue with their discussion as normal.

Part I: Anita

While trudging along on the 20-minute walk to school, I decided to call my friend Anita to see what she was up to. She told me that she was in the hospital after getting in a car wreck on the way to school, she even told me the details and that she broke her arm… etc. etc. I went as far as trying to console her and make her feel better, and thinking about how I could skip work that night to go visit.

“April Fools!!!!”

I suck at life!! And if that wasn’t dumb enough…

Part II: Suzie

Later that day, I called my friend Suzie to make sure she was still good to work out that night. She sounded really upset and starting saying that she wish she could, but shes having some money problems with the new house she’s trying to get for next semester. She said her checked bounced and the bank screwed something up, so she has to to work that out. Poor Suzie!

Again, I completely fell for it and started telling her that I know how frustrating that sort of stuff can be, but I’m sure that she’ll get it all worked out.

“April Fools!!!!”

Again, I suck at life. After getting done a second time that day, I let a string of dammits shits and fucks go un-restricted on a crowded part of campus. Of course a few people gave me concerned and/or scared looks, but they had no way of knowing the pain and agony of getting OWNED by two of your best friends on April fool’s day.

Moral of the story? NEVER forgot about April 1st!!! And never let your guard down.

Ever.

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.

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 black.

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.

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, homework, 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.