Archive for the 'Personal Experience' Category

Enough already, School = Done

Published
by
kelvin
on May 21, 2008
in Personal Experience and Rants
. 0 Comments

I finished the last of my final exams today. I’m done with my BSSE at SJSU. I just hope I’m not permanently as stressed out as I have been for the last couple years. Free time is almost foreign to me at this point… It’ll take a lot time to relax, I guess. Some of my coworkers were joking with me saying how, now that I have my degree, I can now go get a good job. Deep down, it bothers me that I spent so much time at school when I landed my current (awesome) job primarily on merit (the rest was luck). I hate that my degree was a barrier to be crossed rather than a foothold for new opportunity.

A couple of days ago my father was being a whiney bitch. He was going off on how it is important for me to walk at SJSU commencement (I’m not). The singular reason I did the work to complete my degree was because Judy wanted me to; not for myself, not for anyone else, not for any other benefit. Now, at the end when all the work is done, he selfishly demands to be part of the experience. He tirades me with tenuous reasons why I should walk. Every reason thinly veils only his personal desires. He wants the achievement to be his own. Like he gives a fuck about me. If he gave two shits about me completing my degree, he’d have helped me pay for college. If he really cared that I finished, he might’ve helped me not encumber myself in debt. If had any desire to support me he wouldn’t have forced me out of his goddamn house when I was on hard times trying to figure out how I’d finish the degree. If he’d really cared at all he’d have asked me “What classes are you taking?”, “Who are your professors?”, “How are your grades?”, “Are you happy?”, anything. 

 

 

Kelvin’s Las Vegas Excursion

Published
by
kelvin
on April 27, 2008
in Personal Experience
. 0 Comments

Cryptic sent me to Las Vegas this past weekend! I brought Judy. We stayed at the Palazzo. Fun was had. Sites were seen.

I guess you could say that this was my first real (unsupervised) trip to Vegas, so I got to do pretty much just what I felt like doing, which was great. Anyhow, the sites and activities are well documented by others, I’m sure, so I’ll just go over the numbers.

Friday:

Venitian, $10 Craps (3-4-5) on $200 bankroll: -$55

Venitian, Cryptic Hospitality: +$500

Saturday:

Palazzo, $10 Craps (3-4-5) on $300 bankroll: +$410

MGM Grand, $5 Craps (3-4-5) on $300 bankroll: +$99

MGM Grand, Ka by Cirque du Soleil: -$280

Sunday:

Casino Royale, $5 Craps (5x) on $300 bankroll: -$300

Venitian, $10 Craps (3-4-5) on $200 bankroll: +$105

Total (hospitality, show, and gambling): +$479

So, my personal gambling (not counting Judy’s penny slots) plus the Ka show plus Cryptic Hospitality still ends up fairly well in the black. Even with the couple hundred we spent on dining, souvenirs, and conveniences, we’re still ahead by a fair amount. Nothing like a free trip to Vegas to lighten your spirits :D

Wordpress Hates K2

Published
by
kelvin
on April 6, 2008
in News and Personal Experience
. 0 Comments

So, I gave in to the nag tag on my wordpress dashboard and upgraded to wp2.5. Unsurprisingly, wp2.5 completely hates K2’s sidebar manager and widget system. They’ve gone so far as to widgetize the wp-dashboard, thus causing asinine incompatibility on the default admin logged in page.

For now, my two options are:

  1. Live without a login dashboard
  2. Disable the K2 sidebar

Both options are rather unsavory. I like wordpress AND K2… but it seems like with every new version automattic tries just a little harder to turn it into a contest of who I should dislike more.

RTWarp - Hyperbolic Geometry Demo

Published
by
kelvin
on March 20, 2008
in News and Personal Experience
. 0 Comments

Picture 10 This is an old demo I’ve radically updated. Way back when I built an image distortion demo in Macromedia Director lingo (ran about 0.1fps) . This version is built in a GLSL vertex shader (runs 90fps).

If you have an OpenGL 2.0 capable Mac:

Download RTWarp

Try opening a 640×480-ish sized image.

Continue reading ‘RTWarp - Hyperbolic Geometry Demo’

Black Sea Gallery Deserves to go Out of Business

Published
by
kelvin
on March 20, 2008
in Personal Experience
. 1 Comment

Wolly Bully Sofa & Townsend TableWell, it’s been a month now. My Wolly Bully sofa is performing pretty well and there seems to be no more surprises. But, what an ordeal it was.

There is an egregious problem with the management and logistics at Black Sea Gallery. For a furniture retailer, their performance rates abysmal. But the problem doesn’t lie in the salespeople. It doesn’t lie with the delivery and warehousemen. It’s deeper than that. And, while it’s easy to blame all the people on the train to screwed-over-ville, it’s important to recognize who built the tracks. My experience was a bad one; it was partly my fault for not researching, but these events were certainly out of the normal range of bad I’ve witnessed in the past.

Continue reading ‘Black Sea Gallery Deserves to go Out of Business’