Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Update

Sorry, I haven't been updating much lately. I've been a little busy/stressed over school and related issues. Here are some updates:
  • Resolutions update - well, for the crunches, it's been okay. Despite not being very good at doing the crunches/situps every day, I've been able to keep up with my pace by doubling my crunches and doing it every other day. In addition, I've been adding other exercises (since I'm on the floor anyway) like push-ups, bicycles, leg lifts, and stretching exercises. For my books, well I'm already behing my pace; but the good news is that I've finally started reading a book. For me, the hardest part is getting into a new book, once I'm in then I can read it pretty quickly. Now if only I could stop reading magazine articles and watching numerous movies on the teli.

  • I was only able to get into one class and one lab, because apparently the philosophy department at UNLV is a complete mess. Oh well, I was only planning to take two classes anyway. I decided to attend the orientation. It was okay, but also the main reason I had little time in the past week. Some of the stuff, like the financial aid and the health services meetings I found very informative, but some stuff, like the campus tour, was pretty superfluous.

  • Stuff like registering for 3 different lab accounts, and worrying about my FASFA has had me a little spaced out lately.

  • And of course I've been keeping up with the football...

The Aviator

I saw the Aviator the other day. It's very good, a bit of a surprise to me (I'm not a huge DiCaprio fan). But DiCaprio nailed the part, and the rest of the cast was very good. One nice thing about the movie is that despite its length, over 2 1/2 hours, it does not seem to be so long because the movie is well paced and full of action and intrigue. I highly recommend it.

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

What Season Are You?


You scored as Winter. You are WINTER. You're more introspective, thinking deeply, feeling deeply. You love nothing better than to enjoy one on one time with those who are important to you. You are cautious, and sometimes second guess yourself. Dreams, though you have them, are a luxury, because life is not a plaything.

Winter

90%

Fall

60%

Summer

50%

Spring

30%

What Season Are You?
created with QuizFarm.com

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

What's Your Element?





Your Element Is Air



You dislike conflict, and you've been able to rise above the angst of the world. And when things don't go your way, you know they'll blow over quickly.

Easygoing, you tend to find joy from the simple things in life. You roll with the punches, and as a result, your life is light and cheerful.

You find it easy to adapt to most situations, and you're an open person. With you, what you see is what you get... and people love that!




What Kind of Intelligence Do You Have?




Your Dominant Intelligence is Logical-Mathematical Intelligence





You are great at finding patterns and relationships between things.
Always curious about how things work, you love to set up experiments.
You need for the world to make sense - and are good at making sense of it.
You have a head for numbers and math ... and you can solve almost any logic puzzle.

You would make a great scientist, engineer, computer programmer, researcher, accountant, or mathematician.



Monday, January 10, 2005

Googlewhacking

"Googlewhacking is a game in which, to win, you enter two words into the massive Google search engine and come up with just one result, meaning you have found a pair of words that appear only once on the same Web page in nearly the entire vastness of the Internet."

Okay I basically ripped this off from Eric Zorn's notebook on www.chicagotribune.com, but I didn't feel like paraphrasing something so short. Here is the source page.

Here are some examples I did for googlewhacking:
  • Example 1 (Notice I used an 'alternate' spelling for filibuster, and the longest word in the dictionary)

  • Example 2 (Sure, one of the words may not be in the dictionary, but it is used in the Might and Magic series)

  • Example 3 (heh, using my name might be considered... cheap)

  • Example 4 (err, one of these is technically not a word)

  • Example 5 (it's easier if you don't have to worry about choosing words that may not have any meaning)

I can't actually give the words out on my post because that would cause google to pick up two pages instead of one. Also, these examples may be true now, but not necessarily a week from now because the internet is an ever-evolving creature.

Saturday, January 08, 2005

Not too long ago, I watched Four Weddings and a Funeral. I found the poem recited in the funeral to be very moving, so here it is:


Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever; I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood,
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

W. H. Auden

Friday, January 07, 2005

Snow

It snowed today, lest I forget.

Thursday, January 06, 2005

Film and Paint

For some reason, this site struck me:

http://www.josiemccoy.co.uk/gallery/

tricks of the trade?

I think I have some. In any case I somehow was able to net a 1st place finish in my fantasy baseball league, and a 1st place and 3rd place finish in my two fantasy football leagues, despite not having participated in any kind of fantasy sports beforehand. Let me examine the situation:

In the fantasy baseball league I was a little worried that I would have no idea what I was doing. I mean, it was the first time I had paricipated in any kind of fantasy league, so I had no clue how things worked. Worse yet, I'm not much of a baseball fan (they lost me as a fan ever since the strike in the mid 90's), so I don't really know much about what players are good or bad. I did not prepare well for the draft, and I ended up with a fairly mediocre team. The good news - the baseball season is long, so I had a long time to get my act together. And eventually I did.

One of the nice things about the baseball league (and in case you were wondering, it was head-to-head points 5x5 catagories) was that the success in the season was determined more by strategy and activity than by having a great draft. What I ended up doing, to great effect, was use a large pitching staff rotation, and utilize cheap saves. By having a large pitching staff, and subsequently a limited or non-existent position player bench, I was able to rotate in starting pitchers constantly, something you can't do with bench postition players because the play every day. Pitchers don't play every day, so you can choose to start them only when it's their day to pitch. Then there are cheap saves, something I had to use because I only drafted one closer (oops). I went ahead and traded Smoltz for Delgado (somewhat of a bust), and then mined the free agent wires to obtain cheap saves. See, about 1/2 the teams in the major league change closers during the season. If you are paying close attention, you can nab the replacement closer before anyone else does. Since these scrubs are often available off the free agent wire, why bother drafting a closer high anyway? Saves are also one of the most unpredictable stats anyways year-to-year, so you can get great value frome a 'scrub' closer and poor value from a 'stud' closer.

The other main resource was the fact that there are so many decent players available on the waiver wires, ready to break out. You can literally build a good team straight off the waiver wires - if you can find and process the right information. My team was built off of solid players (A-rod and Abreu) and some waiver wire scrubs (Mesa, Lew Ford, Rollins, Pavano (picked up early in the season), Cliff Lee, etc.)

That was it. By using a large pitching rotation and cheap saves (and staying active), I had an advantage in Wins, K's, and saves every week. Despite average hitting, I easily coasted into third place and made the playoffs. I will admit, winning the playoffs was largely luck, but making the top 6 was by design.

Then came football season. I thought the fact that I am a rabid fan of the NFL might either hamper with my enjoyment of the game, or hurt me in the fantasy football world when I played the fantasy football leagues, but thankfully that was not the case. It seemed like the most important things for fantasy football success was having a good top end draft (top 4 to 6 picks, and I prepared much better for the draft this time around) and evaluating matchups. Since I already had a good sense of which teams were good and which teams were bad, I had a slight advantage at picking my matchups. Of course, I don't want to give away all my secrets since I care more about my fantasy football leagues, so I'll leave it at that.

In the end, thanks to some bad luck, I just missed a sweep of my leagues. But don't get me wrong - I can do much better next year. There is plenty of improvement left in me, particularly in the draft and the regular season. Also, the leagues were marred by some people being inactive. It felt like I was only playing against 6 or 8 people instead of 12. Hopefully I can recruit some more people I know - so I can get on them about staying active. In any case, I can't really complain about the results this year.

Tuesday, January 04, 2005

I'm slipping...

Naturally. While I was sick, I have been slacking off when it comes to my crunches. I missed two days, so I resolved to do 60 the next two days to compensate. I did 60 on one day, but not the other, so now I have to do 90 tomorrow to make it up, etc. I need to persevere somehow...

Meanwhile, my sleeping cycle is totally discombobulated. Sleeping for 7 hours, 2 hours, then 6 hours, then 5 hours, at all different times of day. I guess pulling an all nighter, while sick even, has made my sleeping habits even more unstable than usual.

It's been raining. Very nice - for me it's remeniscent of Hawaii. To tell the truth, I don't like being in the rain at all. It's cold and wet; and it's annoying for me because I wear glasses. But for some reason hearing raindrops on the rooftop is very soothing.

Saturday, January 01, 2005

Play 20 Questions

Here is a site where you can play 20 questions with an artificial intelligence:

http://www.20q.net/

It can be addicting.

Resolutions

I've never really gotten into the whole New Year resolution thing. I don't really know why. Maybe it's because I've been too lazy to do one. However, I do have this blog so I can post it as a reminder to keep on track. So without further ado, here are my modest New Year's Resolutions.

By next year, I want to accomplish the following:
  1. Do 10,000 situps/crunches. It amounts to about 30 a day, very plausible. A pretty silly story, really. I had to work on Christmas eve and then Christmas morning. Sucks, I know, but I was trying to make the best of it. I have a pair of dark emerald green slacks. They are nice looking, kindly flashy, and very impractical to wear. I figured, just for Christmas, I'd wear the green slacks, a white shirt, and a red tie. Unfortunately, to my horror, the green slacks, which used to fit me perfectly, now do not fit me at all! I can't even squeeze into them! Apparently I've been eating too much the past couple of years. I'm not fat by any stretch of the imagination, but it would be nice to lose one inch. I guess this means I'm vain.

  2. Read 24 books. I've been neglecting my reading since I've been out of school. I know how to read, so I might as well do it! The books must be at least 100 pages in length, not including illustrations. Magazine don't count.

  3. Speaking of school, I've enrolled in UNLV and plan to get back into the whole college thing. I'm planning to ease into it. Since my workload will be light, I should be able to ace all my classes, right? Take at least four classes in the next year, and get A's in all of them. It's not like I'll be overworked, no excuses for me!

  4. Try to post at least three times a week. I'm really a hot and cold blogger. Mostly I don't feel like posting anything, or I'm just not in the mood. However, when I'm not in the mood for posting is probably the best time for me to post! 'Cause how are you going to see a true version of me if I only speak when I feel fine or good or swell? Besides, I don't really want to post, "A week ago I saw Kevin Spacey in concert and he was very impressive..." It seems so unspontaneous to post about things that happend days ago, and I end up not saying anything instead. Even it it's a silly little "I saw the red hollies growing outside and it reminded me of the movie The Village" I should still say it. Maybe I should try to post more pictures too.

Other ambigous goals for me: Be more friendly, more sociable. Watch less tv, more movies. Clean up my room. Get a cell phone (maybe). Carry around a pen and notebook. Try more different things. Be more reckless (assertive). Try not to worry so much about spelling and grammar, and all the other little things that bother me. Be more grateful. Communicate more easily, frequently, abundantly.

The mornings are the worst

So, here I am once again, embarking on a truly foolish endeavor. It always seems like a good idea at the time. I'm up late, can't go to sleep. I have to work/have a class in the morning, so I have to get up early somehow. Only six and a half more hours... Then a light bulb flashes in my head! Why continue to toss an turn in an effort to squeeze in a tiny amount of sleep before struggling out of bed in the morning, when the simple solution is to stay up all night! Yep, foolish indeed. I've done this enough times, that I can already imagine what it's going to be like when the sun comes up. I'll basically be floating around deliriously in a haze. The surroundings will seem to be constantly moving. And for some reason, everything around me seems to be hilariously funny. Such is the state of sleep deprivation, but this time it can't be helped. Because I caught a cold.

Yes, I caught a cold. Everyone around me kept getting sick, but somehow I managed to avoid it. Then it seemed like everybody was getting healthy again, it looked like I was going to escape the endemic. When least expected, after having worked six straight days through the holidays, including Christmas, I catch a cold. On my day off no less. One thing I've noticed about colds, perhaps it's just me, is that the mornings are the worst. If you're sick, the time you feel the worst is usually right after you wake up. You are all dehydrated, coughing up phlegm, having trouble breathing, dizzy, lightheaded, etc. If you were forced to decide if you are healthy enough to work or to call in sick, odds are you will feel a whole lot better six hours after you wake up then one hour. Then again, maybe it's just me. I'm not a morning person.

So I figure staying up all night will dramatically increase the chances I'll feel well enough to come in to work in the morning - since I don't have to wake up. If this logic isn't making sense, then maybe the sleep deprivation is already affecting me. However, I'm already commited to it. I've been drinking a fair amount of caffeine in the past few hours, and will continue to do so. Soon, I'm going to have to switch from diet coke to coffee, I think. (I hate coffee) Only six and a half more hours to go...