COG Developers

As some of you may remember, I wrote a blog a few weeks back about starting to work on a new website. Well, Champions of Gaming (COG) is officially under development. I am working on it with Mark Fedor (papasmurf786) and Chris Tuvera (eviltim11). They are both people I play videogames on a fairly regular basis. Mark I have only known for the last two and a half years as I recall. I grew up knowing Chris since first grade. Mark has some pretty impressive graphic skills and is starting to learn some basic programming concepts. Chris is constantly getting better and better with his graphics skills. He also has some programming skills; though, he has yet to delve too much into web development. For the moment, I am doing most of the backend development while working with Chris and Mark on the frontend.

As for how the development is going, we have officially bought the domain now. We are hoping to pick up a few similar domain names, but that is still hanging in the air at the moment. The look-and-feel is pretty much set, and I must say it looks pretty sexy. We have mapped out a few placeholders for some features we think will be cool. No real functionality has been put in place yet, but a lot of ideas are being thrown around and decided on. I do not know how much will get done before Thanksgiving as all three of us are in college at the moment. However, hopefully, we will make some significant progress over winter break.

Friday Rocked

Let's just say I had a pretty good day on Friday. The first good news that set the tone for the rest of the day came in my English History to 1688 class. We had taken a test in there the Monday before and it was a big test. It was worth 25% of my final grade. This is the class I have expected to be my worse grade this semester. If I get something above a B, I will be pretty happy. We got a study guide a week before and quickly realized this test was going to be tough. The study guide had four essay questions on it. The actual test had two of those. Of those two, we got to choose one to write about. The essay questions all required us to use the primary documents we had been reading for class to explain some general theme in English history. We had read 50+ documents by this point in the class already. We got no notes, and could not even use the book with the documents. In other words, we essentially had to memorize 3 essays to be truly prepared for this test. As for how long the essays were supposed to be, we were told to expect to write the entire 50 minutes that the class lasted (roughly 3 pages based on my typical hand-writing speed).

When we got the test, the two topics we got to choose from were church/state relations and political organization. These were probably my second and third best topics of the four on the study guide. As we started the test, I came up with a fairly unique idea. I chose to go with political organization, but wrapped up church/state relations by arguing they were a part of England's political organization. The whole controversy between the church and state was over the state attempting to control the church for its own political uses. By answering both topics in one essay I figured I was either writing one amazing essay or fighting for a 'B' which is about what I expected had I written for a single topic.

We got our tests back on Friday. The professor told me he thought I did "pretty good" when he handed me my test. As I looked at it, there were only two comments on it. The first was right beside my opening paragraph. It read, "Which topic are you choosing?" My opening paragraph was fairly confusing, but then again, I was technically answering both topics. The comment did not surprise too much to say the least. The second comment was at the very end. It read, "A really good essay." The word "really" was underlined twice. Just below the comment was a nice, big, red 'A'. Then Dr. Lees told the class he was a pretty hard grader, and if you got a 'B' or better, you should be pretty happy with your grade. I am just going to say I was ecstatic.

The next big highlight came later in the afternoon in a series of emails with my computer science department head, Dr. Wallingford. For a summary of that, just read this blog.

The rest of the day consisted of me just having a good time. I played some Resistance 2 (a new videogame) with a couple friends. We watched some football. We played some Rock Band. We sat around talking and joking about random things. All in all, it was just a fun time with very little effort involved. I think it will be one of the things I miss most about college. With so many friends my age around, I can have a lot of fun just hanging out with a couple friends. I do not have to go out or make any sort of plans. Just sitting around the apartment and doing whatever is fun enough every now and then. Anyways, that was my awesome Friday.

Grad School 2

If you need an update, here is my first blog on grad school. On Friday, I was throwing some general questions to Dr. Wallingford about various things in relation to grad school. He asked who I am looking at. I told him Dr. Cook from UT and Jeremy Siek from CU. It turns out Wallingford knows Dr. Cook personally and has worked with him on a couple different committees in the past. This is very good news for me. Being able to have someone like Wallingford put in a good word for me and make sure my application really gets looked at very easily could be the difference between me being accepted or rejected at a large university like UT. The best thing is Wallingford knows Cook himself. It is not that he simply knows someone on the UT CS faculty. He knows the guy I want as my advisor. Then I hope my track record will speak for itself and get me in.

Apatheism Rebutted

So my lovely sister posted this comment on my initial blog about Apatheism:

What about after this life? Do you care what happens then? I know your '" don't care" attitude is more leave me alone about it. I think you do care more than you are letting on.

I did not respond directly to her because I intended to post another full blog on it. However, I got busy and put it off way too long. So, no, Suzanne, I had no intentions of blowing you off. ;-)

I have to say she makes a very valid point. If I did not care, why would I blog about the notion of Christianity/religion as much as I do? So if it is not a matter of caring, then what is it? My sister suggests it is a preference to be left alone on the topic. That is probably right. The next logical question then proceeds to why do I want to be left alone about it? As I ponder the answer to that question, it seems to come down to serious personal affairs. In my entire life, I have almost never directly confronted a serious conversation about personal matters. When it comes to less personal topics (such as politics or education), I am ready to debate for hours if it is an issue on which I have an opinion. The distinction seems to be on the focus of the topic. Only with an internal focus do I tend to avoid the issue. I believe my ex-girlfriends could attest to this.

I would also say this is where a large portion of my sense of humor comes from. I joke about everything these days, but I most certainly use it as a defense mechanism in tough situations. I am the guy who will joke about absolutely anything. I suspect if you are going to use humor as a shield, this must be true; otherwise, it would make for a lousy defense. One might even go so far as to say defining a new religion, such as "Apatheism" itself, is a joke in an effort to avoid the issue.