Bryan’s Web (.net)

Well, Jeff and I are leaving for our Dad’s tomorrow - spring break. We should have a good time… It should be very relaxing. And after this quarter, I’m ready to relax. I did manage pretty good grades though- two As and a B, for a GPA of 3.66! The worst part is that I got the B in the class that was the least amount of work. You just had to show up and take notes, and then regurgitate that back on the exams. But with all of work that I had to do for my other classes, it kinda got pushed into the background. Here’s the animation that I did in my Maya class.

This quarter I haven’t been able to spend many hours at work, and thus I’ve been feeling stagnant- like I wasn’t accomplishing anything. It was hard to get anything done spending only 2.5-3 hours a day there. So I started to not enjoy it. But this past week, since I had no exams, I’ve been able to go in 8:00-5:00 for a few days, and it’s revitalized my work there. I’ve finished off a project and even though my list of stuff to do is never-ending, it feels like I’m actually getting somewhere again. After spring break I’ll have been there for 2 years without a raise. I’m contemplating asking for one. Not too big, just a little something to compensate me for how much my workload has increased in both quantity and complexity since I started.

At work today, this cute girl came in to pick up something that she had printed to the printer in our office. I asked her out to dinner tonight, but no dice- rejected. I just thought I’d share.

We had a LAN party wednesday- our first in like 4 years. It was fun, but I had to go to bed around 2:30 since I had to be at work in the morning.

Jeff was in a car accident last weekend- somebody hit him from behind at a speed difference of ~20MPH and his car was pushed into a ditch and flipped. He’s fine- he walked away. But I’ve seen pictures of his car, and I’m really glad he’s okay. His car doesn’t look as bas as this guy’s though.

As for the title of this post, it’s in honor of Billy “Wicked” Wilson, who just passed away last weekend. He was the co-founder of Voodoo Extreme and led it before it got taken away from him by IGN and the corporate entity sucked out all of the character that Billy put in. From the first time I read that site in 1997 until shortly after IGN bought it (a period of about 4-5 years), it was my home page. Voodoo Extreme was one of the first gaming news websites out there. Every day Billy would start off the news with a personal post titled “blah”- before blogs were blogs- that I always enjoyed reading. He’d always manage to spice up the news a bit instead of just regurgitating what was said on other websites. It’s hard to explain. Anyways, I didn’t read his new site Gaming Groove very much, but his death was shocking since it was so unexpected. He died of liver failure at the age of 33. RIP, Billy.

I’ve come across some interesting links recently.

This Site has a survey to figure out whether you have a more male or female brain. The tests take about 20 minutes, but I thought it was interesting.

Jeff sent me this link, which refutes the claims of creationists. I think this is excellent, because I’ve heard many of these arguments when religious people try to convince me that evolution isn’t how we came about. I think this is especially topical due to all of the discussion about teaching “intelligent design” in science classes. Just for the record- I firmly believe that intelligent design has no place in science classrooms. The link points out that creationism is very similar to Last Thursdayism, “the unfalsifiable view that the universe and everything in it was created last Thursday with only the appearance of earlier history”. It’s funny because it’s true.

Oh, and the title of this post comes from an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 in which they were watching a movie entitled: Manos, the Hands of Fate. It’s #1 on IMDB’s worst movies of all time list.

Oh, and still no picture support on this site. Maybe I’ll get a chance during spring break.

My mind works in mysterious ways. Don’t leave me to my own devices.

I was walking home from my first final of the quarter today, wondering why 40 out of 50 of the multiple choice questions had to be from the one lecture that I missed, when I noticed that I was semi-consciously avoiding the cracks on the sidewalk. I then started thinking about the implications of stepping on a crack and breaking your mother’s back. I started wondering that if the old saying were true, would they make smooth sidewalks? Probably not, since the cracks are put in there to actually prevent cracking in the future. Would they instead make sidewalks from asphalt? And what of tile floors? Certainly they wouldn’t exist. Would the mother-back-cracking epidemic have put the kabosh on the entire industrial revolution? No, they had cracks before that I thought as I pictured a dry lakebed. And I wouldn’t even dream of visiting the grand canyon. Or would that not count? Perhaps, since cracks were around long before humans came to step upon them, mothers would have evolved with multiple backbones and other organs in case a crack was stepped upon by her offspring. German Scientists’ interpretation of such a creature can be seen here.