Sketchdumps are for WiPs

Drawing I was trying to finish for last year's Thanksgiving.
Obivously, I didn't make it in time.

One of the thing that irks me about the school year is how little time it leaves me to use the computer for art. On the one hand, because I take a bus that 90% of the time gets stuck in traffic, I have a practically guaranteed drawing session every day. On the other, if any of those drawings requires a little touch up in the computer to be finished (say, to add color), it most likely never will be finished.

What's this? An actual blog post?

Preliminary image. Will be finished later

Of course, I've never actually
taken apart a coin, so I don't know if
this is even possible…
Nor do I encourage you to try

For weeks, I haven’t been able to focus on my studies. The fact is, I keep worrying about money. Maybe It’s the fact that my scholarship wasn’t paid for two months. Maybe it’s the fact that three-quarters of the people I went to high school with have graduated from college and I haven’t. Maybe I’ve been reading too much on how people in their thirties and forties who don't have money get money. Maybe I've simply grown too old for the "college" life. Whichever it is, somehow, I can barely complete a simple math problem before my thoughts turn, in some form or another, to money.

The frustrating part is that I already know what I’m going to do for money once I graduate, and I know exactly how I’m going to do it, yet the questions keep coming back, haunting me like some undead monster. I crunch away at them, desperately fixing the numbers which are still vague to me, in hopes that the thoughts will finally go away and leave me alone!

But no luck

Community Service

(Or “What’s been keeping me busy, part 1”)

Like many American (and, indeed Pan-American) colleges, mine requires me to do some community service in order to graduate. Apparently this is an alien concept to Europeans so I’ll try to explain it briefly: Basically, I’m required to do work for free “for the benefit of the community”, in hopes that this will motivate me to do stuff for the places where I’ll live “for the benefit of the community”.

Now, before you rain suggestions on me like firefighters or soup kitchens, part of the catch is that the community service can’t be just any old volunteer work; it has to be a “service” registered with the university. There’s a bulletin board with all the options, as well as a web page, and I spent two weeks reading through them all. Turns out, 80% of the options require you to own a car (which, just like 60% of the student population, I don’t).

The Graduation Countdown

I had it all figured out. I only had Statistics, my thesis, and community service (required by a local law – or was it an ordinance?) and then I could graduate. I would do statistics during the summer of 2010, community service during the summer of 2011, and my thesis throughout the 2011 calendar year. There was plenty of leeway if anything went wrong. The plan was flawless!

…or so I thought.

I Hate Long Weekends!

Originally done out of
Stresssss!

Most people love long weekends; I don't. Long weekends for me are an opportunity; an opportunity I can never use.

It's always the same. I see the long weekend coming up on the calendar, and I start thinking of what I could do with that extra day (or days). Usually I settle on one thing; something that I know I can do in much less than a day, and then start doing it from Friday afteroon.

Except that it never gets done.

Stresssss!

I haven’t felt stress –at all– for a very,very long time.

Ye Irish facepalm

St. Patrick's Day ended, and I was unable to make the last image for my St. Patrick's avatar. My schedule, my sleep debt, my phone, and certain callers all got together and "decided" to make this impossible.

The new Frenzy

(The title is obviously a reference to The Ophiuchus frenzy.)

Wednesday, February 16, 2011. 2:41 PM. The Computer Science student lounge.

A group of students are trying to make sense of the instructions to a Computer Networks exercise, when one of the guys' cell phones vibrates. The guy reaches for his cell phone and reads the text message.

"Hey," he announces, "you remember how the professor was saying there weren't enough IP addresses; that one day when our computers would try to connect to the Internet, they wouldn't be able to?"
"Yeah?" answers one of the girls, who had obviously heard the professor say that a million times.
"Well, it's happened. Just now. The professor says, 'do not turn your computers off' … they may not be able to connect afterwards."

"Preposterous," I thought. I immediately input "IP addresses" into Google news. I got only two results: a report from Cornell and business news. It obviously was the former, which had been published exactly two hours and one minute previously –while we had all been eating lunch.

The Ophiuchus frenzy also got to me

I wrote the following on January 14. I didn't post it back then because I felt the need to apologize first.

I really hope I don't need
to explain why I put this
image here.

So, I was in the student lounge Friday morning, January 14, 10 a.m., when I overheard one guy tell another,
"Yo, you know what your sign is?"
"Duh, I do."
"Well, what is it?"
"Scorpio."
"Not anymore."
"Whaddaya men 'not any more'?"
"Your birthday's is November 30, right? The International Astronomy thingy is saying your sign's now Ophiuchus"
"What the hell is that?"


I immediately Googled "Zodiac" and saw the news story, already dead and buried by then, unfold before my eyes.

An apology

Text-only version

The last assignment

Text-only version

Crossroad

No, I don't know why I
thought this image would be
funny. And no, the blue
clothes don't mean
anything.

I find myself today at a crossroad. On one side stands writing a thesis, on the other stands doing an internship. The university's rulebook states that I must do one of the two to graduate. And as I try to decide I think I'm stuck in some sort of infinite loop.

I didn't make it

Firstly, I want to appologize to the people who expected I would have my avatar's Halloween story done by today. Or by Thursday, when I promised it for. The thing is, something happened. Something bad, yet it turned out monumentally well. And by getting involved in it, two days passed without my noticing, and my duedates caught up with me. (No, it's not love; I'll tell you what it was later.)

I will finish the halloween story, mainly because it feeds into what I'm planning to do for Christmas, but first I've got three projects to hand in this week: one on Tuesday, one on Wednesday, and one on Thursday. And Monday, it seems, I'll need to dedicate to closing off that thing I got involved in.

So maybe the real question is, why am I investing time into telling you all?

It's a miracle

Self portrait #2: face loosely based on photo.
The rest (hair, arms, etc) is the result
of me guessing how long the lines should be;
I have very little experience drawing
people in profile –or people holding things
up to their faces, for that matter.

So, I've passed all my courses. "What? That's the title 'miracle'? I thought you said you were a 'mostly-all-A' student; what's the big deal?" It seems pretty tame, I know, compared to the Resurrection of Lazarus or turning water into wine. All the same, I'm convinced God had a hand in this.

I try to keep the fact that I'm a very devoted Christian separate from my life online. I really do. Sometimes, it's hard; the words just escape me. People really don't like it when you randomly quote an appropriate passage from the bible or point something out as evidence of the existence of God. They pigeonhole you and put any possible resentment they have on any possible "bad" action the Church, as an institution, has done at any possible point in time during the past 2,000 years.

But still, given the situation I was in, I just had to write about it.

if(summer_vacation == false){...

The term is over. I should be on summer vacation. But noooo. I'm stuck here doing a project due (of all the impossibles) Sunday! (Yes I know half of you are going "Bah, I've had to hand in projects on Sundays before; I've had to hand in projects on Christmas day! What's the big deal then?"
and the other half is going "What? Sunday? How can that even be possible? Is he going to be in his office on Sunday? I don't think so! There must be some law against it!" Look, I have no clue.)

Life Sucks

I had something brilliant planned for Father's Day. A wonderful series of posts which were to take advantage of the fact that I comment on about half a dozen sites with an avatar, which I was going to change for the occasion. I hoped to have it up long enough for people to notice, ask themselves "what's up with this?" and click it, linking them to the blog. And the explanation would be here! Right after a short post which I hoped would tell enough about me to get them to keep reading my blog.

But my teachers didn't agree with my plans, and let's just say, I'm lucky to be alive... literally.

Fortibus Es

Last Saturday, May 22, I went to the library to meet with my partner so we could work on a project. As I've explained before, my college is quite removed from the city. It therefore has a whole fleet of buses used to take students between the city and campus. (Of course, you can always bring your car, but some 60% of the people who come to this college don't own one... long story.)

We had no problem getting to the library, it was getting back that was the problem. The library opens on Saturdays until midday; there's usually a bus at 12:30 for the people who need to come to it. But there we were at the bus stop, and 12:30 came and went. The logical question arose: where is our bus?

At that point, I told my partner the following:

Luc síbili si ergo, faustus üin don mon dei; pas fortibus es in aro.

This was obviously a reference to http://foribuses.com/. My partner didn't get it, even when I wrote it, so I had to explain: Luc síbili (Look, see Billy) si ergo (see her go) faustus üin (fast as wind) don mon dei (on Monday) pas fortibus es (past fourty busses) in aro (in a row).
My point? There may be no busses now, but on Monday there will be more than fourty!

When he got it, he said something along the lines of "that was so funny I forgot to laugh."

The bus finally arrived at 1:00; having been asked to wait for some course for non-students.

Mrs. R, why do you torture me like this?

The title may be a bit extreeme, but it is exactly how I felt today when I saw that, once again, the teacher was telling us to bring something to the following day's class with few hours left in the day.

Teachers like this abound. Before the internet, it was mainly in the shape of
"Bring it to my office by tomorrow at sunrise."
"But this class is last period! There's no time to do it!"
"I don't care. Just be in my office by sunrise."

Last term I also got a teacher like this, only worse.

It's high time I had a blog!

Several things have been have been happening in my life recently that have made me realize I need a presence on the web. Where to start? Let's try chronologically:

• Last year, I did an internship. I realized how important it is to put your CV online; not just to put it in the way of employers seeking people, but also to expand on it beyond the limits of paper.
• I've realized I've been getting out of touch with the people I know, so I need something to help me decide what to talk about with them.
• I have put a bit of an extra effort into some of the programs I've made for my course projects; I want to show them off, but I don't have anywhere to do it (at least not anywhere that is mine).
• In March, I was asked if I do art (and it so happens I do) and if I have it online (and it happens that I don't).
• I've stated checking more blogs and such, and I think I need to be able to connect all my commenter personas to one place.
• For the past couple of years I've been noticing some queer equalities between languages –both between natural languages (say, English and French) and programming languages (say, C and Haskell)– that are so queer I want to write about them, but I don't have anywhere to do it.

Yes, I know I'm using "recently" in a very relative sense, and yes I know I should get something better to cover these wishes. I could've kept those things bottled up inside of me until I amassed enough money to buy a domain, but during the last week, quite a few things happen that pushed me to finally create this blog.