JC (John Cholewa)'s Journal
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JC (John Cholewa)'s LiveJournal:
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| Monday, July 6th, 2009 | | 2:38 pm |
Shore Leave
It looks like I'm suddenly going to Shore Leave, a convention going on this coming weekend. It's a fan-run con with a heavy media guest slant. Famous folk from Star Trek, Stargate, Dollhouse, et al. I'd love to know if anybody around here will be around there, too. :) | | Friday, July 3rd, 2009 | | 2:22 pm |
People don't like taking my money
Well then. With the money I have saved up, I could afford perhaps a quarter of a decent condo on Long Island. This is pretty good, I thought. The whole purpose of mortgage loans is so that people can purchase homes that it would otherwise take them an additional decade or two to afford on their own, and in return the lending company gets a solid profit in interest payments. My first attempt at get mortgage preapproval has shown to be an incredibly mixed bag. I was approved, but the amount that I was approved for is only slightly higher than that amount of money I already have earmarked for a down payment. In terms of effective earnings, this means that they're willing to loan me what it would take me three years to afford on my own. I must have some sort of horrible assy credit rating. Or maybe this particular mortgage company is terrible. Or there was a miscommunication of some sort on the form. Either way, I'll have to do some snooping. I feel a bit better after writing this all down. For one thing, my wake-up, slept-too-much headache has evaporated. And I did some searching on MLSLI.com, a frequently advertised real estate listings company that happened to be at the top of my search results. They have some interesting condos listed, including a nice sounding place that's in the same general area as my school and sufficiently close to my workplace (it's also within walking distance of a mall or two and very near to an LIRR stop), and their mortgage calculator gives a conservative estimate that I would be able to afford even if I had a much lower down payment than I can spare, an amount roughly equivalent to what it would take me seven or eight years to save up on my own. So I will have to do some hunting next week. [Edit: Wait wait. The preapproval lists a "purchase price" that's only $2100 below the "loan amount". There's something fishy with that -- I think they misread my down payment amount on the form] Current Mood:  anxious | | 3:43 am |
My faith in humanity is strengthened. I accidentally left my keys in the lock of my car's trunk -- very obviously visible -- for eight and a half hours in a supposedly not so great neighborhood. Nothing bad happened. Humans rock! | | Monday, June 22nd, 2009 | | 12:21 am |
| | Friday, June 19th, 2009 | | 7:10 pm |
I'm like James Doohan :D
Some dude friended me on Facebook today. He was apparently a fan of my website back in the '90s, and I was an inspiration for him to pursue a career in Engineering. !!! That is very awesome. I inspired somebody to do something with their lives at a time when I was at my lowest point. I often forget about how many people followed the site. I had several thousand people religiously reading the words that I wrote (this was before the advent of "blogging", so such an achievement meant something back then) every day, and perhaps I did not appreciate it. The difficulty of dealing with real life in my distant past overshadowed a lot. | | 4:50 pm |
| | Saturday, June 13th, 2009 | | 10:17 pm |
They're filming what is apparently a remake of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" near Battery Park, specifically around the elevator to the 4 Train. Fun day today, but it was a bit spoiled by rain. I got to figment around 2:15 and hooped around for a while. I met up with a few friends and went towards one of the more remote areas of the island, but we got caught in a sudden and terrible rain storm. They had umbrellas, but I had ditched mine after bringing it to the city yesterday and not needing it. No worries, though. I just offshirted and everything went along fine for the rest of the day. Unfortunately, the storm caused a lot of the installations to be taken down. Only two out of ten or so were still going on at that remote part of the island, and they were pretty subdued. It was a similar situation, though not quite as dire, back in the main area. My friends left to go somewhere drier, but I stuck around to check as much as I could out. The Dagomir folk were mostly teaching children basic boffer fighting. The hoopers were out in force the whole time. If I had some time, I would have liked to try out the inventive mini-golf thing that was there. I did climb inside a neat three-dimensional-star structure which was fun, and I was given some decent grounding on doing poi. As I was going back on the ferry, some lady gave me an invite to an "erotic body painting event" in the city this week, in which people will be traipsing around in the buff for some sort of artistic something. Apparently, you get brownie points if you're brave enough to walk around without a shirt. She seemed to think that I have "an incredible body". Were the gender roles reversed, I suspect I'd be creeped out at this point. Ha! There was an "after party" around one of the vendors in Battery Park. I got to briefly meet the person who spearheads this event, and I was told all sorts of stuff about Burning Man. Sound like fun, though it's fun that I will probably not do this year or next. So tomorrow, I'm going onto Great Lawn in Central Park for a big water-gun war. That's at 1pm, so I might have a little bit of a shot of checking out just a little bit more of Figment. This is a pretty heavy weekend. No complaints, though. My "Vindicator" will make short work of all the other water-gun warriors. Current Mood:  awesome | | 12:54 am |
So, like, " http://facebook.com/brainguy/" :D The Bubble Battle was really cool. I took a ton of photos, and the memories therein were awesome, but I discovered that my camera lens got slimed by bubble solution partway through, so there's a fuzzy area in some of the pictures. Anyway, there were many bubbles. There were giant bubbles. Some of the bubbles you could fit a person into. I met a random girl and we were chatting for like twenty minutes until we discovered that we have a common friend. My world of doing weird stuff is shrinking. Tomorrow (well, today) I go to Figment, which should be pretty awesome. Sunday will likely be a giant watergun fight. Now I am sleepy. Good night. | | Thursday, June 11th, 2009 | | 2:20 am |
Quick sleepy update:
Did move-related stuff in the Forum. Boxed something like half the books in the library. The major players, in order of arrival, were Aaron, Mary Scott, me and Janet. I took some pictures of interesting things for posterity (again), and there was much discussion on how to keep the Forum healthier going into the future. We eventually made our way to the usual diner and talked about drama. I think I'm happy that I largely stay away from it. Anyway, today's work. I will not sleep enough. Fortunately, it promises to be a good day. We have quotes from PSSC Labs for new workstations, and they seem like a promising vendor. Also, I am already avidly awaiting the free coffee that work has to offer. :o | | Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 | | 5:38 pm |
Mathman, your mission is to eat only prime numbers....
This GRE thing was really fun. I think I'll go again some time. I did enough to convince myself that I can communicate with means slightly better than grunts and clicks. Also, no human being has ever scored higher in math than I have. I think that I will celebrate by either exercising at the gym or driving for an hour and a half to help out with the Forum boxing effort. I have not yet decided which. Anybody going to the boxing? Current Mood:  sleepy | | 11:51 am |
GRE
I'm taking the GRE in about an hour. I no longer need it, because NYIT accepted me last week, but I would still like to see if I am a functional human. That said, it will be hard to concentrate on the GRE, because I just learned that Futurama is getting a new season. :O :O :O | | Sunday, June 7th, 2009 | | 12:20 pm |
Last minute FORUM MOVING NEEDS HELP reminder
The Forum is doing another move right now. They're going from Harriman Hall to the Old Union, in case you've been hiding under a pile of tribbles all this time. They can move stuff to the new room until 4pm, after which time they'll be boxing anything that remains unboxed. If you go, free hugs. If you bring cardboard boxes, which are lacking, we will have to invent some sort of something that is superior to the hug, but I am skeptical of such a creature. | | Friday, June 5th, 2009 | | 4:24 pm |
Party
I'm going to Amityville for a party tonight. I think I'm bringing the weiners and nuts. Should be nice and relaxing. Tomorrow night, I will be going to the Forest Rave. I'll be all done up in my steampunk outfit (well, the lite version, at least, without the long sleeves!) and with my steampunk hoop and a bunch of stuff that will light me up and make pointless the periodness of my garb. Sunday is the Forum Move Redux. Lots of boxes to move from one place to another, hopefully some follow-up boxing if they can manage to find some more boxes. I'm getting set up for NYIT. They need me to prove that I've taken the equivalent of their "Programming II" course, because the transcript from Stony Brook is too vague for them. I just forwarded an email from USB's CS department containing a scan with a description of the "Software Engineering II" class. Hopefully, this will prevent them from making me spend two thousand dollars on a class I shouldn't need to retake. Anyway, I'll shortly be sending them the $500 deposit they require to finalize my gradstudentness. :D Current Mood: good | | Thursday, June 4th, 2009 | | 3:36 pm |
√♣
I just was telling scienceboss about me getting into grad school, and I idly mentioned that I had a bad first year in college (leading to an overall GPA lower than NYIT's grad program requirement, which had caused me worries). He asked me if I was "a member of the square club". Interesting stuff. He meant the same thing that my Stony Brook contemporaries meant when they so often said "square root club". Apparently, the term is much larger than my circle of friends. Of course, he's a sciency person who went to Stony Brook, so maybe it's limited to a one-mile radius or something. :D BTW, I logged into my NYIT account for the first time. ^_^ [Edit: The term is apparently just really popular across many nerdy universities] | | Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 | | 6:22 pm |
Oh, hello there!
I got an envelope in the mail from NYIT. It has the words "YOU'RE ACCEPTED!" on the front. Inside, it says I'm conditionally accepted as long as I meet the criteria in the other sheet and then give them money in two weeks. The other sheet is a standard form with checkboxes for criteria to be met, but all of them (including the GRE box!) are unchecked with the exception of "must take these classes", which is checked, but none of the classes are checked. I'll have to see about that. But I think I won. This is a good day. I also made my first hula hoop ever. It's all taped up, even! I have only to spray paint it metallic gold for use with my steampunky outfit. | | Sunday, May 31st, 2009 | | 1:08 pm |
Mum cancelled tea this afternoon, so I am heading out to Stony Brook to help with the Forum move, yaaaaaay! | | Saturday, May 30th, 2009 | | 12:27 pm |
I went to a trapeze show and took many photos. The trapeze stuff was great, but the photos did not come out so well. I have many clearish-white circles that appear in different places in each picture. Now, my camera is broken -- nearly an entire pen worth of ink spilled into it a month ago, and despite my best efforts, a lot of it failed to come out. It slowly made its way through the camera, and three months later it knocked out the functionality of one button and -- a few days after that -- killed the LCD screen. The button is the one that toggles (or "would toggle") the Macrophotography mode. And I had a few days between the button breaking and the screen breaking to notice that this mode is permanently activated. From the looks of it, my camera is picking up tiny flash-illuminated dust particles floating near (though not on, since they're always in different places in the picture) the lens. In a few pictures, the dust is strong enough that the camera manages to focus on it and not the subjects of the photograph, but this is fortunately rare. So I can take outdoor pictures or any picture not requiring flash. I can take indoor photos, but only when the air is reasonably clear. I guess this circus tent area had a lot of flotsam and jetsam in the air. I think I'm going to have to spring for another camera, probably before ConnectiCon (FIGMENT, a really cool upcoming event, I'll take my chances with). Does anybody have some good suggestions for a good quality camera that runs about a hundred dollars or less? I take my photographs at 3MP, so I don't really need insano resolution, though all my cameras have been 7MP or over, "just in case". Video with sound is preferred. Oh, and I like using SD cards, though I will stoop to something using Memory Stick, because that's what the camera I have now uses. Okay, I'm going to a nerdy picnic now! Call me up if you're in the southeastern Nassau area and want to crash. There will likely be meat and/or chips. This is in the Bethpage State Park, btw. | | Friday, May 29th, 2009 | | 12:30 pm |
Ooh, there's a free trapeze show being put on by Trapeze School New York tonight, so if you're in the area, this could be a really fun way to kill time! 518 W. 30th Street 8:15pm to 10:30pm Free | | Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 | | 10:42 am |
Why?
Why? WHY? WHY‽ Why would you make your program reside in a subdirectory of "/usr/local/bin"? Why? This makes no sense. It's what "opt" is for. Seriously, conforming to a basic file hierarchy standard that's been generally stable for TWO DECADES is the simplest level of professionalism in computer science. You don't see programs in Windows installing themselves onto "C:\" or "C:\Windows", do you? (you do; I seethe at them, too) (btw, just so I don't seem like a hunnert percent of the time grouch, the Mp3 experiment was really, really awesome, I got in a festive eleven-plus miles of random walking done that day, and I also snuck off to a nice barbecue with surprise unannounced spicy dogs; perhaps I will post more in depth about all that, but you can see photos for now if you sneak onto my facebook account) Current Mood:  angry | | Monday, May 25th, 2009 | | 1:37 pm |
I almost forgot that today is towel day. |
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