Category Archives: Photography

Mrrr

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The human need for companionship and interaction is stupid. People are overrated.
Solitude makes me feel comfortable. This is a good thing.

Um… I’ve been shooting film with my new camera. I really like it… it’s nicer to use than my old AE-1 (which is currently out of batteries anyway), even if the film is harder to load… and it has a flash, which is a definite plus. I have 15 more rolls of film. It’s going to be expensive to develop it all. Meh. Stupid not-being-able-to-develop-color-film-at-CMU.

I really like this song (Wonderchild by Adam Pascal). I think I’m going to buy his CDs next month when my budget clears up.

I’m feeling like I’m behind on homework, even though two of the things I’m freaking out about were assigned only yesterday, and I have a pretty good idea of how to do my graphics program (due Thursday), and I have about 1/10 of my algo homework left (due Tuesday). Still, I should work harder. I slack too much. There’s no reason that graphics should not already be finished. Algo should have been done last weekend. Bleh.

I have my finals on the first Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday this semester (three on Thursday and Friday… ewww). This means I could potentially go home that weekend. I’m debating whether I actually want to leave then, or if I want to go home as late as possible. I don’t know. I like it so much better here, but going home means I get to see my parents.

Red Robot vs. the Vermillion mascot (whose name I forget because I am a bad person… Akari Vermillion?) at the activities fair yesterday.

That reminds me… I should post pictures of the activities fair. I have them batched and everything, I just need to upload. I should do that, shouldn’t I? Meh.

Updates

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Meh, using the same post title for every entry is good in that I don’t have to think very hard, but I imagine it’ll make posts hard to find in the future. Then again, my titles are never very descriptive anyway, so what does it matter?

This weekend has been full of homework. Like, omg, I didn’t know I could have so much homework… and it’s only the first week. Slowly working away at them… I need to start the graphics assignment today and go to office hours for algo tomorrow. Still need to finish numerical methods (which was supposed to be the easiest one…) and algo. Also, once my film arrives, I need to shoot a couple rolls in varying light to see how colors change.

Went to see SoaP yesterday with Everett. Surprisingly, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. In fact, if it wasn’t for the name, I’d be temped to call it a decent movie.
Now they just need the trilogy… BoaT (Bears on a Train) and HoaC (Hamsters on a Car)… despite the fact that the last one doesn’t make a word, and that they’d have to be rabid hamsters.

Bagelfish sandwich! :D

Last night was lots of puyo fun with people, pizza, and brownies. Then I felt antisocial and came and holled myself up in my room with algo.

Whee life is good :)

Updates

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Time and time again, you discover that it isn’t the subject matter that makes a class good or bad, it’s the professor.

In high school, I hated history, but I loved Ms. Pullen’s history classes. Same thing with Intro World History here with Donna Harsch. In high school, I loved chemistry, but hated Mr. Petkus’ chem class. Here, I hate physics, but I loved my experimental physics class.

This semester, I was looking forward to numerical methods… the subject matter seemed interesting and everything. Now that I’ve been to two classes, I can’t help but feel disappointed. I mean, so maybe it’s just the beginning of the class and it’s too early to judge, and maybe she hasn’t taught the class before, so whatever. I just know I’m disappointed thus far.

Likewise, I was dreading my analysis class, but now that I’m in it, I’m loving it. The professor is amazing and whee! Also, the section I switched into (because the professor asked people to, if possible) has something like 10 people in it. Amazing!

But yeah, today’s alt. photo class was amazing. We shot 4 X 5 film, and took polaroids to test the exposure metering and such. 4 X 5 cameras are a pain to use though… I don’t know how fond I am of them.

Less than three, OMG
I love alt photography
Polaroids they shot of me
LOLOL

Memories

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I’ve spent the past ~6 hours going through stuff on my hard drive. There’s things on there from my very first webpage (back in 4th grade) to my first VB programs (4th grade) to my first Java programs (6th grade) to various LPSO board stuff to every photo I’ve ever taken to a bunch of Games Factory games I made with Jim in middle school.

As I read through the various archived forum pages and chat logs, it occurs to me how horribly arrogant and self-righteous I was then. I acted like an ass to so much of the LPSO community, and for that I apologize. In chats, I was intrusive and annoying (hopefully I’m not as bad now… hopefully). Bleh. I hate who I was back then. Stupid stupid stupid.

I look over my old websites and I realize how horribly devoid of content they were. Sure, they featured interesting layouts and advertised themselves as “Fanfics, forums, and much much more,” but there really wasn’t “much more” than that. I think that’s one thing I’m proud of in AlanvDotOrg… it actually has content. Design is important, sure, but it comes second to content. Back in my early web design years, I seem to have forgotten that and used and reused the same old tired layouts as many times as I could just to have many pages up, even if those pages had only a “Coming soon” sign on them.

I was so full of myself… things were created under the assumption that everyone was interested in me… that my site was the one that everyone wanted to come to. I had password protected pages. I had exclusive members-only content. I put together tons of web games and quizzes. I had a page to give out awards to other websites. Meh.

I also stumbed across my first website ever. It’s an animorphs fansite with stuff copied directly from the official site and random animated web graphics. I was a little confused until I remembered it was before I knew to use “index.html” as the splash… so the index is “t1.html”. Odd, but meh. I should upload it sometime in case people are interested… it’s 1.2MB, but only because it contains WAV files.

So yeah, it’s highly amusing to go back and look through my old webpages. I just realized I have screens of them here. Heh. They evolved so much.

Looking over old photos, I’ve really changed.
Here’s me from Halloween 2000 with my Sonic pumpkin

Here’s me from before we even had a digital camera, at my birthday party (probably 5th grade) with Kat, Katie, and Jim

Oh, and me with my 6th grade homeroom class

My photography has also changed a lot… I guess you could say it’s matured. Interesting.
In any case, my folder containing almost every photo I’ve ever taken is now 47.2GB (94,872 photos) and growing weekly.
…
That’s a hell of a lot of photos.
I wonder if I can break 100,000 before December.

Looked over my massive archive of game screenshots from back when I loved posting screens of video games online. There’s over 1.5 GB of horrible-quality 640X480px screenshots from SoAL, Sonic Adventure 2, Animal Crossing, PSO, Grandia 2, Evolution 1/2, Starfox Adventures, SSBM, and Super Mario Sunshine. So much random crap in there. I really should get back into video games… I kinda miss them sometimes. I should also get my video capture card working again. Meh.

Looked over my archive of card games, from the failed games to my first “successful” one, the Starcraft TCG (although the definition of “successful” is debatable). So much potential. I still want to create RPG Get! I think they’re the best set of card game rules I’ve ever created, and the system is expandable such that it can encompass potentially-limitless numbers of RPGs in the game as seperate affiliations. Meh. One of these days I’ll get around to taking more screenshots of the games so I can have enough stuff to create the base set (which I think was supposed to be themed around Grandia 2 and Skies of Arcadia). Whee.

Ahhh so much more I want to write about, but it’s almost 2 AM, so I should probably sleep.

Edit: Meh, it’s 2:30. I’ve uploaded some (more) old pictures onto Facebook. Go and look. Whee.

More feelings?

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Hmm… yeah so, over the last few days, my mood has been continuously improving. All of today, I’ve felt a lot better than I have in a while…
It’s strange, this is the first time since high school when I’ve really felt good about myself… confident in what I do… it actually feels like I’m good enough, for once. Despite work kinda sucking still, I’m feeling more and more confident that I can do it.
And that’s a really good place to be, being completely happy with yourself.

I’ve also been doing a lot of creative photography lately (as I’ve mentioned in my previous posts).
Blurry tree with leaves in foreground

Greg

Oh god playing with depth of field makes me spontaneously orgasm whee!
I don’t know, I’m personally a huge fan of a lot of these pictures (they do look a lot better larger though).
Photography makes me happy. Part of me really wishes I had been a photo major. The other (bigger) part is glad that I’m a CS major.

Workwise, things are going okay. I’ve gotten the primary tokenizer and classifier working… it works on simple things like “How far did she drive if she drove for 5 hours?” and “If she made $50, how long did she work?” Going to need to mess around more with MinorThird to get it working on more complicated things. Spent a lot of time today getting the tokenizer to tokenize things like “how many students got As and Bs” into “how many LABEL2″… figured out an algorithm to do so yesterday on the bus ride home, and implemented it today, and it seems to be working. My only worry is that its runtime is exponential to the length of the input substrings plus linear to the input label sizes… I think
O(2^n + m) == O(2^n) BLEH
Luckily, the input substrings will never be very long, but still. I should definetly find a way to optimize that after I have stuff working better.

Meh. I’m really considering starting a page for my more artsy photography. There’s a lot of it that I’d love to share in a bigger size (the ones I post in this journal are just too tiny to be effective) and such. I should later sometime or something.

I am also the proud new owner of $25 worth of iTunes downloads of Kelly Clarkson’s “Walk Away” and “Because of You” remixes, and Carrie Underwood’s AOL Live session downloads (see today’s “Listening to”). See, we get a lot of money each week for food from my job… about twice as much as I could possibly eat in a week. It’s also in plaid cash. Geagle takes plaid cash. Geagle sells gift cards. I think I win.
Last week I bought a $70 jacket from the CMU bookstore (using my “food money”) because I really needed a jacket (and it’s a really nice one; I’m glad I bought it). Whee. I also bought really good conditioner and shampoo (like, the expensive kind that I wouldn’t normally buy for myself). It’s kinda nice.
So I guess then this money pays for entertainment and necessities for me as well as for food. Whee.

So yeah, life is good right now.