I hate photography (classes)

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I swear, every time we have a portrait crit or I get a segment grade back, a little part of me dies and I just want to never touch a camera again, at least in an academic sense.
I mean, if I suck so much, what’s the point of even trying? I’d rather be photographing and printing because I enjoy it (and oh god, I used to enjoy it so much).
I wonder if I should drop portrait. The class is killing my love of photography, and stomping every bit of enjoyment I get out of it into the ground, and then stampeding over it with a herd of deer, and then running it over with a steamroller. I technically have all the requirements for my photo minor already. It’s just that I always feel bad dropping a class, even if it’s a class I absolutely late (read: graphics last semester). I’d rather just stick with it until the end. The unfortunate thing is I don’t know if my QPA can afford the hit it’ll take from staying in the class (especially given Networks and Graph Theory this semester, neither of which is going well). Just have to work hard to make sure my other two classes are A’s.
Blaahhhhh.
To be fair, I don’t completely disagree with the grade I got on this assignment (I do think I could have done a better job)… what gets me is the lack of feedback and the fact that I tried really, really hard for this assignment (probably the most work I’ve done for any single photo assignment ever)… and that I was actually *happy* with my work (then again, I’m usually happy with my work, but it apparently sucks anyway).
I wish I knew how to fix my portraiture.
Someone tell me how to fix my portraiture.
Am I bad at framing? Am I a bad judge of lighting or angle? Do I just print horribly? Is my artistic sense just screwed up beyond repair? How the hell am I supposed to improve if I’m never told anything beyond, “Crop your prints better,” and, “These suck, do better.”?

Yeeeah, I think that ruined my mood for today. To think I was all happy this morning upon waking up too.

Today is clustaring, working on my webapps project (which I actually enjoy doing, and am apparently good at given that I’ve gotten 100% on every webapps assignment so far) and dinner with Alisa (yay all-you-can-eat pasta). Then, tonight, there is a campfire of yummyness.

No picture. I can’t stand to look at my camera or any photos right now. Hopefully I’ll be up for piccaring again by tonight (because campfire shots are always fun).

I did, however, download 6 CDs worth of new music from eMusic today. A bunch of great stuff, and a little not-so-good stuff, but meh… it was only $20, so I don’t feel bad about it. Yay for cheap, legal, DRM-free music that doesn’t support the greedy RIAA assholes. You should get some too, especially since March is the Boycott-RIAA month.

…
…
Wow, I feel really, really, really shitty now.
God dammit.

Foo

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Break has been full of awesome so far.
I got our networks routing daemon (mostly) working the other day (with only one late day). The thing I spent 4 hours debugging manefested itself as 3 or 4 different bugs in different parts of code, depending on how I ran it and what the network topology looked like. I finally traced it back into the tree-generation algorithm, in which I found the error….
A loop inside a loop, where I had mistyped the “j” as an “i”.
Don’t you hate it when you do that?

In any case, yesterday was full of awesome gameness with Tim, Mars, Dan, and Ian after an amazing dinner with Christina and some exploring with Ben. Today was full of piccaring with Greg and matthewj, followed by games with Alisa, rlambert, damo, Alex, and Brian. Whee. I’m also managing to get a lot done for CMU Adventures.
Yay for breaks?

Piccars:

He’s got branches growing out of his head. I can’t decide whether I like it or if it detracts from the image. It’s less distracting in the full version because of the depth of field though. Meh.

Teh matthewj photographs well.

Whee photos!

Ah, break

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This past week has been the busiest ever in my 3-years thus far at CMU. The bulk of it has been my networks project 2. Including the night I spent coding until 10 AM (from around 4 PM the previous day, with a couple hours of photography and other stuff around 10 PM), my partner and I have probably put in well over 30 hours of coding for this assignment. The best part? It’s still not done. I’m going to wake up early tomorrow and to my best to get it working completely (which may or may not happen) and use a late day.
Wheee.
So yeah, I’ve basically been doing nothing but coding today since 9 AM, which seems to have been the story of my life for the past 3 days (wake up, go to class, code until dinner, go to eat, code until bedtime, repeat).
For networks, I more or less rewrote the entire routing daemon from scratch, because it was the preferable alternative to trying to restructure our existing code to be more correct.
For web apps, did a little bit more with CMU Adventures… mostly backend work.

Apparently, my webhost upgraded PHP or changed around some settings today, because I came home to find my site completely broken. Keep in mind that most of my site was written by me back when I was teaching myself PHP (with some tips from B’man), and so was written before I knew about the $_POST, $_GET, and $_REQUEST variables. My host had previously had these arrays set to be automatically exposed, and all of my code was written for that. They switched it on me today, and so I had to go in and fix almost every script on my site (many probably still don’t work). Whee.

Besides that, there was a “ZMONGZ SPRING BREAK!” party with Tim/Tim/Apphia/Ian/Mars/Dan/Keith tonight. There was ice cream and games and it was awesome and happy.

Been spending a lot of time in the darkroom lately, developing film and printing. I’ve mostly been doing photography for myself lately, more than for class (because god knows I’m sure as hell not enjoying the class). I eventually want to assemble a book of cluster photographs, starting with my final project for color photo last year (which you can see in art), and adding in more of my work from this year (mostly black and white film, but a couple digitals).

This is the first picture I have of everyone in “The group”… and I had to be blah and stand in front of Mars and Dan.
Meh.
Whatever.

Um yeah.
Oh god busy week :(
At least it’s almost over. One more day of coding and then I’m free…
…
Free to start… coding… other… things…
…
But meh, I want to code my webapps project, so that’s a good thing.

Edit: In case you’re the geeky type and interested in this kind of stuff, like me…. here is more info about the global registration of variables that got disabled.

Busy, busy, busy

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Let’s start off on a good note…
I played lots of ITG today.

This makes me very happy (my first ever double star).

Academic things are slightly less good…

Worked a ton on our Networks project today. It is now 3:30 AM and I’m still coding. I probably won’t get to sleep tonight. Meh. I keep feeling bad, like Mike is doing all the work and I’m just writing bad stuff that he has to go back and fix later. I dunno.
I did write various tree-construction functions though (with Dijkstra’s, which is a pain to implement in C, especially when your graph is implemented as a linked list of nodes with ints of destination ids), and I suppose they work, but coding past midnight is probably never good for writing sane code.
Note to self: start the next project sooner, dammit.
I also need to finish up graph theory homework (a rather difficult set) and develop the two rolls of film I shot today. All of this must be done tomorrow (networks is due Thursday, graph theory and film are due Monday).

On top of that, Casino Royale at McConomy was cancelled today. ‘Tis a shame… I was looking forward to it too. At least there was still a bunch of yummy free food at the UC.

Backtracking a bit, I shot flashlight portraits of Alisa and Valerie today in the studio. The digitals came out decently (could’ve been better), but I don’t know how the film came out yet (I have to develop it; see above). Alisa and Val are awesome subjects, and have good suggestions too.


Lots of other stuff has happened since the last post that I’ve wanted to post about, but I can’t seem to remember any of it right now except that my new (awesome) flip phone is here and it makes me happy. It replaces my old phone (alluded to in the previous entry), which was awesome but too small, which was inconvenient for loud rooms (since my mouth was 4 inches away from the bottom of the phone). Whee.
You should poke me for the number, if interested.

There was a Pittsburgh job fair logical yesterday. I went. Not many people seemed interested in me, as usual. Meh. I feel like I have so much potential as a potential intern…. I wish companies would give me a chance. This doesn’t bode well for my getting a job after graduation in under a year.

Back to coding…

Power Plant

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Whee…. lots of stuff happened today.

First of all, I got my cell phone. I don’t know my number yet (I will get a number assigned when I activate it), so suggestions as to whether I should get a Pittsburgh or a Phoenix area code are happily considered (I’m leaning toward a 412 number right now).

Second, I got the login and registration portion of my final project for webapps (as written about in last night’s post) working and debugged. It uses email authentication to activate accounts as not to fill the database with spammed accounts, and it also has challenges to verify human registration. Whee. I can start writing the actual content for it now.

Third, and best of all, I just spent the past 5 hours touring a coal power plant courtesy of Ben’s associate Kevin. There will soon be pictures up in photos (yes, first update in a while, I know). It was by far one of the most awesome things ever (and I have a piece of coal schlag from it too).
Here’s a teaser image until I get the rest up (which I will do before I go to bed)… This is actually looking into the main reactor where coal is burned to produce the steam. We got to look in (safe due to the difference in pressure, causing air to rush in rather than out, even though it’s over 4000 degrees inside) and see the coal streams and everything.

Only downside is that my eyes now are watery and I’m coughing a bit from all the coal dust I absorbed throughout the tour. Whee. So worth it though.

Fourth was that today was the Dean’s List dinner. I got my Klaus pin and had lots of yummy food. Not much to report about that, of course… whee.