Final Damage Report

OK, no real damage actually. Lowest grade was a B (probably my highest low grade of any semester besides last fall) and my two grades I was worried about dropping to B+'s both stayed at A- so that means I made Deans list again. WOOT! Since switching my major at the start of my 2nd year, I've made deans/presidents list all but this past spring. Still amazing how changing your major will do that (and by that I mean "turn some dumb kid into someone who, by grades alone, seems to know what the hell they're doing"). Now we'll just have to see what I can muster in spring. It would be nice to end on Presidents list with all A's.

Oh yeah. . .Half Life 2

Totally forgot. I finished Half Life 2 on Saturday morning after I woke up. I finished the game in a little over 2 weeks (probably did about half the game on Thursday,Friday,Saturday). Thats gotta be record time for me. I usually play through games really slow (it took me almost 3 months to get through Doom 3) but Half Life 2 drew me in so much. It is an amazing game and definately deserves all of the credit in the world. To me, Doom 3 is still a better GOTY candidate but I know that it can't really compete with HL2 in that category. Everyone saw Doom as merely eye candy with a really crappy story and horrible AI. After playing through HL2, I dont think the story is all that much better than Doom. And for AI, yeah, Doom did kind of lack (come on, seriously, a HellKnight just isn't going to move as fast as a friggin human). Of course I could just say "Well, they are demons after all. . ." but thats just sort of pussy-footing around the issue. Graphics/game engine is where I think people should really look at more. Yeah, HL2 has real life physics. But you know what, so does Doom 3. I shoot a light. . .it swings or bursts. I hit a box. . .it flies off the shelf. I get the crap knocked out of me by a Pinky. . .I fly back a few feet and get shaken up. And then there's the lighting and sound effects. Sorry, Doom 3 totally wins in best new game engine in my book. I can't wait until that engine starts getting used in more mods and becomes less of a beast so it can run on my computer at a good 60fps.

So, in conclusion. . .finished HL2. . .awesome game. . .played through it fast (for me). . .Doom 3 is better overall. The end.

Done done and done

As of 7pm tonight I officially have no more business left to do for the fall semester of my senior year (besides check for my grades every 5 minutes). I am quite amazed I pulled off all of that work I listed in my previous post in less than 2 weeks. Guess the senior slack didnt really kick in all that much.

Today was kind of good and bad. Good because I'm done and I'm happy with my grades that have been posted (a B in programming, my highest grade in any CS programming class. . .and a B+ in digital art, thanks to an A- on my final project and a 100 on the take home final test). Don't ask me how the hell I got an A- on my final project. I did all the work the day before and was up until 2am finishing putting it all into Flash. Oh well, Mike pretty much crapped on everyones work all semester so I'll accept the A- and forgive him a little bit.

For the bad: my two classes with Megan. I'm a CIS major so I should tend to do well in those classes, right? I mean, my overal major GPA is something insane like 3.8 or higher. However, for my two classes with Megan this semester, I'm not going to be surprised if I get B+'s in both classes. Today, both classes had projects (and database also had an in-class test, at 8-friggin-AM). Well, for database, everything was good for the project up until I couldnt get half of the SQL SELECT statements to work as they should. I was working on them for probably close to 4 hours yesterday (which happens to be a long time to look at snippets of code that shouldnt be more than 10 lines long). Eventually I got to the point where I sort of just threw some stuff together that sort of answered the reverse of the question and just hope that I get some credit for it. All that working didnt give me any time to really prepare for the in-class test part so I just kind of winged that (when I was half asleep). For the other class, we had 3 features to implement in our Wine Store Website. First was to add a Tips page which was easy (no dynamic Cold Fusion schtuff). Second was to add an age checker to the website (again, no big deal, simple Cold Fusion). Last was to add a feature that would let a user change their password. Here's where the shit hit the fan. I created a page that would allow you to enter your old password and new password and got it to pass those values to another page that would check and make sure your old password matches your current one (for security) and if it did, it would replace it with the new password. However, I was not able to figure out how to make it do that for the specific user that was trying to do this. It would change every persons password in the database to whatever the new password is. I knew exactly what I had to do and I probably tried about 10 ways to do it, but it just would not work.

I hate not handing in things that don't work. As much as I want good grades, I'd almost rather get a C on something that just doesnt work. Least then I'd know I had messed up. Arg. Nothing else I can do now I suppose. I'll let myself be consoled by video games and sleep for the next few days I guess. I'll write more after all my grades are in.