I, Curtis

Today has been one big puddle of emotions, reactions and moods. This will be quite an adventure for my loyal readers, so either grab on to something stable or grab a pillow.
Lets start with yesterday at 4:30PM when I was enroute to UNCC and the first sign of weirdness occured. It was a perfectly nice day to be driving to UNCC, everything was on schedule and everything was ok with my day (can you not see the horror story plot building here?). I had visual contact with the campus from my position on highway 49 and was waiting at the last stop light before the campus entrance. As I slowed down for the stop my vehicle began a slight shaking and then decided to die all together as soon as it was at a full stop. Me being the incredibly bright person that I am tried to go from dead (switch in on posotion) to restarting the vehicle, this didn’t work as it only reactivated the electrical system. Once I discovered that the vehicle really wanted to be off for a second, I shut it down and then performed ignition again. Vehicle resumed as if nothing had gone wrong. I continued to campus, entered successfully and then notified both parents of the possible issue with my vehicle. I started that evening out already nervous about possible issues with my vehicle. I went to class (Western History and Culture: Masterpieces of Western Art) for 3 hours. I was bored out of my mind most of the time with Mr. Frakes’s analysis of the pieces we were looking at. One of the pieces we were looking at was the sculpture, “David”. While we were on this subject there was an image of “David” on the projector. I counted five seperate times that Mr. Frakes pointed to David’s penis. I would consider this abnormal behavior for an art instructor. Eventually time for the course was up. I was in a non-excited but not depressed mood as I exited the class. I returned to my vehicle not sure what to expect: perfect startup, perfect run all the way home (I was going at a fairly rapid pace, so it was a run for the vehicle).
My evening didn’t conclude there, I arrived home and began just generally staring into space because I felt like it. At some point Chris requested a call, I made the call and then noticed that I had Logic homework to do. At some point the Logic homework became a group effort as I started reading the questions out loud. Chris is a very logical person and can follow the patterns without any formal logic instruction. I learned 2 things from the experience: 1. Logic is more fun with a partner, 2. Chris hates logic, even though he is great at it. The evening ended a few hours after the homework was finished when I became tired and Chris became non-talkative.
Today began at 10:00AM for me. I awake to an alarm sounding and my television activating. Once I was awake I ate breakfast, began getting dressed and prepared myself for the day. About the time I was ready to leave I heard my car starting and moving out of the driveway, my father decided to steal my car! My father returned about 15 minutes later, but instead of wasting time yelling at him I decided to not waste time conveying messages to the deaf, ignorant, yankee ears. I proceded on to UNCC, vehicle operated normally with the exception of an unusual smell when I parked.
The first order on the agenda of the day was the Psychology study at 11:30. I was on time for the study, amazingly. There were only 2 participants in the session I attended. The study was survey based, a 50 item survey about a stressful event. The event I used was me taking the Microsoft 70-220 certification exam, the only exam that I failed. The study coordinator was pretty cute, she was also very nice and made an attempt to make study participants feel comfortable. The only thing I have to complain about with her is the way she handled debriefing. Debriefing consisted of a 1″ x 8.5″ piece of paper, for this study it was ok, but for something more in depth i would expect an actual defriefing session before being released.
Once the wonderful little study was over with I hauled myself to the other end of the quadrant of the campus to McEniry for Deductive Logic. We reviewed stuff, we turned in homework, we reviewed some more, we heard jokes about Mr. Dr. Presler, we were dismissed. Physics was a little odd today, I took my new seat today beside Ryan. The Clickers now work with the devices (w00000t!). One of the odd things of the class was related to my new placement in the room. I could see better and it was nice to actually not be right in front of Dr. Naeini, but the back-of-the-room-disturbance-people were right behind me. Some people shouldn’t even attend class, they should just stay in their happy little worlds of their percieved perfections and not attmept to interact with people who are different than them. Dr. Naeini is a perfectly nice guy, but for some reason a lot of students feel the need to insult him, disrupt his class and constantly giggle (im thinking the 2 rows behind my seat may actually be the pot-smoking group). The physics class itself went well, there was some knowledge obtained, but towards the end i found myself not able to follow what Dr. Naeini was doing and gave up on the rest of my notes for the day. Once physics concluded I went out of Burson and headed toward Barnard like I always do. I got caught in a cloud of smoke as many students exiting the building began to “light up” for their post-class smoke. I don’t know that I have ever been as disgusted with smokers as I was today (combination of circumstance and mood I suppose).
I manged to breath long enough to make my way to the clear air of Barnard Computer Commons and took care of neccesary (one day i need to learn to spell that word) administrative issues, such as entering grades from my Logic class as well as entering the homework for the course. After those issues were out of the way I handled my standard email stuff on my 3 normal domains for mail checking during the day – curtis.kularski.net, uncc.edu and now gmail.com. Two of my accounts (uncc and g) are by webmail only, I am not finding this to be horribly annoying because it means i have to check 3 seperate webmail servers instead of just having CMK4’s IMail installation retrieve it at logon. After I finished checking email I spent a few minutes looking at GITI from a truely end-user perspective and found a lot of things that needed to be done to it. There is such a huge difference in using GITI at home where I can call the source code at a moments notice and being on-campus where I can’t easily make code changes on a whim. Maybe this is what makes GITI so problematic, I edit without much thought. I found a bug today in my new navigation bar for Education module components, if I submit a form I am taken to my scripts folder, and the links attempt to call the files based on that, this doesn’t work as the files it needs are in the modules folder, not the scripts folder. This should be a simple fix though.
When the time arrived for me to leave Barnard I proceded on to my English 1102 course. We recieved back our drafts of our papers today. I have been told I did better than most people, even though Betsy wrote about the same amount on my paper as I did. The woman worries me sometimes. I will be revising the paper over the weekend and preparing draft #3 for Monday and then Tuesday I will work on the final copy for Wednesday’s class. We were told to exchange copies of draft #2 with people around us for our peer review stuff. I have 2 decent papers I will be reviewing. I pray for the mental stability of the two unfortunate souls who have ended up with my paper. I am way too technical in it and it is enough to make anyone’s head spin. English was dismissed about 20 minutes early. I came home, ate dinner and have pretty much been sitting here since I got home. I am thinking about working on GITI at least some tonight.
Next week I have a tests in Logic and Abnormal Psyc. The week after I have tests in Physics, and WH&C:MOWA. Anyone who interacts with me should take this as fair warning.
As requested, I am posting GITI screen shots for public viewing. Once they are ready they will be at http://curtis.kularski.net/GITI/v1 for current version (stable) and http://curtis.kularski.net/GITI/v2 for the development project. Development is highly volitile and is totally theoretical at this point.
Current Music: Leann Rimes – Life Goes On (mp3, local\e:\my_music)
In the Queue: Eiffel 65 – Now is Foreever; Europe – Final Countdown
No witty conclusion, just me. Bye Yall!

Today was about as uninteresting as days at UNCC get for me. I was exactly on schedule this morning (in my carefully timed world I can only do this occasionally without being totally screwed), I had no seconds to spare, but at the same time was in no danger of being late. I was in sight of McEniry when I here this familar voice beside me talking on a cell phone. The voice was Elizibeth Park, a friend of mine from Highland. I poked her in the arm and went on, she concluded her cell phone call and chased me down. I don’t know that a more convienient plot could have been written for her. She needed help preparing for her Unix Proficiency Exam, and there I was. The time it took me to talk to her cost me my schedule, but no big deal. I agreed to help her after my Physics class. I then went to Logic where Dr. Preseler was just starting to unpack her materials. After Logic I went to Physics. In Physics we made an attempt to use the Clicker devices (little green remotes for responding to questions). The attempt failed and Dr. Naeini assures us that he will have them working on Wednesday. After Physics I met Elizibeth at Smith Building to assist her with the preperation for the proficiency exam. The Unix lab was pretty much empty except for a few students. I was expecting purely command line functionality but was pleased that there was an interface availible. I don’t know nearly enough Unix. My function with Elizibeth was mostly as a support role to help her be calm through the material. She is very intelligent, but stresses easily. I helped Elizibeth until 3PM when I went to English. Not much to tell about English for today, we peer reviewed papers and were complemented for being an efficient group, then we were dismissed about 45 minutes early. For homework and stuff I just have to do some logic homework that combines the concepts of the past 2 weeks, Physics has the standard homework due Monday and an English paper is to be completed and ready to turn in as a 2nd draft quality document on Wednesday. Final is due on Monday. None of my other classes really have any outside assignments to be done. I’m a little worried about Western History and Culture, I feel so disconnected from the class.
This evening my focus has been on working with GITI and attempting to develop a better interface for it. That isn’t going too well, and so far I have created more new bugs in GITI than ever before. Most of the problems are related to sessions. For some reason the thing attempts to make multiple sessions or at least multiple copies of the same session run at once. Issues occur mostly in going back in pages. Forward linear navigation works fine. The concept of the new GITI will be tested in a few days as it becomes functional and maybe useful. The next step will be to build a navigation system that doesn’t run in frames and that can float over the interface. I am seeing something in DHTML or JS. For the most part I just want the thing to work and be more efficient than the current version of GITI.

In high school the most dreaded word was “homework”, in college it is a bit different. Homework is a chance to boost your grade and most classes don’t have homework on any grand level. I just completed my 2nd Physics homework assignment, it was challenging, but at the same time I felt like I was actually learning the material. In addition, it was kinda fun. The most dreaded words in college seem to be “pop quiz”. Dr. Preseler just can’t seem to say it enough though.
As for my non-academic world today. One of my high school friends, Matt Cloninger, gave me one of his GMail invites today and I am now hooked up with that. Not sure what I will use the address and associated space (1000MB) for, but I will find some use im sure. I didn’t get too creative with the address, I went with the default of firstname.lastname. This situation gives me an interesting perspective of my own email server though. I have roughly 80,000MB (80GB) availible for my email in actuallity, but I like the idea of having the 1000 MB reserved just for email on GMail. For more about GMail visit GMail.com.
I talked to Jeff a little today from NCSU, I sort of wish I was going to one of the schools in the NC triad area. Matt Creedmore is at Greensboro College, Jeff and Guy at NCSU, Lamb at Duke. There are a lot of HST people in this area too, but none that I want to be around. This current situation feels like I was in port (graduation), but managed to get on the wrong ship (UNCC) and should be on a ship going to the same location as my closest friends (that would be the good ships UNCG, NCSU, Duke and pretty much anything but UNCC or GC. ). If I remember correctly I wanted to be on this ship (UNCC) because it came with familiar quarters (my bedroom, server room and kitchen). I think I want some adventure in my life, I want to be away from all things safe, normal and familar for once in my life. I plan to apply to some of the other schools (including MIT and UC Berkeley) to test viability of my options at this point. I also will be applying for scholarships so I can have more flexibility in my educational options. I would love to go to University of California at Berkeley, it would be fulfilling a dream of mine. Perhaps I will do something that drastic for my graduate school career. My vision of my life is always focused on a single goal that I consider significant, my previous goal of this position was actually going to UNCC. Thats been accomplished, and as such leaves a vacancy for something that needs accomplishing in the academic slot. I am currently working on my fall-back goal of getting GITI completed, but that is a lower priority project that can be extended to being incomplete even if i work on it several hours per day, everyday until my death (lets theorize i will live until like 105 or so). Its nice having a fallback project, but its like having a life goal of making first contact with an alien race, it just isn’t practical. As with most of my hobbies I will one day get bored with GITI and declare it finalized.
Back to academics temporarily, I still have a paper to finish in draft form for English by Monday. It is a technical paper of sorts, so I will babble my way through it and try to not make it to polished on the first run through. I tend to write papers and marry myself to the way something is written to the extent that I would be happy with it being written in stone. If I could do that with GITI code we would be making progress. I am looking forward to some of the next papers in the course where we can get really detailed. I anticipate great amounts of fun with Microsoft Word.
On my body structuring project I am getting a little farther, I have been working different components of my abs each day (on a 3 day cycle) and my walks are still occuring. I don’t think I will give up this time. I have a goal in mind that I want too badly to do that. If progress becomes substantial then pics will be posted here.
Still no comments to the blog, I guess I will just have to keep writing to myself. My server shows me that some people are grabbing my RSS feed, so i know someone is out there. Come on, readers of my mindless babble, make yourselves known!

Yesterday was a decent day for me, with the exception of Dr. Noland rejecting my requested article for review. I wanted to review an article about the correlation between the stress caused by being male and math performance. Dr. Noland states that the article doesn’t meet the criteria of being relavent to Abnormal Psychology. Oh well, I guess I will try again with anoher article (or battery of articles) next week.
Last night I stayed up until about 7AM today, then I got up at 10:30AM to get started on my day. Suprisingly I had energy, and I have energy now. I anticipate a premature expiration later this evening, but I probably have a few more good hours to go yet.
Today was Friday, so it was my short day. I went to Logic this morning, Dr. Preseler was late and she was also in a very good mood. Almost to the point of being giddy. I have never seen her as disorganized as she was this morning. Disorganization of other people amuses me, while me being disorganized or having anything out of place completely annoys me. Dr. Preseler gave another quiz this morning. She thew out the grades from the first quiz because she felt that it was flawed and wasn’t a good interpretation of what we know. I wish more of my classes we like hers, I at least know where I stand in there. I know that I am doing OK in her class and at the moment have a good chance at coming out of the course with an A. The next course I had today was Physics, same basic thing as always in there today, took some notes, worked some problems. I am not sure how I will do in physics in the end. There are only homework assignments and 3 tests, then the final exam. Physics is highly mathy, but not as complicated as Biology, so im still glad I am taking the course, but my success isn’t gurananteed. I made a decision today about my seat placement in Physics. Ryan (my lab partner) looks extreamly lonely in class, and there is an open seat beside him, so I am thinking about sitting beside him. The seat couldn’t be any worse than my present one, I have one-on-one direct eye contact with Dr. Naeini. I feel like I am in the teacher’s-pet-seat and it is very uncomfortable.
Since I am reviewing my academic progress lets go for the other classes too. Im not sure how im going to do in “Masterpieces of Western Art”/”Western History and Culture”, it seems very lecture driven, which works for me when I am able to pay attention and not be bored. I am not interested in that course that much. Enlgish 1102 is fine. I am grasping the concepts and the grades are all based on papers! That pretty much says “A” to me. I have this weird ability to write in such a way that instructors love. I have always been a more mature writer than most of my peers, for once it makes me not a freak. Betsy and I are getting along fine, she is a nutcase, she knows it and on top of that she is used to technical writing. Abnormal Psyc is the next course. The material of the course will be psychological disorders. I think I will do ok in the class as long as I am able to pay attention, which so far im doing fine at. It is the type of course where I dont feel propelled to take notes. I feel more like just relaxing and listening to what is being said. I am hoping for an A in the course, but with only 4 tests and 5 journals the fates in control of my grades may have other ideas. My lab class is way too early in the day, but overall it is ok. ok, this concludes my academic report.
Today when I finished Physics I exited the campus and came right home. Much to my delight the ugly plastic owl that I got into a fight with last night has been put in the garage and I dont have to look at it. I haven’t done much since I have been home in the way of actual doing of things that need to be done (read as: I didn’t tell GITI I did anything). I have had a large number of phone calls today, none of which were truely personal. Everyone who called seemed to need technical assistance in some form or another. Anyone know how to get a 900 number set up? Nothing hit voice mail today while I was gone, so no calls to return, YIPPEE!
Between taking phone calls I added some minor changes to GITI’s schedule system for how it handles class scheduling with the normal scheduling and I prepped the database table of scheduler to handle multiple occurance types of schedules. I will probably add Class Schedule to it also at some point (merging tables, yes i have a free weekend). the principal aspects of the two schedule systems are virtually the same now that the primary schedule tool will be doing occurance based things. I will still have to add a check and update script to the education scheduler for correcting things after a user has screwed with the dates. Another aspect that will have to be taken care of is the lack of a method for dismissing a reoccuring schedule item. Schedule is the oldest GITI component and it shows it. I am almost tempted to rewrite the whole thing for convienience. With all of the things I am using to reference across the GITI system I might eventually end up having to ask Chris to teach me how to do table joins in SQL. Sometimes I feel so inferior to him. He knows so much more than I ever will about certain things. Of the two of us he is the more likely to be depressed it seems, but yet he is more ambitious than I ever would dream of being. He for some reason is blind to his own accomplishments though. Talented people like him shouldn’t feel the need to be confined by the restrictions of society. Society is “Normal”, or “average” or “[insert favorite euphamism for the middle 68% here]”. People who go above and beyond shouldn’t be restricted to the same rules of normal as the rest of the societal drones. Whats weird is that by my own self assesment I can’t determine where I fit in. As my overall self am I normal or different? Am I below everyone else? I guess these are questions that I can’t validly ask myself.
Norms are very unusual things in the universal context. Humans are supposed to be organized, anything below is unorganized and anything above is a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, why? I myself am starting to worry that I may be approaching being overly organized with all of the stuff I am doing to GITI. I fear breaking GITI because I fear breaking my ability to track events of my life and have every detail scheduled.
Why does no one ever comment in my blog? Does it suck that bad?
I will now return my fine readers to their normal full functioning lives and away from my depressed pit of despair that is my blog….
“Live Long and Prosper” – Wise Vulcan Philosopher