mistypedURL

I preordered The Orange Box over Steam not too long ago and scored five games for $45. Unfortunately I already had two of the five (Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One), but I’m recouping some of my expenditure by passing those two along to Omar for a small fee. He started playing Half-Life 2 last night and I think I’ve managed to get him hooked. Hey, it’s one of the greatest PC first-person shooters of all time, what can I say?

Currently contributing along with homework, studying, and other such nuisances to my not-playing of Bioshock is another one of the Orange Box components: Portal. I was intrigued when I first saw the trailer a while back, and the gameplay has definitely upheld my expectations. It is a puzzle game based around an intriguing concept – imagine being able to directly connect any two planes in space with a portal. Now imagine puzzles based around that ability, where you have to do mind-bending tasks such as jumping down to get enough velocity to travel upwards. It’s a really clever idea and well-executed on the technical level. There are many opportunities to look through one end of a portal and see what is on the other side, which means you can actually chase yourself around if you so wish, or force objects to bounce around in an infinite loop. The player is given many chances to invent clever solutions to the puzzles as many times there is more than one way to reach the goal.

I managed to beat the game in the first few days after its release and reached a very satisfying ending with a priceless song over the ending credits. There is a bit of storyline surrounding the game that ties in with the rest of the Half-Life universe, although exactly how it does so remains unclear. I’m looking forward to starting on Half-Life 2: Episode Two, seeing as I only finished Episode One a month or so ago and the story is still fresh in my mind. Alas, Bioshock, you are destined to remain on the shelf for a while longer.

After several weeks of returning to my room, rudely deserting my appalled roommates and shutting myself away until the wee hours of the morning, only to wake up exhausted the following morning, I have finally finished the Harry Potter book series. Yes, I know, I’m about oh, say, four or five years behind the rest of the world (generously speaking), but I kind of missed out on the whole craze while it was happening and thus never really felt the need to get involved. Only after Rachel checked the first two out of the library on her card, thrust them into my hand, and insisted that I read them, did I give the now-wealthy Rowling a try. The outcome of the experiment has already been made clear – I spend my precious free time over the next several weeks finishing the remaining books one after another like an experienced chain smoker. I’ll admit, they aren’t the most spectacular pieces of literature I’ve ever devoured, but they are pretty darn addictive.

Much to Rachel’s surprise, Harry Potter is not my favorite character of them all – for me Hermione takes that prize. Some of the things he does just strike too close to “little Michael” for me. Plus, Hermione’s the intellectual and that’s certainly a position with which I can identify (darn people always wanting to copy your work…). Anyway, I held out for a long time, but in the end I think the reading was worth it. At the very least I can rejoin the world with a slightly better understanding of popular culture, and enjoy such things as Potter Puppet Pals.

I can’t stand it when I have the perfect idea for something to write here, and then forget it hours later. It’s like the more information I try and cram into my brain, the more stuff falls out the back, forgotten.

At any rate, my day got off to a poor start when I was leaving my fiancée Rachel’s house and noticed that three accidents had occurred, all along 95-S. Her dad helpfully suggested I take an alternate route I had never tried before as a means of bypassing the congestion. However, in my naivete I first went the wrong direction on 40, then the wrong direction on 695, with the end result being that I still ended up sitting in different traffic, the whole excursion took two hours and fifteen minutes instead of the normal, non-accident time of approximately 45 minutes, and I ended up fifteen minutes late for class despite leaving her house at 6:45 this morning. Lovely!

However, in typing this I remembered the beautiful sunrise over the water I almost pulled over the photograph, at which an official sign had been posted with the following text:

The other day I had an interview with a new research professor on campus. During our conversation, she abruptly asked me, “Michael, what has been the most difficult part of your life thus far?” I looked her right in the eye and answered promptly with a single word, “Gastrulation.”

In reference to the previous post:

I do not cheat; I do not plagiarize. What I resent is being treated like a criminal when I have not, and do not plan to, do anything wrong, especially when the defined “crimes” have been deemed permissible by esteemed professors at this university as opposed to a tired old lecturer. Finally, I detest the thought that I may be somehow blacklisted for simply daring to question his particular brand of integrity.

Cell Biology lab has put me in a foul mood this afternoon. To be fair, it starts at a disadvantage thanks to the time: 2:30-5:30 on Friday afternoons. However, any remaining grace I may have felt for the class evaporated faster than isopropyl alcohol when my partner Amir and I began the activity. So much of this class, and, I venture to extrapolate, future classes, is absolute bullshit. Our instructor, Brian MacKay, has “unique” take on academic integrity that takes the values set forth by our university and other professors to a completely different level. To Brian, simply obtain a copy of one of his previous exams constitutes cheating. Copying the data your lab partner wrote down during the experiment? Plagiarism. I suppose this means other renown professors at this institution should receive F’s on their transcripts for helping students to cheat when they not only provide old exams for practice, but encourage them to find additional exams on their own! Indeed, the world would be a better place if such dishonest organizations such as Kaplan and The Princeton Review were shut down – imagine, providing not just questions, but entire copies of old standardized tests to students to help them study. The audacity! Brian takes all of this and ratchets it up one more painful notch by announcing in his syllabus that he knows when somebody has been cheating or plagiarizing, “even if he cannot prove it.” What a way to kick off the semester!

Add to this ridiculous standard his commitment to ensuring that all labs take as much of the three hour time allotment as possible. Not because the labs are difficult, no, because he will make sure that your graph, crudely constructed on scrap paper, is appropriately titled with a complete sentence, among other things. It is this kind of busywork that so infuriates somebody who has a basic grasp on biological concepts. I mean, if you’ve come this far and you still don’t understand how to operate a micropipetter, where the hell have you been?!

This fellow’s exams are supposed to be hard, which is absolutely fitting given his personality. Here’s to getting through this semester with an A.

I own a number of Apple products, I have given Apple products as gifts, and I most likely will purchase an Apple MacBook Pro to replace my current laptop computer. What really gets me, though, is the idea that PC problems can somehow be solved by switching platforms. It’s as if a customer, upon purchasing a new game, experiences an error preventing the software from launching. When soliciting help for this obstacle, however, he is told that “that game sucks anyway.”

I look upon this logic with furrowed brow – a request for assistance is not a green light to pimp your operating system of choice. Rather, it is an opportunity to impart knowledge to another who may be treading a path you have already conquered. If you can think of nothing helpful to say, privately bask in the knowledge that your Mac does not do that and continue on your merry way, creating space for those who genuinely want to help.

This flawed reasoning is also routinely applied in a unique medium known as the “Slashdot comment”, but that is a subcultural aberration that is better discussed at another time.

One year ago today, I asked Rachel to marry me, and she said “yes”.

I was doing physics homework before I got distracted popping cherries, into my mouth. Such succulent fruits!

Neat adventure this morning: The very moment I stepped into the shower, the fire alarm in my apartment went off, immediately transforming what should have been a very enjoyable time into a moment of awkward. I debated continuing my shower, willfully ignorant to the blaring warnings, but decided against it in fear of an overzealous student marshal pounding down my door and insisting I vacate the premises as is. I much prefer leaving my apartment on my own terms. Although I did take the time to clothe myself before exiting the building, I wasn’t the last person out of the building, proving that once again, if the building was on fire, we would all die.

It didn’t help that the alarm for my apartment is located on the hallway directly across from the shower, so when I opened the door I realized exactly how loud that thing really was. I could feel my eardrums vibrating in sync with its cacophonous projection…

I’ve now extracted all the delicious goodness from the bag, so to physics I return.

That’s right, I got the crazy idea to run for the 2007-2008 SGA Senate. On one hand, I am trying to investigate solutions to some irritating issue, such as the student parking allocation and the current requirements for using meal plans. However, it is my primary goal to continue to build an SGA that is open and accessible to all students. I myself have felt underrepresented by the SGA in the past – only after I got more seriously involved did I see what the organization is actually doing. This is an image I will be striving to change as Senator.

As always, please feel free to contact me with any issues you would like to see represented in the coming year, and don’t forget to vote in the elections April 23-25!

-Michael SteelWolf