Daniel Spisak on Technology

For the past two weeks I have managed to get very little sleep due to a variety of reasons:

1. It was midterms week for me at UCI.
2. I had a large data forensics analysis job come in which required me to work late on a Friday night and most of a Saturday day. And that doesnt even count time spent doing analysis yet!
3. I had last minute notices of friends parties, of which some I was able to make it to. For future refrence people I need more then 1 or two days of notice if you want any chance in hell of a hope of me having free time to schedule you in.
4. I’ve been behind on some of my writing for one of my classes. Partly due to a lack of enthusiasm for the subject, the working poor. Not that I don’t care about their predicament, just the exercise reminds me of my granola tree hugging hippie days at UC Santa Cruz and the fact that I am not a god damn dirty hippy type nor am I a big fat cat free market rules capitalist type.
5. I forced myself to go out to a party or two because I’ve been a homebody and its driving me nuts.
6. I’ve had to drive from Irvine to Studio City, during rush hour. To make a planning meeting for a new project
7. I had to drive from Irvine to the Farmers Market for another business meeting today, and then had to fight traffic home
8. An old client with another company I work with has had some questions come up that they need me to analyize.
9. I occasionally spend time in a fools errand of talking to single women in some foolhardy quest to find myself a nice woman to be in a relationship with.

That being said I feel like I have let some of this affect my school performance which I am kicking myself in the ass for. Basically for the past two weeks I have been getting to bed at the likes of 2-4AM and then having to get up at 8:30AM to be able to get to my 10AM class on time.

I’ve gotten back the results on my three midterms and the results are not totally bad. I managed a B+ on my 39C in-class essay which isnt bad considering I was shortchanged on time to write it in class because I had to deal with a lack of parking at UCI on that day and eventually had to just say “fuck it” and pay a few bucks for the temporary short term parking in the parking structure next to the student center. My ICS22 midterm that I thought I did well in, turns out I landed in the ballpark of the average for the class. Not great but not horrible either I guess. I’ll have to see what it was I missed and study harder there for sure. I suspect I choked up on some of the Java coding parts of the exam. I just need to write more stuff in java and get more comfortable with the language; I still have some bad syntax habits because I confuse C/C++ syntax with Java syntax sometimes. I’ll get the hang of the damn thing soon enough.

The worst news however is in my linear algebra class. My score wasn’t even in the distribution of scores. In this case I really have myself to blame as I hadn’t been attending class as studiously here as I should have been. While the class itself is a MWF class, it has a discussion on TTh also and realistically discussion days are being treated as additional material teaching days.

This combined with the fact that its my earliest class and I am not a morning person coupled with the poor sleep I’d been getting lately I just really botched things up. Later today I have to go to the math department to get a drop card for the class so I can make sure this doesnt affect my GPA at UCI. I am not sure if UCI is going to have a connipition fit over dropping this class as it would take me from 14 units to 10 units enrolled. I have to talk to the administration and see what the fallout of this will be. Other news I got today was my ICS counselor, Kurt is not going to be at UCI anymore after November 18th so I have no idea who will be my new counselor over there, hopefully someone good.

Other things going on in my life lately that I’ve had to deal with:

1. A flat tire on one of my rear wheels on the BMW. Since then has been replaced with my fullsize spare. Have to still sit down and find my recipt from Amercia’s Tire Store as I think the tire might be warrantied and I can then get a new tire put on the rim in the trunk with the busted tire.
2. I suspect my car might need a tire alignment
3. I suspect my car might have something weird going on with its coolant system. Once in a blue moon I get the warning indicator for low coolant but it never stays that way. Also, the temp of the car never goes past the midway point. Yet the car seems to stay warm/hot longer then I remember it
4. I suspect the car might have a slow oil leak. I need to document what days I’ve had to put oil into the car, but it feels like the periods are getting shorter
5. I am a broke-ass bastard for the most part. I will get a big payout from the patest round of contract work, but I still owe Discover card and USAA some money so its going to come down to probably taking half of the money and throwing it over the wall at Discover card and then taking the rest and getting the car its 100k mile service which is way overdue and making sure the darn thing is working properly.
6. I suspect my cars shocks might need some TLC, but its hard to say since its got a stiffer sport suspension. However this could also just be a case of the tires needing alignment instead.

Other things I’ve had happen, lately I made some new friends thanks to me forcing myself to go to a few parties this weekend. There was a really nice and cute woman on HotOrNot (stop snikcering and rolling your eyes) who approached me which is certainly out of the ordinary. Shes from Temecula at the moment but might be moving to OC later on down the road. But talking with her is nice and she seems to feel the same which was cool but after a few days it turns out that she is ultra religious which isnt that big a deal to me really as I think people should be allowed to believe whatever they wish. My big problem with religious people usually stems from the fact that these people tend to want to force their religous ideology on others and thats where I start to have issues. As it turns out this woman wants someone just as religious as her and who is into God. Of course, me being a holiday Catholic not to mention being a science oriented kind of person turns out isnt good enough for this lady. She wants some guy who will be there in church with her praying with God and whatnot. She also is saving her virginity for her marriage. I wish her luck in finding a guy, but I cant help to think that shes boxing herself off into a corner thats going to relegate her to the old spinster with 23 cats destiny. Perhaps there are other people like that in the world but if so I would be very surprised to find any of them living in LA or OC.

It’s funny though, I was jonesing for Civilization 4 to come out so I could play it and escape from some of the madness. So out it came and out I went to buy it which I did. I’ve played one game of it so far, and not even to completion. I’ve just been too damn busy or had more important things that needed my attention. Right now more then anything in the world I just want to sleep in for a day and have some beautiful woman massage my neck and rub my back. Just for a day. I feel like I’ve gotten onto some kind of crazy ass treadmill and that someone decided to raise the incline on it without me noticing.

Or maybe I am just getting too old for some of this shit, but that sounds like an odd sentiment to be coming out of my mouth at the age of 29.

I realize I havent written a lot lately and this is why so if you got any questions or comments please leave them here as I do read these things and I try to keep up on what my friends are up to so I can pretend to have some semblance of a social life at times.