numbersnut

My first Friday night off in 3 years. Really my first Friday off in 5, because even when I didn't work Fridays I had work at 6:00AM on Saturday so the night was a waste anyway.

The perfect storm is brewing tonight. Meeting up with a ton of the coolest people I know, money in my pocket, and I've been loading up on water for two days in anticipation. If I don't wake up to that momentary panic of "Where the hell am I?" this night will have been an utter failure.

Whoa. We now return to our regularly scheduled postings. Move along.

Well, I'm done. *crosses fingers for the finals*



numbersnut
2006
Bachelor of Science, Biomedical Engineering

I've been ramping up my water intake for a couple of days now. My friends know this can only mean one thing: Tonight, it's Miller Martini, Long Island, JagerBomb, and Jameson on ice Time!

Tonight is oddly emotional for me. Not emo-tional, but rather happy anticipation emotional. I'm miserable with my time, the quintessential procrastinator and I always have been. As such, I've pulled my share of all nighters in my college career.

And here I am again. One final exam left, one all nighter left. My last all-nighter.

I can't put it in words yet, but I'll try sometime soon here. The closest I can come to it at the moment is that I feel like a caged bird about to be let free. I've flown before, and I've crashed before; but for the first time I feel ready to fly. Trained to fly. Free to fly. Not a thing in the world holding me down or back now that the crushing burden of school combined with my work week are so very nearly behind me. I was trying to remember the last time I had a day off, a real day off. For the last 5 years the closest I've come is when I have either work or school and not work and school.

Who knows how I'll do, how things will go. But I do know this: I'M FINALLY FREAKING DONE! (well almost! stupid chemistry final... :)

I've often referred to finals that are worth 40% or more of a total grade for a class as "High Stakes Finals". That's because it doesn't really matter what you have walking into the final, if you bomb it you'll kill your grade. Turns out I didn't know what high stakes was. High stakes is where if you don't pass, you don't graduate. If you don't graduate, you don't get the job you thought you had. If you don't get the job you thought you had, and you've already quit the job that you do have; well, that's often called homeless.

The stress is un-FUCKING-real. It's too much. The human brain can only process so much at a time, and when part of what you're trying it process is a difficult engineering course it doesn't leave much processing power for much else.

Ah, so that's what happened yesterday.

Got some more pics of my future new place. Turns out the master bedroom doesn't have a vaulted ceiling, the vaulted ceiling is on the main floor including in the living room and the kitchen. I was a little disappointed in the flooring and paint in the interior, however I reminded myself that what ever was in there I probably would have redone the carpet and tile anyway, just because I can. Seriously, when you know how to do things like tile, any floor sucks unless it's your floor. I'll also probably remodel the upstairs. They tried to fit 4 rooms up there, just because basement rooms are the kiss of death I guess. Being an Arizona native, I don't have much experience in basements. Anyway, the rooms are tiny, so I'll probably take the 4 rooms and turn it into 3, divided across all three rooms, not just removing one wall. Also, only a fraction of the basement is finished, WooHoo! There's two rooms and a bathroom down there, but the rest of it needs work. That means I'll be able to design it the way I like.

Anyway, got more pics:


That's a jetted tub baby! I feel a bit dumb, but it took me about 30 seconds to realize that someone hadn't in fact put a vanity light inside the shower, but that it was simply a reflection.



The spa is mine! It's going to SUCK having a yard this size. If I had kids, blah, blah, blah, but at the moment it just looks like a lot of work. I think I'll also put a balcony deck out there that the master bedroom opens out into. I'll have to find out zoning laws and all that, and I'll have a lot of work to do on the inside first.

All in all I think I'm pretty happy with it. I have a little bit of buyers remorse, but that's pretty normal after blowing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Oh god, what'd I do?

For all intents and purposes anyway. Just haven't, you know, paid for it yet.
It's funny the way life works. I always pictured that when I bought a house I'd be walking hand in hand with my wife, maybe pushing a stroller, talking over things at night, stressing out... Well you can plan all the live-long day, but sometimes things just happen and ya gotta go with the flow.

Instead, my boss' wife, who's a realtor, emailed me 22 pictures of properties that they own. 10 minutes later I emailed her back, and done. Just last night I was telling a friend that I'm a "see and touch" guy when it comes to making purchasing decisions too! When I got my new job the original plan was for me to relocate to his basement for a few months (well, actually my original plan was to get an apartment, but my boss wouldn't hear of it.) so that I could save up for a down payment; instead he decided that he wants to remodel, so he offered me one of his properties at a semi-cut rate. He owns the place outright, so it was an extremely painless process (which as of now simply entailed him taking the house off the market). When I get there, he's going to spot me a 20% down payment out of a relocation bonus and my salary, and then I'll get the financing.


So what'd I get?


It's a 6 bedroom, 4 bath, vaulted ceilings in the master bathroom (with a jetted bath tub!), and a mountain view. It has a basement and then a main and second floor. I'd like to say more about it, but I haven't actually seen it yet!

6 bedrooms! Can you imagine the tour? "This is my bedroom, here's a guestroom, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another." Actually, I'll probably have to put in an office, a den, an exercise room, a dungeon (j/k), and then a guestroom.

It's going to be pretty boring in there for a while though. I might have to get a pet tiger or something just to make living there more exciting, because that's what it'd take. I went from my parents house, to a college house with 3 roommates, and since then I've always shared a residence with at least one roommate, girlfriend, or family member. Change is in the air!!

I'm thinking about using this journal for more personal stuff again. When I started Cascadeddesign.com I had intended to use it as a more professional site than it currently is. And now that I'm starting my career that's suddenly become important. The site is doing really well, as far as I can tell from the logs it is syndicated by a few thousand people from all over the world, and in its 5th or so month it has a Google Page Rank of 4. I've also enjoyed meeting tons of people through email, particularly other bioengineers working on their school projects.

I'll still keep up with some light-hearted stuff there for all the readers, but I'm going to start watching my language and topics; not that it was all that racy to begin with or anything, it just wasn't all that professional either. The stuff in this journal will be strictly friend-locked, if I don't feel a need to lock something then it's going to go on Cascadeddesign, not here. Because of that, I may be tidying up my friends page even further to people who are either 1) total and complete strangers, 2) Real-life friends, 3) Real-life internet friends; ie, people I chat with or talk on the phone with, but haven't actually met in person. 4) Specific request.

At the moment I'm too busy to write much of anything, so this is just a heads up on future plans...

AZ has been my home-base for goin' on, well, all my life. But I'll be relocating in mid-June to the lovely and wonderful Salt Lake City, Utah. I have mixed feelings on this. Salt Lake is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, IMHO. And I dislike being surrounded by religion. My step-father's mother lives in SLC so I've spent some time there in the past and enjoyed it immensely, so we'll see. Warm summers, cold winters. Perfect!

How warm and how cold? Well, SLC had 132 days below freezing last year; and get this, 56 days above 90 degrees F. Phoenix, on the other hand had 5 days below freezing, and a whopping 168 days above 90! I think I'm going to enjoy the switch...

If any of you LJers are interested, one of muh' very good friends with a paid account has created a syndication feed of my website. That means you can keep up on my page from your friends page. I'm not saying you LJers are too lazy to, you know, book mark it or type in the URL, instead of just hitting your friends button (OK, I am) but it's there if you want it. (In my latest entry you can see pictures of my prematurely grey hair. I'd bet I can pick up on 50 year olds and we can talk about how purple is the only color that'll stick to white hair!)

I've been watching the LJ feedseeker come though and it is a lazy robot, that one; so the LJ feed isn't always up to date and I think sometimes it will get buried if you have a fairly active friend's page. I don't, so I'm not sure how that'll work.

You can add the page here:
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/cascadeddesign/profile

The Top Gear fans on my friends page (I'm looking at you Sideshow) may be interested to know that I have a new clip up on my blog. I nearly cried laughing so hard.

Hey all,

I'm starting to get more active writing in my new blog over at Cascaded Design. I still have my Sudoku game up as well. I haven't received any feed back on it, so either everyone is an expert at it, or it's way too hard. Is anyone here playing it? Is it too hard? I know people are at least attempting the game as that page alone used up several hundred megabytes of bandwidth last month (which I am very happy about! :) but I also want people to actually win a game every now and again! I'd love to hear from you if you have any suggestions on it.

I’ve updated the code to the java script that I’m using on my site to keep up with my skill level. According to other Sudoku sites, mine ranks as “evil”, in fact, it's the hardest one I've seen so far. There are several puzzles which present only two blocks filled in per sector, but then other sectors have as many as five filled in. Mine has two sectors with four filled in, two sectors with three filled in, and five sectors with just two filled in. (Note to self if I need to change it in the future: code line 528)

It should be noted that there is only one correct solution to each puzzle, as it takes surprisingly little info to create a board with only one possible solution. The puzzles presented on my page will almost always require some amount of back-tracking to solve.

Good luck!

I've added a harder version of Sudoku to the page. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to add buttons which let you choose between easy, medium, or hard.

But so far, the only people I know that are playing it appear to be experts at it, so hopefully this will make it more of a challenge for them.

As if any of us needed another way to kill time on the net, but I'm going to give you one more anyway. Sudoku, courtesy of me. This game is super fun, super addictive, and takes super reasoning ability. Why am I using the word 'super' so much? Because the game is super popular among the Japanese.

Give it a try. If you need more directions than the brief ones I've listed on the page, google them or leave me a comment.

Think it's easy?? Well, do ya' punk?

Well, I've officially got everything up and running at my new site, CascadedDesign.com. There's not much up yet, but bookmark it and check back periodically.

Thanks to luminairex for his Wordpress recommendation. It went up like a breeze. My blog will be the main area where I'll be adding content to the site, at least initially. Its link is on the main page.

So check it out and let me know what you think. I have a comment board!

After extensive thought I've decided to go the website route rather than set up a new blog with the variety of blogging services out there. As a perk (to me) my website will have a blog program of sorts on it, allowing me to interact with it before I learn all the nuts and bolts of HTML and such (I'm lookin' at you luminairex!! :-D).

I just registered the domain name and it takes a day or two to become official so I will not be posting it yet. It took forever to find one that A) I liked, and B) wasn't taken. It's harder than you'd think to accomplish that if you haven't tried it before.

I have a few ideas for where I want to go with it. I'm really excited, this is something I've wanted to do for a while.

About this journal:

It's pretty much shut down for good. I originally was going to delete it but I realized that if I did that, all the comments I've posted in my friends' journals would have that annoying numbersnut thing going on, which I feel isn't very courteous. It'd annoy me anyway. So I'm leaving it up but I've friend locked all the posts therein. I've also edited my fiends list so that it only includes people I know in real life, people who attend ASU, and engineering students just as a quick way to keep in touch with these people. Also, I can still comment whore! So basically, no offense is intended if anyone is wondering. It's not like I'm going to continue posting here under a friend lock and I don't want you reading or anything.

About your journal:

I feel one of the traps a lot of bloggers fall into is that they want to be read, but not read. (Gotta love English there!) I can honestly say that I've read every word of every post every one of my friends has made since I met them. If you were on my friend's list when I shut this journal down, this means you. I'd already dropped boring journals/ones I didn't like previous to this. This won't change, only now I'll have to go to my bookmarks to access your journal rather than hit my friends page link. So if you post a lot of friend-locked stuff and don't mind me reading, keep me on. Or drop me if the opposite is true, I'll take the hint!

Nope, I'm not pulling the plug on life but I am pulling it on my Livejournal. I'll give the reasons why, and a brief review of LJ behind the cut, but first the vital stats:

Date Created: February 4, 2005
Journal Entries: 130

And my Yahoo! email account which I set up exclusively for this journal has exactly 1023 LJ emails in it.

I don't think it's too pretentious to admit that I like a few of the things I've written. Here they are in no particular order. (OK, I lied, they're in reverse chronological order. If you've been reading my journal for a while start at the bottom if you want to read these)

http://www.livejournal.com/users/numbersnut/26917.html

http://www.livejournal.com/users/numbersnut/23103.html

http://www.livejournal.com/users/numbersnut/16365.html

http://www.livejournal.com/users/numbersnut/9816.html

http://www.livejournal.com/users/numbersnut/7298.html

http://www.livejournal.com/users/numbersnut/2068.html

( Read more... )