chaz720.net - journal

May 07, 2001

First I learned to crawl and then some other strokes. I can never remember any real good jokes. Do you feel like swimming? Yes right now. I know a way to swim all the way downtown. It's a lot like swimming the first time over your head. It gets easier when you move your arms and legs. And for air you lift your head why don't we try it right now? Yes right now. Well I know a way to swim all the way downtown. I know a way to swim all the way downtown. Well I know a way to swim all the way downtown. I know a way to swim all the way downtown. We'll go by way of the garden. Fat with tomatoes and beans on the vine. Sweet like the way it was. Like swimming for the very first time. Do you feel like swimming? Well I know a way to swim all the way downtown. I know a way to swim all the way downtown. Do you feel like swimming?

Do you feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeel, like swimming?

Well I got my econ test back and I did okay on it. I have landed right on where I think the border for A-/B+ is so it's anyone's guess as to what I'm going to actually going to get. Although I think I remember him saying something at the begining of the year along the lines of, "if you do all the work all semester that will be smiled upon at the end of." Oh well I'll cross my fingers.

Well, regardless, I'd like to share my opinion on Economics and a few other classes right now. I think I know why I don't find Econ/History/Psych as easy as other classes that I enjoy like Ece, Calc, Physics, and Philosophy. The reason being that in econ and the lot, you have to do two things to do well on the exams. First you must do gobs and gobs of reading out of the text book, then you must recall about 70 lines of information from that book in multiple-choice form. It's kind of a "sampling the knowledge" way of testing you, and while I don't think that's outright invalid, I just seem to struggle a bit in that area. I have always been pretty bad at things like that and I'm wondering if it's just the way I'm wired or something. Whenever we read novels in Lit classes, and there would be quote-identification prolbems I would be, for the most part, lost if it wasn't a pretty important quote. Likewise, I am about as bad with names as it gets. I can't tell you the number of times I'll be at a party, and I'll be dancing, and I'll met a couple people and be talking and joking with them, and then when they are going to get a drink I ask them to get one for me to and for the love of everything holy I can't come up with their name to ask them politely even though I know they told me not 5 minutes ago. And yet I could tell you everything else I've learned about them in the preceding conversation. If this sounds like you as well please tell me and share some much needed consoling or some crap like that.

As I'm sure many of you do, I listen to lots and lots of music while at (and away from) my computer, and everyone has their own way of doing it. There are all kinds of different programs and modifications that you can get to listen to music at your computer, here are the ones I use.

Winamp - considered by most the staple of mp3 listening, winamp is clean, simple, and full feaured, what more could you want?
ClearAmp b/w - this is kinda my own personal skin that, joel will contest, I modified to my liking. The original graphics were done by, um, some other guy, but I went through the effort of removing the colors from it, as well as setting all the g-eq and playlist color settings to be more of my liking, now you can use it too.
Advanced Crossfader - This output plug-in will overlap the last few seconds of the current song with the first few seconds of the next song and fade them out and in respectively so that you get a nice clean transition between songs. You can set up all the times and fading speeds to your liking, and I love the effect you get.
Find It - This is a program that Hans stumbled upon that essentially replaces the "jump" feature built into winamp. This allows you to hit ctrl+down and type a word or two from the title/artist of the song and it will let you jump to that song easily. The catch being that you need to keep a very large playlist, which apparently is unacceptable for some people
The Songs - Kind of an integral part of listening to music being the music, that is my playlist as of about 30 seconds ago.
GeForce 2 - A long-time user of Geiss I know how hard it can be to change to a new visualization plug in, but I think that Geforce offers a larger variety of datafields and wave-patterns, so I'm going with it. A note though, in many cases on a bit slower machines, Geiss does run faster.
MusicMatch Jukebox - One of the fastest mp3 encoders out there, using the Xing codec, it allows me to rip mp3s from a cd digitally with full error-correction at around 12x all the way accross the disc, that's great in my book

So now I've just kinda been hanging out for a few days here doing a whole lot of nothing till it comes time to study for my next finals, Hans already moved back, he's just going to "stop by" later in the week to finish his finals, and things are just kinda dying down here. I'll be here until Sunday cause my parents will be here and my sister will be graduating. This will leave me with basically Sunday night to get all my stuff moved back in and start work Monday... =/ ...it's not too bad though, I'm still looking forward to Motorola. As I've said a million times before (ballpark estimate) just these three more finals...

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