Festivus

Well, it didn't quite go as planned. I don't have a real pole this year. All I've got is our flagpole in the front yard, and it's really not the same. Also, Sandy wasn't home for Festivus dinner. Apparently, that's how she disappointed me this year. That, and the fact that she's a needy little brat who still owes me $13 dollars. I didn't get to do the Feats of Strength this year, but I had something equivalent in Urban Dead. So far, I haven't been killed, so Festivus isn't over yet, and probably won't be for several days if I play my cards right.

Late Post

I actually wrote this last Saturday, but didn't get around to posting it until now. I'm not sure why.

Just watched Dead and Deader on Sci-fi. I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's definitely not your typical zombie movie, and the fact that it stars the guy who hosted Ripley's Believe It or Not is a plus. Honestly, before Dead and Deader, I didn't even know he was an actor. Go figure.

I just have one burning question: how many pop culture references can you possibly fit into one movie? Seriously, next time it's on, watch it and try to keep track. I guarantee you'll lose count in the first hour if you don't have one of those little clicker things.

Seriously, she used to bullseye womp rats in her T-16 back home? It's like they're trying to set a record or something. Hell, the movie will probably be featured on Ripley's Believe It or Not.

I just accidentally electrocuted myself

I was plugging in my laptop, and apparently my finger was in contact with the metal part of the plug when it touched the outlet. I felt a shock and pulled my finger away. There isn't any kind of possibility of permanent damage after something like that, right? Probably not. I mean, I'm typing fine right now, aren't I?

A Festivus For The Rest Of Us

I hope you guys are celebrating Festivus this year. I know I will be. Know why? Because I'm really getting sick of Christmas. At least Festivus is untarnished by commercialism, decorations and bad singing. Everybody get on the bandwagon and celebrate in style Dec. 23rd.

Now, if you happen to be unfamilar with Festivus, you need to do three things. First, realize that your entire life up until this point has been a lie. Second, read the wikipedia article that I linked to above. Third, get your ass in gear and get ready to celebrate one of my favorite holidays. If you don't join in the festivites, you can expect to feel my malice when I'm airing grievances this year. Other than that, just relax and have fun. That's kind of the point of a holiday, isn't it?

C++ Rant

So, I'm finally done with finals. Overall, it didn't go as smoothly as I had hoped, but I'll have to wait and see just how bad or good things turned out. I already know I failed physics. That was mostly due to poor planning on my part. That, and the fact that the class is held at 8am, a most ungodly hour to be forced to think. At least next semester I won't have to deal with that anymore.

Now, I have a rant about my C++ teacher that I really need to get out, or else I won't be able to relax over the break. I'm kind of hoping she never hears it, though, so maybe this isn't the best place to do it, but whatever.

Hayes is evil. It's as simple as that. I used to think she was just a bad teacher, maybe getting a little senile in her old age, but that's not it. She is, in fact, a force of pure evil. I did extremely poorly in a class I'd normally love and do well in because of her. For once, I'm not screwing up because of my own mistakes. This is definitely because of her.

First, the assignments. I hate her grading system for programming assignments. Rather than simply giving a grade, she reads the code, and if it is 100% perfect in her eyes (which it never is), she gives it a check. Otherwise, she marks it NA and gives it back to you. If you turned it in early enough, you'll be able to try to turn it in again for the check. With any luck, you'll be able to decipher the incomprehensible chicken scratch that she writes all over the page, then make the changes she feels need to be made. Most of the time, these are not even serious changes. Usually, your program will work just fine, but she'll mark one part wrong because that's not the way she would have done it.

This is pure evil. I don't want to deal with that crap. I don't like doing programming assignments in the first place, so when I finish one, I just want to give it to her and block out my memory of having ever done it. If there is one small thing wrong with it, then it should just be a 90% or so instead of 100%. Grading is supposed to have a range of possible grades, so you can get partial credit for doing a pretty good job. However, for reasons I'll never understand, she feels that, in the case of programming assignments, there are no grades. There is only "Okay, good work," or "No. Do it over, or it's a zero." That's fucked up. If I do an assignment and it's 90% right, I just want to be given a 90. I don't want to have to go back and do the fucking assignment over again just because there's one little thing wrong with it. Believe it or not, I have better shit to do than write the same assignment over and over again. Beside that, I don't have the time to do it over. If I turn an assignment in on the day of it's final deadline, and it comes back NA, then that's it. Game over. I can't do it over anymore because the deadline is passed. The assignment is marked as a failure, regardless of the fact that there's only one or two lines of code that need to be changed. Is the level of malice I feel toward her sinking in yet? Well, hang on, because we're just getting started.

Next, she gives us a quiz at the beginning of every class. These quizzes are never easy, and it's damn near impossible to do well on them. Aside from the fact that they're written in her own language that few people beside her can understand, there's always just one or two questions on them, so if you get just one wrong, you fail the quiz. This was often the case for me, since I really don't know the material as well as I should. That again is not my fault, though. I explain why in this next part:

Third, she is just not good at teaching. Everything I learned in that class this year had to be learned by reading handouts, because I could not get anything out of her lectures. The woman cannot lecture. When she lectures, she always does the same stupid crap. Rather than talk equally about all the important points in a lesson, she finds one point she really wants to hammer home, then says that same point over and over and over again for the next half-hour to an hour, slightly rewording each sentence in a feeble attempt to trick you into thinking that she's saying anything new or relevant. As if that wasn't bad enough, she then illustrates her point by coming up with some bizarre analogy. She cannot do analogies. The point of an analogy is to make something easier to understand by relating it to something familiar. Her analogies are completely unfamiliar and make no sense at all to anyone but her. If anything, they cause you to have a worse understanding of the topic at hand. Examples? Can anyone tell me how the phrase "plain vanilla" relates in any way to the string class? Can anyone tell me how cin or the istream are in any way similar to "a slob that goes to McDonalds"? Somehow, in her mind, these are natural and universally understood concepts. Am I missing something here? Is it me? It's her, right?

I can't prove it, but I don't think she's trying to teach me. She's trying to destroy my psyche. I think she really must have an evil force inside her, because I am physically unable to listen to her. Whenever I try, my brain just shuts down and I black out, sometimes for minutes at a time. I swear to god, it's like every time she speaks, she's broadcasting evil psychic waves of negative energy that drain the intellect right out of me. I actually become stupider by trying to listen to her. How is that possible, unless she is, in fact, a brain-draining alien from another galaxy?

The fact that she doesn't even realize or care something's wrong drives me nuts. Hayes, think about it. If more than half the class consistently fails your daily quizzes from hell, which they do, don't you think that's an indication that the class really isn't getting the material? Shouldn't that tip you off that something is amiss? If you have to put a 20 point curve on the unit test to ensure that the entire class doesn't fail, which you did, doesn't it ever occur to you that this could be your fault? Do us all a favor and retire, before you ruin any more students. I'm out.

Saving the Internet

I've never really been that politically active, but I do try to keep up with current events and issues. One issue that is important to me is this issue of preserving Net Neutrality. I imagine it should matter to you, too, since you're using the Internet right now. Of course, I still haven't done much about it. The most I've done so far is sign up for a Save the Internet mailing list.

The most recent thing they sent me is about this potential merger between Bell South and AT&T. That's a god damn big merger. The guys at freepress.net seem to believe that a merger of this scale could be dangerous, and I agree with them. You can read the full story at the link above. After doing so, I'd suggest you do as I did and send a message to your congressperson about this. They'll even let you send a prewritten message if you're lazy like me.

http://action.freepress.net/campaign/stop_att_merger

Note to self:

My watch is broken. If I find myself in a dark room, I must remember not to activate the backlight on the watch. If I do, it will release an unholy shrieking noise and reset itself, which is a major pain because it is rather difficult to set the time. Especially now that one of the buttons isn't working half of the time.

On a related note, if anyone's looking to get me a Christmas present, a new watch wouldn't be a bad idea.

Facebook Group: Let Eddie Guerrero Die

I made this group after watching Survivor Series this year. Overall, I was pretty disappointed with the whole thing. However, the low-light of the night had to be the United States Championship match: Chris Benoit vs. Chavo Guerrero, with his "business manager" Vicki Guerrero in his corner. The storyline leading up to this match is possibly the most putrid, stinking pile of feces that the WWE writing staff has ever produced. Furthermore, it is an insult to Eddie Guerrero's memory.

For those who weren't there for it, I'll give you a brief history lesson. A little over a year ago, Eddie Guerrero passed away suddenly at the age of 38. Everyone was hurt by the loss, and the WWE had a week-long tribute, interrupting their normal broadcasts to pay their respects. On top of that, at Wrestlemania, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. Now, I'm fine with all that. He was a great guy who deserves to be remembered. However, it should have stopped at Wrestlmania.

In the months leading up to his induction, not a single WWE show aired without someone mentioning the name Eddie Guerrero. Whether it was the commentators, the crowd or the wrestlers, he was always being brought up. I thought this would fade over time as we were entering 2006, but it only got worse. Rey Mysterio, a good friend of Eddie, entered the Royal Rumble saying that he was dedicating his match to his late friend. Now, at the time, I had no problem with that. Hell, I was even rooting for him when he won the Rumble. (Well, really, I was rooting for Randy Orton, but Rey was a close second in my mind) However, in winning the Rumble, he got the chance to try for the World Heavyweight Championship at Wrestlmania. Orton almost got left out of the match entirely until a little plot twist resulted in the match being a triple threat match. In other words, Rey, Orton, and the champion at the time Kurt Angle would all be facing each other for the title. Honestly, I thought there was no chance of Rey winning. But, I guess I forgot how much people love a good underdog story. After Rey also dedicated his Wrestlmania match to Eddie, it was basically guaranteed to be a victory for him. And so it was. Rey Mysterio officially became the World Heavyweight Champion. An ironic title for him to hold, considering he weighs about 170 pounds.

I was rather irritated by then. For months after that, Rey defended his championship and won. That in itself wasn't so bad. What was bad was that he always did so getting chants of "Eddie" from the crowd. They weren't cheering for Rey, they were cheering for Eddie. Am I the only one who realized that Eddie was not in the match? What's more, Rey only encouraged them by finishing his matches with Eddie's old signature move, the Frog Splash, and pointing to the heavens.

When it gets to the point that you find yourself rooting for a washed-up John "Bradshaw" Layfield over Rey Mysterio, you know something's wrong. Well, that's the point it got to. I was just dying for someone to take that title from Rey so the Eddie nonsense would stop. It didn't matter, though. Even after the title changed hands, the nonsense continued. Rey Mysterio soon began a rivalry with Chavo Guerrero, Eddie's nephew. Honestly, I don't know what the feud was about, because by that time I had pretty much stopped watching Smackdown altogether.

At some point in the mess, Eddie's wife Vicki Guerrero became involved. She actually joined Chavo as his "business manager", taking on a heel character persona. Now, I ask you, how desperate did she have to be for money that she would agree to such a retarded idea?

The madness didn't stop, even after Rey Mysterio was injured and couldn't continue. As soon as he was injured, another close friend of Eddie, Chris Benoit, stepped in to take his place, and the bitter conflict picked up right where it left off. This led to the Survivor Series match, in which Benoit would defend his US championship.

During Survivor Series, before the match started, they played a brief video package, as they often do, detailing the events that led up to this heated rivalry. I watched that video package from start to finish, then watched the whole match, in which Chavo was constantly shouting something like "You're not a Guerrero!", Vicki was yelling similar things from outside the ring, and Benoit was doing his best to win while the crowd broke into another "Eddie" chant. By the end, my mind had pretty much shut down. I was completely flabbergasted. The only coherent though I could process was, "This is so fucking stupid."

So, that's why I made the group. I want the madness to end, and making a Facebook group seemed like the best way to get the word out to people. If enough people join, I'm hoping we can send a letter to WWE's writing staff telling them that a huge volume of their fans are pissed off and want them to stop. If that doesn't happen, well, at least we can start a discussion to complain about how stupid the writing staff are.