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Carl Jantzen

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Parting Remarks [Apr. 1st, 2006|03:48 am]
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[Current Location |Emi's House, Basking Ridge, New Jersey]
[Current Mood |eager]
[Current Music |Daft Punk - Emotion]

Before I finally go to bed here are some more things I wanted to say:


  • Meta-emotion often occurs very late at night. Whether it is caused by being awake at night or the feeling itself causes one to stay up later is up for debate.

  • Becoming a princess is a relatively easy feat. One can marry into a royal family, or even consume the remains of a long-dead Egyptian Princess to absorb her regal essence.

  • The last song on the album I was listening to as I wrote these entries tonight (Human After All) is entitled Emotion, which I did not remember until after the song had begun to play.

  • I want to create some more userpics for myself even though I really don't have any use for more.

  • I still want to create games, but the games themselves aren't what I find the most interesting, what I really, really want to do is create worlds.

  • Anyone who sees me taking my vitamin pills must think I'm addicted to drugs on a massive scale.

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Plane [Mar. 28th, 2006|03:13 pm]
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[Current Location |Airborne over California]

3:13 Eastern Standard Time

Right now I’m on a Boeing 757 hurtling at approximately 580 miles per hour through the troposphere towards New York. Note that even though I’m still over California, I’ve set my computer to eastern time already.

Each seat (in every class) has its own screen, with 24 channels of satellite tv, 1600 mp3s, games (albeit lame ones), and movies. And everything but the movies is free! I know these services were supposed to arrive years ago, but this is the first time I’ve ever been on a flight that actually had them. Maybe I just take the wrong flights, but for a discount airline Song sure knows how to treat a passenger.

Also, the monitor offers current flight statistics and map, and we just crossed into Nevada, FYI. We have traveled 217 miles (354 km), our current ground speed is mph (973 kph), the temperature outside the cabin is -9 degrees Farenheit (-21 Centigrade), and our altitude is 38995 feet (11889 meters).

Now its time to go code. I’ve been getting back into the submarine scene, and I can’t wait to get AVI into a testable and working state.
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Northern Star [Jan. 25th, 2006|03:32 pm]
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[Current Music |Groove Armada - Entrance to Zanzibar]

Well once again I find myself encompassed by a number of projects.


  • UCSBWiki is a collaborative database that seeks to accumulate all knowledge about University of California, Santa Barbara, and the surrounding communities into a single, easy to access location on the internet. I've announced it on the ucsb livejournal community, and will likely soon start promoting it via facebook. I still contribute the vast majority of edits, but some other individuals are getting involved as well; hopefully soon growth will accelerate. The goal is to reach the critical mass of articles so that we can attract readers in addition to content contributers.

  • Constantly Disemboweled by Bears is the name of my CS 50 project team. We are developing a distributed raytracer in Java. Right now I'm focusing on the storage format of scene information, and am getting involved in research into X3D, the successor to VRML. If you're interested you can check out some very early screenshots of the renderer here.

  • Work. Yes, I'm still active at my job. Coding PHP. Blech; I hate web programming.

  • Possible government contract work. I've been contacted by someone who wants my help writing Java code for some simulation software for the NSA. No lie. I'm not sure if I want to get involved in this, but I'll let you know how it turns out.

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only perl can parse Perl [Oct. 26th, 2005|12:58 pm]
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[Current Mood |normal]
[Current Music |Bloodhound Gang - Discovery Channel]

I hate doing web development.

Right now I'm working on updating an application that involves four distinct computer languages in the same document. Why should I have to deal with both JavaScript and PHP sending SQL queries embedded within an HTML document when I could do all of the above in a more readable and less insane Perl script?

Other than dealing with this arcane application work is going well.
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T-28 Hours [Aug. 2nd, 2005|12:33 am]
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[Current Mood |busy]
[Current Music |Mutha's Day Out - What U See/We All Bleed Red]

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[Aug. 1st, 2005|11:30 am]
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[Current Mood |busy]
[Current Music |Israfel - Godiva in the Desert]

This weekend was one of the best weekends ever.

Saturday was our two month anniversary, so to celebrate we had a very fun date. Dinner followed by a movie and ice cream, with much window shopping interspersed between. Then yesterday was fantastic as well; I picked Allie up at church and we went down to see the Taylor Woodrow Grand Prix of San Jose.

Because my father is the race president we got awesome seats in an air conditioned booth, and of course free food and drinks. Some of the funniest moments of the day were when my dad went up and performed some official functions. It was especially hillarious when he presented "Mr. Listwin", his best friend since college, with one of those novelty giant checks for half a million dollars. It was also cool seeing hunter, Don's young son, give out the Rookie of the Race trophy.

All in all it was a good day of family fun.

Anyways, this is short because I've really gotta get cracking. We leave for San Diego in less than 48 hours, and there are still major subsystems on the submarine that haven't even been INSTALLED yet.
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7 Days to San Diego [Jul. 27th, 2005|12:35 pm]
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[Current Mood |busy]
[Current Music |The Who - Pinball Wizard]

The CMU Cams arrived today. I was pretty worried they wouldn't get here before San Diego, and that would have sucked, cause they cost $109 each. Luckily they're here now, so we can start waterproofing them and writing software. Yesterday I spent 13 hours working on the sub.

I spent a good amount of time this morning daydreaming about wide, wide freeways. One of my favorite things about driving to San Diego is passing through LA, which has some of the most awesome freeways in the world.
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Poop [Jul. 12th, 2005|09:37 pm]
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[Current Mood | irritated]
[Current Music |Nine Inch Nails - Somewhat Damaged]

I just spoke with my father on the phone; he was having lots of trouble with one of the family computers at his house and he called me for help. It wasn’t something I could solve over the phone however. He was really frustrated because he had spent hours attempting to solve this issue, and he got really mad when I couldn’t help. So now I’m in a cranky mood as a result.

The rest of this week has been so much more awesome, though. I spent the last three days in Santa Barbara at orientation. In addition to participating in that fun program I also got to spend a fair deal of time with Allie, who is currently vacationing there with her family.

I really do want to spend as much time with Allie as possible while I still can. As soon as college starts I’m going to be lucky if I get to see her once every month or two, so I don’t think it’s so ridiculous that I want to spend so much time with her now.

As an aside, I’ve really come to realize that a huge portion of Desktop Support and IT stems not from extensive education or study, but is actually an acquired talent. If it was simply a question of knowledge I would be able to troubleshoot any problem over the telephone simply by conveying the appropriate instructions to first diagnose and then solve the problem. As it is, however, unless it is something very simple I usually can’t even think of what to try unless I’m sitting at the terminal reading the error message myself. Somehow when I am operating the machine it is different, and I can solve issues that are far more intricate and twisted than I otherwise could.

This is why instead of going back to Pleasanton tonight I am going to get dropped off in Saratoga so I can fix all those fucking problems with the computers. I don’t actually even have my OS CDs with me, but I’ll see what I can do without them. I can probably bittorrent every image I need overnight, and then burn them when I wake up in the morning.

Aside #2: As I’m writing this on my new laptop in the car on the way back from Santa Barbara, and I keep stopping my writing to chat with my mother and answer the phone, I’m actually listening to the entire album (Fragile) as I write this entry. It’s definitely one of my top five favorite albums of all time, and may even be number one. I can’t decide whether or not Discovery belongs on that list. It’s also another contender for the coveted #1 spot, but for some reason I don’t feel like it really is the best album ever. Maybe it’s just cause I’m in more of a NINy mode right now.

Anyways, as I was saying, Santa Barbara was awesome. It’s a beautiful campus, especially when looking out over the water. In fact, I think the two best moments of the entire weekend were when Allie and I were constructing sand structures on the beach, and when we spotted two dolphins gracefully swimming west along the shore.

Other highlights include discovering that earning my Bachelor’s is going to require even fewer classes than I previously thought, meeting some really fun and interesting people, and having a late night powwow on the beach.

Aside #3: Just because I’m curious to know: do you, my readership, enjoy reading my longer, more detailed but multi-subjected entries? Or do you prefer when I write shorter, more focused entries about a single topic? Chances are I’m not going to change anything as a result of this survey, but I am interested in knowing the answer.
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Princess Leia [May. 30th, 2005|09:08 am]
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[Current Music |Blink 182 - A New Hope]

I've got her in my head
At night when I go to bed
And I know it sounds lame, but
She's the girl of my dreams

And of course I'd do anything for her
I'd search the moons of Endor
I'd even walk naked through
The deserts of Tatooine

And even though I'm not as cool as Han
I still want to be your man
You're exactly the kind of
Alderranian that I need


So I've had a pretty awesome weekend.

It started off shaky when the school went on lockdown at 2:35, so everybody had to spend an extra half hour at school. Right after the lockdown ended, though, I walked over to Allie's house, and we got to hang out during her sister's birthday party. I even got free pizza. After that was over Angelica drove us back to the school parking lot so we could pick up our cars and go home.

I stayed in Friday night to make sure that my mother would be willing to let me go to SuperHappyDevHouse on Saturday. I did chores around the house and was generally helpfull, and it ended up paying off. Saturday morning was uneventful, but in the afternoon I met Jim at In-N-Out, and then I drove off to the peninsula.

SuperHappyDevHouse was a fantastic party. Even though I encountered numerous problems relating to my flat screen monitor, I still managed to have a really awesome time. I managed to do a tiny bit of coding work on AUVSI, and I also refreshed my memory of perl by writing a very basic web application, which ended up being a brain teaser. I met a guy who was writing software to pilot a Jeep Cherokee in the DARPA Grand Challange. This was very cool not only because of how interesting and complicated the problem was, but also because it meant I wasn't the only person there writing artificial intelligence software for piloting unmanned vehicles.

I also met Jan, who came to the party armed not with a computer, but with decks of cards and rubber bands. She performed a number of magic tricks for us, which was not only entertaining in itself, but led to endless discussion as to how certain tricks were executed. Sometime after two in the morning Jan sat down at my computer and started IMing with Jim and Shelby, and the resultant conversations were pretty funny.

I met a ton of other cool people that night too. I'd especially like to thank David Weekly, for allowing all of us to utilize his amazing houes for an amazing party. If SuperHappyDevHouseII ever occurs, I'm definately interested in attending.

Anyways, I left the party around 5:00 AM, and drove down the peninsula to Saratoga to get some sleep, and say hi to my dogs and my family in the morning. When I awoke, however, I discovered that not only was my dad not home, neither were the dogs. My stepsister was the only one in the house, and she informed me that everyone had gone to Lake Tahoe for the weekend. So much for that plan.

I went back to sleep, and was awoken pleasantly by a phone call from Allie, who also happened to be in Tahoe. We talked for about half an hour, and then I went back to sleep again. I woke up around one, and left for Pleasanton. I also stopped at Kirk's for lunch, and ordered a Big Tripler.

Back in Pleasanton I took yet another nap, and then went out for Chineese with my mom, Matt, and Brett. Then I drove over to a park and sat on a bench while I talked for about another half hour with Allie. Then I drove over and saw Jim's appartment for the first time. Caitlin, Randal, and Shelby were also there, and we played Scrabble. I was beaten by team Jim+Shelby by a margin of 18 points, which isn't huge, but isn't very small either. I'll get 'em next time.
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[May. 29th, 2005|04:38 am]
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[Current Mood | tired]

I just locked my computer, for reasons unknown. I then spent about four minutes trying to type in my password. I have no password on this computer.
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[May. 29th, 2005|04:29 am]
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[Current Mood | tired]

ehhhh
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[May. 28th, 2005|02:58 pm]
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So I've been getting Zolton ready to take to DevLan. In addition to cleaning the dust out of the tower, and installing a WiFi PCI card, I had to disable my dual-monitor setup, because I only have one panel screen. Now I only have one monitor to work with. I feel significantly less powerful when I only have one monitor to work with.
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Reverse Insomnia [Apr. 28th, 2005|05:04 am]
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[Current Mood |awake]
[Current Music |Muse - Butterflies and Hurricanes]

Well, I woke up around four, and I've been trying to get back to sleep for the past hour but it isn't working, so I'm just going to get up now. I think I'm awake because I've had too much sleep lately. School starts late every day this week, so I've been sleeping in.

This week I've either been up to quite a lot, or very little, depending on how you look at it. I finished watching the fourth season of The West Wing, which was spectacular, as always. I really want to buy the fifth season, but the DVDs are only available in the UK right now, so I'm currently snatching bits and pieces out of the torrent. At this rate it'll be two days before the download is done, though.

I passed my Calculus final with a 4, meaning I did well enough to raise my grade in that class to a B. I'm also pretty sure I got a 5 on the Microeconomics final, as my multiple choice score alone was high enough to warrant a 4. I think I'm doing well on the Macro final too, but I won't take the second part of that one until Friday. Ironically I think I'm going to score better on the economics finals than on the government final, even though I know so much more about the latter. I just don't get along well with the format of the free response questions.

Speaking of tests, I have my six AP exams coming up over the next two weeks. If I pass all of these I'll have a total of 60 units of AP credit at UCSB, and my degree only requires 180. What this means is that over the next four years I'm going to have a really light courseload, and I'm going to have a ton of free time. As far as I'm concerned thats what college is supposto be like. There is some question as to whether or not I'll pass the Human Geography exam; especially because I've never taken the class. I declared Sunday the beginning of an 8-day study period that would be devoted to ensuring that I pass the test, but I've yet to dedicate any time to it. I really wouldn't be upset if I didn't pass it, although it would be a minor blow to my ego. I wonder if I can bring myself to study in order to prevent that?

I've also been in concact with two of the three men running for the vacant city council seat in the June election, and I'll hopefully be able to reach the third soon. I'm trying to arrange for them to come in and speak to the Student Political Association sometime next month, before the election. That should give the voting students a wonderful opportunity to select a candidate from what so far seems to be a relatively undifferentiated field. To be honest, right now I'm leaning towards Dan Faustina, because so far he's been willing to go out of his way to communicate with me. I might be meeting up with him and some of his campaign people Saturday morning, which should be a fun and educational experience.

I found out today that AUVSI (Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International) wants our team roster by Friday, which means I need to get ahold of everybody and find out who's coming to San Diego this summer. So far the trip will probably consist of myself, Randal, Tim, Damian, Stu, and Peter. Hopefully we can convince Evan to come down with us, and Dipayan is likely going to. If Allie remains active in the club she might come as well. There are also a handful of newbies who might accompany us.

I really do need to get cracking on the command software, and make sure Tim is handling the hardware side of thigns. I also need to get Stu back into active development; he's definately one of our key assets for this year. I'm hoping I can get some of the coding done at SuperHappyDevHouse. I've got a handful of other projects that I'd love to work on, but those are all for fun. If I don't get this software written we're going to have a beautiful submarine that doesn't do anything. I've still got a few kinks to work out of subversion, but overall that aspect is working very well. Hopefully I'll soon have at least Randal working through it too.

I need to learn how to divide this monolithic task into segments, so I can assign them to other programmers. I have control issues, and I feel like that if I have someone else code something I'll just have to rewrite it anyways in order to make sure it meets my specifications exactly. I need to let go. I actually already had Randal write a small piece of the software, and he did an outstanding job. I just need to get myself into a mental place where I can continue to rely on him to contribute to the code.

Alright, thats enough writing in here. I need to go write some code.
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Sleep [Jul. 27th, 2004|03:58 am]
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[Current Mood | tired]
[Current Music |Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral]

I'm not going to let this turn into a relatively-techincal entry like my last one. Suffice it to say that I worked on the submarine non-stop today from 1 in the afternoon to 4 in the morning.

Actually, I guess it wasn't really 13 hours non-stop. The hard-core work didn't actually start until around 4 in the afternoon. I woke up at 11, played KoL for about an hour, then grabbed jamba juice and pizza for breakfast. I got to Jenifer's around 1, but found that there wasn't really anything I could work on at that point. We ended up swimming for about an hour and a half, which was actually quite fun. Fiona came out to visit, and we ended up getting her quite wet by splashing too.

Eventually Nick called and told us we were relocating to Stu's house, and that there would be work for us there. Evan, Tim, and I made a quick Starbucks run and then went to Stu's house. By around 4 o'clock the hard-core sub work had begun.

At first I assisted Stu on troubleshooting the camera code, but I ended up getting drawn in to some seriously in-depth discussions of the hydrophone software with Nick and Evan. Eventually we brought Stu's dad Steve and Tim's dad Joel into the conversation, and we talked about everything. The discussion contained serious elements of information theory, wave theory, electronics, fluid dynamics, acouistic absorbance/reflection, digital signal processing, search algorithms, and software architecture/design. Steve and Joel are very knowledgeable, intelligent people, and they contributed enormously to my understanding of all of the above areas, and in doing so assisted in the design of the hydrophone software.

Anyway, this "theory" stage lasted until about 11:00 when the serious programming began. At this point Stu's family had to hit the hey, so Evan and I went over to Nicks house to write the actual software. Although we were all discussing and bouncing ideas back and forth, we each ended up kind of taking our own project for the night.

My main project was the aforementioned hydrophone code. I wrote almost all of it, and Nick and Evan helped me error-check and improve it. This work brought up the question of once we have the hydrophone data what do we actually do with it. Nick and Evan focused on this problem. Nick began writing the new mission driver, with a modular section to change the navigation code depending on what we eventually decide. Evan got really creative, and turned a car-driving simulation he had programmed for his CompSci final project into a navigation-algorithm simulator. We are now able to program in a number of different algorithms, and then watch the car drive in patterns emulating what our sub should do if we were to use the algorithms. It's a very interesting theoretical tool, and I think will aid us to some extent in choosing our algorithm. It also might help us score some static-judging points, assuming we change the graphics to something more sub-related.

Alright, I know I promised this would be less techincal, but oh well.

I'm going to sleep until about noon, then I have to drive some parts over to Stu's house. I'll then head over to Jenifer's and code for a few hours. After that I get to meet up with Allie; it'll be the first time I'll have seen her in six weeks. I'll spend as much time with her as possible, but I'll have to head back over and do some more programming. I'm not sure if I'll actually sleep tomorrow night; we're leaving at 4 in the morning anyways.
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Submarine [Jul. 26th, 2004|12:04 am]
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[Current Mood |lucky]

Alright, today a number of the problems with the submarine were finally all solved at right about the same time.

Today Kevin finished making the new connector board, and I installed it into the computer rack. As amazing as it sounds, everything worked perfectly on the new board. Stewart was able to isolate the problem with the engine controllers to a damaged ribbon cable, and managed to repair it. When we put the new components together with the repaired old ones, we popped in the endplates with the o-ring seals and started to lower the vehicle into the water.

Luckily for us all I noticed when the water started to pool in the bottom of the tube, and we hastily yanked the sub back out and drained the water. The water got within about an inch of the compass complex, but nothing was damaged. It turns out we just failed to seal the ring properly, and after a very careful examination, we put the sub back into the water, and the seal held.

All of this was done through the tether, and the moment of truth came when we sent the computer the command to start engines.

It worked!

Now the submarine has working engines, a compass, communication tether, and of course the computer works.

Our primary tasks remaining include fixing the waterproof camera, installing the hydrophones, and then writing the new mission driver.

As of this posting we have about 51.5 hours left until we have to leave for San Diego. This is going to take a lot of work, and even more luck.
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Carson City [Jul. 19th, 2004|12:03 pm]
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[Current Mood | numb]
[Current Music |None]

Alright, in an Internet Cafe now. $7 for an hour isn't too bad. Had to drive about 20 minutes to get here, though.

I solved the segmentation fault last night, it was actually pretty easy. It turns out the file path for the command program is hard-coded into the binary, which means that whenever the binary is not in the correct path it will segfault. All I had to do was move it to the right place in the filesystem and that worked. After that I just needed to remove some of the debug comments I added, and to create some blank config files the program wanted to learn. Tonight I'm goin to start working on the new mission driver, and also try to figure out what kind of data is supposto be stored in the three config files the program created for me. I should actually post this in the botz forums. I'll copy-paste it there in a minute.

As for the vacation, it's alright. The resort blows, but I'm still managing to have fun. I haven't heard from any girls the whole time I've been here though, which is pretty depressing. I've sent Caitlin a few emails from my phone; and sent everyone emails from my normal account. I hope I get emails or calls from someone soon. I don't care if someone calls me in the middle of the night, I need to be saved from the boringness that is the Nevada Desert.
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Genoa, Nevada [Jul. 18th, 2004|09:25 pm]
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Alright, we're in Genoa Nevada. As far as I can tell it's not even really a city. The only buildings I have seen are owned by this "resort". And it's basically an old person resort. They have cheap mineral water pools, which are actual pools into which they suppodosly pump water from mineral springs. Especially lame because old people constantly fill them up.

The only thing to do here is play poker against my family members. I won $14 bucks tonight, which makes me very happy as it is my first poker winning ever. I'm hoping to add to that amount by the end of the trip, and also to get good enough to maybe not always loose money when playing in PTown.

Working on the sub right now. Trying to solve the fscking Segmentation fault. I'm probably going to be at this for hours. See ya.
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Short [Jul. 17th, 2004|05:23 pm]
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[Current Mood | blah]

I want to write more but I don't have a lot of time. I'll probably be insoniatic tonight and write a lot more though.

My Stepbrother is in boot camp, and I just found out he has pnemonia. He's hooked up to an oxygen machine in a hospital now. My stepmom flew down to see him last night. I've heard that you get kicked out of boot camp if you get sick. I hope thats not true. I hope he's alright.

I'm leaving for Nevada in the morning. I'll still be reachable on my cell, and I'm going to try to hit the internet cafes as much as possible. I'm also bringing Fernando to work on the sub code. I'm flying back on Thursday, and I'm going to need to find someone to pick me up at the BART station to drive me home.

I slept from 4 to noon this morning. Then I spent the period from about 12 to 4 cat-napping. This is why I know I'm going to be up late tonight. I think I'm dehydrated though. I've had a small headache all day, and I haven't been drinking anything. I also went like a week without taking my vitamins, and I think thats contributing to my blah feeling. I'm back on the pills though, hopefully it'll improve how I'm feeling.
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Computers [May. 17th, 2004|11:09 pm]
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[Current Music |Boards of Canada - An Eagle in Your Mind]

My download of Fedora Core 2 is just about done. I'll hopefully upgrade Opus when I get home from Cheer practice tomorrow.

I was sorting through heaps of old files, and I was really excited to stumble upon a bunch of code I'd thought I'd lost forever. It was the Final Fantasy Tactics style game I was working on using OpenGL in C++. Hopefully I'll be able to go through the code one of these days and edit into some sort of form suitable for publishing on the interweb. Who knows, maybe once I get jmep into a working order I might even go back and revisit the tactics game.

My wrist has been really sore since prom. I think bowling really made it this sore, and then typing on it certainly hasn't helped. I need to do something about this CTS soon, before I do something irrepreable (if I havne't already) :-/

I want to post more code in the projects section of my site, but all the stuff I have needs to be cleaned up before I can put it live. So I'm going to stop typing and go to bed. Night!
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jmep [May. 17th, 2004|06:30 pm]
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http://www.carljantzen.com/projects/jmep/index.html

Alright, I made a post a few weeks ago about my ideal UberAmp application. Well, for my final project in CompSci I've decided to go ahead and start work on it. There isn't much of anything on the website yet, it's really more of a tool for me to keep track of where I am, but it's public incase anyone else wants to take a look.
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