Ravings of an Undead Cheese Minion

Choose Edit Mesh -> Delete Edge/Vertex. 

I made that post about my October goals and then got my butt kicked, mainly due to the layoff completely tanking my morale.  So, let's try again.  Today is a kinda flex-day but we are getting back to it as soon as lunch is over.  Fun stuff: Success:  I already made my final Lagoon trip as it is now closed for the season. I went swimming outdoors while it was still warm, and did 2 races. I have also eaten Reese's pumpkins, ghosts, and bats lol. I did some great fall walks and took some trips to Wilkerson Farm, though not a ton.  2 more trips to Wilkerson Farm. 1 trip to Cornbelly's Lehi and 1 trip to Cornbelly's Spanish Fork Go to Witchfest / Ricochet Canyon to ride Rattling Iron Read scary stories on the Noctrium, and a few others. Watch 1 horror movie, maybe even just The Conjuring again Watch Over the Garden Wall as I've heard lots of good things about it, plus it's supposed to be a great show for fall Clean and decorate for Halloween (yes, even for just a day...

It's technically still fall, but winter in Utah really starts around Halloween. It's 29F. I'm cold. It's winter. 1. All bathrooms are closed at parks and trails. The implicit assumption is that you will not leave your house until May. So if you have to pee, you are out of luck.  2. Your windshield constantly fogs up, so you have to run the defroster. This means you can't recycle air. Instead you have to breathe in the nice gas fumes from the freeway.  3. All theme parks and water parks are closed.  4. Whenever you are running and see ice, you have to slow down to a walk so you don't fall and get hurt. I've fallen on the ice while running too many times.  5. Everyone blasts the heat like crazy. So you go from freezing to melting constantly.  6.All the layers you constantly have to shed and re-don.  On the bright side, the bathroom at Vineyard Grove hasn't closed yet.  And at least the bugs are dead. 

And it's time to start. Almost every company asks algorithm questions for some reason. I enjoyed those courses, but can't always pull things out of my hat on the fly for an interview.  For example, an interview asked me once to design an LR1 cache or something (?) and I legitimately had no idea what they were talking about. Obviously, that didn't go so well.  I didn't do much Leetcode grinding, despite enjoying the problem-solving, because I have so many interests and commitments. And to solve those problems you've kinda got to sit with them for a while, can't just crank them out in 15 minutes. So it's hard to balance and thus I don't do it a lot.  After today, my final day of work, or at the very least by tomorrow, my new life begins. I will do my best to not miss any days of Leetcoding -- but first, 2 weeks to re-code data structures (I should be able to spin them up from scratch) and finish Cracking the Coding Interview. After that, some easy problems...

"I can't change the weather." Or can you?  Get the daily forecast and then change it to be whatever you want. 35F too cold for you? Crank it right up to 75F. Wish it wasn't snowing? Change it to sunny, stat. Wish you were in Cancun? You are now. That sunshine sure feels nice, doesn't it?  With Weather Wish, deny reality just as you deny the existence of the abyss that we've all been hurtling towards since birth.  (I'm going to make an Apple Watch version of this too, plus maybe a home screen widget and the ability to adjust longer-term forecasts. And maybe custom photo backgrounds. Got to differentiate it from the few other ones that are out there.)

I was going to list this on my other blog post. However, I didn't.  This will need to be as school-like as possible, with deadlines and everything. The deadlines will be flexible, but only slightly so. The pace will be decent, but not killer, and the tests open-book. Each course will have a project too -- if it makes sense to do so.  general idea to finally finish this Finish CS, physics I, and math review by December, or February at the latest. That'll be brutal, but necessary.  Finish OSEE -- with MechE minor -- in the recommended 3 years, if possible. But, it can be extended to 6 if necessary. Basically stretching out a semester into a year.  Finish my PLC courses all by the end of 2024.  Get CompTIA and CCNA by May 2024, or at least by EOY 2024 Finish art self-study CORE -- the stuff we've been wanting to do for forever -- by the end of 2023. The rest of the stuff can take until 2024 when we will start Cubebrush.  For writing, I want to get to writing 3...

...not studying engineering.  For the record, I do NOT regret majoring in computer science. I loved all the classes and the animation emphasis. I just should have double-majored. I mean, the entire time through CS, I was secretly thinking, "will I actually be able to design roller coasters with a CS degree?" But I liked it, so didn't want to switch out, and had too many credits anyway. These feelings only amplified when taking over the TPED club. Reading about PLCs, and from my communications with Birket Engineering, it does seem possible to get into controls software engineering. But, you can't get a PE with a CS degree. And actual engineering graduates will take precedence over you for jobs. Case in point, just got passed over for a Universal Creative engineering job, even though CS majors are listed as one of the majors that is accepted.  Emotions are still high for me, in a negative way, due to getting laid off from DreamWorks starting on Friday, 2 days from now. ...

I've spent many hours over the past few years trying to figure out the optimal bank of knowledge that I need in order to become highly competent at everything I'm interested in. I've constantly revised my self-study sequence, and it's taken me much longer than ideal to get to the point I'm at now -- and I'm still quite behind. But with this most recent layoff (hooray for round 2), I've got some time to re-organize and re-commit.  My end goal is to build my entire dream theme park resort virtually in a game engine, complete with schematics to show its feasibility. I will do this entirely on my own. In case something happens to the game engine itself, as much logic and asset data as possible will be abstracted out into engine-independent classes and folders. Once it's built virtually, I might get some rich person or company to build it for me, if they are impressed enough. If not, or if that takes away my creative rights to my rides or something, I'll ...

A few years back, I was approached by an Amway scammer at Nielsen's Grove Park. It is generally very difficult to break out of their conversations. I didn't know anything about Amway at the time, nor was that name explicitly mentioned. However, something about the whole conversation seemed off, and I figured out pretty quickly afterwards what it was.  I'm pretty sure the dude that talked to me in Target today was another Amway scammer as he had a very similar conversational script to the first guy. Also he was dressed way too nice for a grocery store, was alone without a shopping cart, kept talking about owning a business, etc....there were a lot of signs. A lady gave me a nice way out of the conversation by asking if I was in line. I'm not sure if it was intentional or not but I'm pretty sure she realized what was happening, lol.  At some point I'm going to clob together a set of common patterns to ID these people because it's very annoying when someone see...

terminated gray and grim clouds blot out the sunlight summer is gone and winter is nigh trapped in the north with no firelight to warmer lands the birds will fly but I will remain, amidst impenetrable white stars in uncaring night skies the dream has died and so have I

I like the hardware, yes. I'm definitely going to keep wearing the ring and sleeping with it. It's cool tech.  However, it was not worth the membership cost, or the stress associated with the terrible scores it gave me even when I was sleeping really well . Checking the scores regularly made my sleep significantly worse. To be honest, the Circul+ was better, although the hardware was crap.  It would also tell me that I wasn't getting enough REM on nights where I was remembering like 10 different dreams...because when I was having REM, it thought I was awake. It kept scolding me in the readiness section for doing everything wrong with my sleep hygiene. I had no issues sleeping until I started using this thing. I gave it time and it didn't improve. So, canceled. Again, I still enjoy wearing the ring, will continue to do so, and may reinstate the membership later...But probably not.