Well folks,

Though I would like to post something more substantial and much closer to a recap before the term officially ends, I wanted to keep you up-to-date about what’s been happening. The end of term, particularly the end of spring term, is one that truly demonstrates the range of class experiences we have here. Some folks are done with all class material and all classes (I know a senior in this camp) after today, and some folks have final projects due tomorrow, and next week, as well are a variety of final exams. I am in the camp of still having both projects, papers, and a final exam, but I can’t complain – I’ve had a term or two with very sparse end-of-term work. And of course, the projects and papers wouldn’t be so pressing if I’d started earlier, but we know how that goes.

Also a quick reflection on something I brought up around midterms: you can, in fact, save yourself if you find that you have not done so well on the first half of the class. I’ve had a professor here (not this term) who made it a policy to say that if your cumulative grade after a midterm was a D, and your cumulative grade for everything (including the final exam) after the midterm was an A, you would get an A in the class. But even without a policy that so strongly believes in this concept of redeeming your academic performance, you really can do well if you pull yourself together. I’ve seen people, even this term, do remarkably well working under that philosophy.

Cardinals on Wheels looks to have some really fantastic events next term, having gone through finance committee and receiving our funding. So we look forward to seeing some of you, dear readership, at our events.

Alright, enough rambling for right now.

Again, I hope to post again before term is out, at least to reflect on this year from an academic, extra-curricular, and yes, even blogging, perspective. See you then. Well, sort of.

Free speech! No beating around the bush this time.
So, there was a recent court case that is in the great machine of our Federal Court system. Case goes like this: a professor, in a constitutional law class (as I recall) is discussing affirmative action. He makes comments that, while possibly provocative, were meant to foster debate in his classroom. His comments were not inappropriate to either the class (constitutional law) or the subject matter (a government policy). Two students, finding his remarks offensive, get the student organization of which they are a part involved. This student organization then claims - based on the statements of these two students - that the professor said inappropriate, racially insensitive, things. These are the facts of the case as I remember them -except for a couple I’m neglecting for dramatic effect - and if I am incorrect in any particulars the spirit of the issue is there. The professor sued for defamation on his character, because the things said by the organization were untrue, as both sides now admit.
The question is whether or not the professor, being the professor, should be allowed to sue them, as students. The dean of this college says no on the grounds that it will prevent active debate and will act as a detriment to the overall learning of all students if students do not feel safe saying what they believe.

I was discussing this case with some friends (after the discussion began in my Constitutional Issues class) and the friends were concerned about the entire case, as I was telling it to them. I told them the facts in the same order I have listed them here, and then proceeded to say “the student organization proceeded to tell the dean and the college community the untrue remarks about the professor…” My friends were still uncomfortable about the idea of a professor suing students. And I continued “… and every local media source that would listen.” And then my three friends, in unison, went ‘oh okay then that is totally defamation.”
Without going into my beliefs on the subject, I feel it is not unfair to say that the inverse of the dean’s perspective could also be true: as a professor, I would be afraid to teach in a way that is conducive to engaging students if I was constantly afraid of being defamed while I had no recourse.

So in short, North Central fans: intelligent conversation inside and outside the classroom. Take that.

On the COW front, we had a ball at Medieval Times, and everyone hopes we can return next year.

Classes are relatively wrapping up, which will prove interesting for all manner of reasons, not the least of which being folks’ concerns about final projects.

I was (yesterday) recognized as the Outstanding Major in Computer Science, so that was quite exciting. I shared the award with my fellow blogger, Kelsey Wiseheart, which was pretty nifty. During our professor’s speech on us, our professor mentioned the subjects of our respective honor’s theses. While I was trying to keep somewhat of a lid on mine, my professor spoke in a way that now compels me to speak more openly about its subject, so here goes.
The nutshell version is that I feel that story-based, non-episodic, single-player role playing games are in a serious decline as a sub genre (to those of you who play them: when is the last time you saw a new one?) and I believe I know a possible cause and I believe I have a possible solution.
Quite the challenge, I know. But frankly I feel its a sub genre worth saving, and I hope it isn’t lost to the ages amidst massively multiplayer role playing games and role playing games that are mission-based, or episodic.

Oh, and for everyone who won awards yesterday, congratulations. I know many of you, and I’m glad to see that everyone did so well.

Okay, I know I have more to say, but I lost the thread. Many apologies.

Good luck everyone!

I return!

Which sounds like a good I poster, now that I think of it. But it needs to be something cool like coming back from Asia, not ‘writing a post in notepad, forgetting to actually post it, and then having to throw that post away because it was out of date.’ Oh yeah.

So new information!

Let’s start with the simple: COW is going well, Study Abroad classes are going well, as are my other classes. My honors advisor and I are continually hashing out the details of my honors thesis, and my father and I are having some interesting conversations about some of the finer concepts (like the nature of magic in role playing games). Relay for Life went really well, and while I wish we were able to raise more money, I think we can have a really good experience on that end next year, particularly since, now that I’ve been to Relay once, I am super-pumped about next year (insomuch as such a thing is possible a year away from the event). We had a study abroad meeting today that was really cool because we got to talk with folks who went on the China / Japan trip last year and the year before, and while I am friends with two people who have gone on the trip in previous years, it was nice to hear more people’s experiences in a group setting. Oh, and in one of my courses, we are talking about how - essentially - certain types of free speech are being eaten away here in the good ol’ US of A.

So enough ranting. For this post, let’s talk about Relay… and probably a few other things. But Relay for Life was incredibly fun. For those of you who don’t know what Relay for Life is, it essentially is a giant fund raiser to support cancer research and jazz of that nature. And it is an amazing coming together of survivors, family members, friends, and people who have been touched by cancer. And it is an incredibly emotional experience for some folks. In COW’s group, there were a significant number of individuals who had lost a close family member to cancer, and so it was a really remarkable experience for them to be able to be in a place with other people who have been in their situation, and further with people who have actually fought the disease and won.
In terms of the activities, it was tons of fun, though I have to say it was really really hard. The idea is that someone from the team must at all times (12 hours period from 6pm to 6am) be walking around the track (we were in a gym, though it is customary for some Relays to be outdoors). Often we were on the track together, but the point is that there is always someone representing. This - which I didn’t know until I was there - is supposed to be symbolic of the journey of a cancer survivor: dusk settles, and you are diagnosed with cancer. The light of your life, like the light of the day, seems to dwindle and fade out, seemingly never to return. It gets darker and colder and while you still have energy you start to feel fatigue. At one or two in the morning, they say, one experiences the kind of despair that sometimes takes hold of a cancer patient: one thinks they cannot keep going, in the context of the Relay, one wants to go home to their bed, and in the context of the cancer patient, may not want to continue with treatments. Finally, at four or five, dawn shows up, symbolizing the end of treatment and the realization that, while you have some distance to go, you can see the end. At first I admit I was not quite clear if the experiences would live up to the symbolism, but I have to say at like 2:30 / 3 am, after all the other activities that were going on at Relay, I just wanted to drive home and sleep. But we all persisted, so that was good.

A note on the activities one does at Relay: there are tons of things set up by the wonderful organizers, and those things are really fun, but I have two things of note to say. The first is simply that, if you are going to play in the basketball tournament, note that there are people who probably play basketball more seriously than you do, and you may get beaten horribly. Which isn’t to say I wouldn’t do it again, but next time I need to play a little first. Also, if you are going to play a Risk-like board game which simulates world war two, try not to play it while guys are throwing a Frisbee around you. To quote a friend. “Hey Chris do you know who won World War II?” “Uhm…” “The Frisbee.”

So yeah.
And now, I fear, I must run. But I’m shooting for another post this week, as I want to get in something from my Constitutional Issues class, because it’s pretty awesome. And terrifying.

And Happy Commuter Appreciation Week everyone!

Hello happy people,

Over the past couple weeks I have put considerable thought into the stated purpose of these (and really any) student blogs, and the phrase ’seeing what college life is really like’ keeps standing out. I think it is valuable to remember two things when thinking about that idea. First, that life in college and anywhere else is based greatly on what you make of it (as I believe I have stated before) and secondly that college life still falls under the broader category of ‘life.’ Life here is much like life before and after graduation. And while I recognize there is a wealth of popular opinion to counter that argument, I defer those opinions to a professor I had only once (and who, despite our limited interaction, provided some remarkably insightful comments about life) who said (to greatly paraphrase) “there is no ‘real world’ when one leaves college. College is just as ‘real world’ as anywhere else. You people [students] have to balance your personal lives, full time academic schedules, many of you have jobs and extra curricular activities and I know several of you commute. This is just as real as the world you’ll find when you graduate.” The professor, mind you, when on to use this argument to discuss how if we were habitually late for class we would be habitually late for work when we graduated, etc. But the argument in and of itself stuck with me. And I was reminded of it when confronted with some of the issues of this term.
As you folks may have noticed, there’s been a lapse in my posts. I explain this only by saying that I, like any other student here, am subject to the same real life laws that people in the real world are subject to, which sometimes includes some hilarious and not-so-hilarious misfortune. To recap briefly, personal issues, a short emergency room visit, an automotive failure, academic issues, and all manner of other small and incredibly annoying misfortunes (like leaving a pen in a load of laundry and causing ink spots to appear over all of my clothing) have plagued me over the past couple weeks. But things look to be on the rise: my health is recovering wonderfully, even though I cannot say the same for my clothes.

The past few weeks, I feel, should remind us all that while some students may go to college for free, party all the time, never go to class, and in general not take any responsibility for their lives, I think that this group is in such an overwhelming minority that those students should not shape (as I feel is so often the case in popular culture) the perception of students. We, like any other population, live in as real a world as any.

And now, for the general updates.

I am making significant progress at a project I have been working on for a fair amount of time at my internship. The project involved me learning –essentially from scratch- some of the basics about Visual Basic, ASP.NET, XML, XSL, and some commercial web-services. It has been a really significant learning curve, but I have made some really appreciable progress so I’m glad for that.

Classes are going relatively well, which is to say that they are -as is their nature- challenging, time consuming, and worthwhile experiences. Hopefully in a post soon I will talk a little bit more about my honors thesis. I’m quite excited about it, as it lets me research into a subject that is important to me.

As a junior, I met with my advisor to schedule my last round of classes. We spoke at length and made sure that I would be able to graduate in four years, fulfilling the requirements for a Computer Science major with an English Writing minor while simultaneously fulfilling the requirements to graduate with honors. And there was a strange sense when I realized I would have exactly enough time to get in exactly the classes I needed. Everything fell into place, and it allowed for the moment when you realize graduation isn’t that far away. And then you also realize that doesn’t change the one paper being due next week, and so that moment was short lived.

Oh! And the first study abroad orientation met since I posted last, and I must say I am very excited about the program. Which I suppose should go without saying, but the opportunity to be able to meet the other people going on the trip, including the professor that would accompany us, was really nice. The folks seem to be cool people, and I’m glad for the opportunity to get to know them better over the course of the orientations, pre-study abroad class, and the program itself.

I think that’s about it for me.
So there.

Welcome back everyone.
Or should you be welcoming me back? I’m not sure.

In any case, it’s the beginning of Spring term and all the excitement associated therewith. Rall Symposium presentations, tons of fun activities from student orgs, not the least of which will be COW, wonderful classes, warm weather, etc etc. And -before you go thinking I’ve suddenly become overly bubbly - the graduation of some of our dearest friends, as they go off and leave the Ivory halls forever.
Are we balanced now? Fantastic.

Classes this term look to be the general mixture of excitement and challenge.
Okay, I suppose there are some people for whom that’s not the norm, but I truly feel (and have probably said so here) that college is almost entirely what you make of it, and that if you don’t take the opportunities that are presented to you then you’ll be less satisfied with your experiences than someone who has. And North Central, I have found, is rife with opportunities for those who keep their eyes open and actually talk to their professors.
Which means that, for the most part, I’m really happy with my classes despite how difficult they often are. This term, I’m working on my honors thesis (amazingly exciting, but from the background research I did over spring break, it’ll be a crushing amount of work - even though I have a year and a term before I graduate / it’s due), taking a class on constitutional issues (taught by a professor who routinely provokes students to engage them in the content of the class), a class dealing with Linux (how can you not love Linux?), and, in the latter five weeks of the term, my pre-study abroad trip for China / Japan (and let’s be honest, it hasn’t fully sunk in yet, but I’m excited all the same).

In any case, I’m really excited, desperately busy, and looking forward to the rest of the term.

Talk to you folks again soon.

So much to talk about.

But first, an apology. This past week has been… well I won’t say bad necessarily. I feel it is enough to say that, roughly speaking, I spent 13 hours a day at school. Not unheard of, certainly. And not even unheard of for folks who commute a fair distance. But definitely unusual. So I’ve been busy, to say the least

I know I spoke last post about the plethora of people who were ill, and I reiterate that message now, not because of those same people, but rather – unfortunately – because a new group of people have been suffering from some fairly significant medical problems. So again, to all those folks, I wish them speedy recoveries.

And now, academia.

Final projects were due at the end of last week, and that was, for the most part, where I was / what I was doing. For one of my classes we had to design and implement (in Java) a program that would not only generate mazes at random but would also solve those same mazes. The generation part was quite interesting: it involved data structures called graphs that would be able to represent something as relatively unorganized as a maze. But the coolest part, to be honest, was the solution part. It involved backtracking, which is best described in the terms of a maze. Basically, the program walks through the maze, and when it hits a dead end, it just backs up and goes somewhere it hasn’t been before. If it can’t go somewhere it hasn’t been before, it backs up more.
And that’s essentially it, from a conceptual perspective.
The picture that follows is a maze I just generated (each is random) and the dotted path is the solution.

Game programming also required a final project, and for it our professor decided to allow us to design our own game and implement it (with some requirements – he has to grade it, after all). For mine, I decided to create a game where you flew around in an Asteroids style ship and shot lasers at other opponents. Basic concept. But the twist is that you can create these things called wormholes, which not only allow you to travel at double speed when you create them, but also – once they’re created – drag any player that comes too close to one of the endpoints along the length of the wormhole.
Long story short, it’s pretty nifty, even though wasn’t able to complete everything I wanted to.
The first screen shot is the start screen, the second is from playing.

On the Cardinals On Wheels front, we met with Finance Committee the Thursday before last, and it went quite well. If you don’t know / if I have forgotten to mention, Finance Committee is a group of students responsible for allocating the student activities budgets to student organizations. That said, it seems to be that student organizations look at Finance Committee, in the good case, with a wary eye, and almost always nervously. In the worst case, I think its very possible that some student organizations feel they have an adversarial relationship with Finance Committee, as if they have the cash and it’s an uphill battle to get any out of them. However, when we went up before the Committee, (we being four members of COW’s executive board – a fifth was sitting elsewhere in the room) we kind of just chatted. Spoke of the events on our budget, spoke about reasonable changes to our budget that would make everyone happy. As my advisor would say, instead of merely believing we has to divvy up a fixed set of resources (a pie, if you will) we expanded the pie. So all went well, and we have some really cool events coming up next term, including a trip to Medieval Times, Anderson’s Japanese Gardens, the Second City comedy club, and more!

Finally, on a more personal note, the Saturday before last two friends and I attended the Distant Worlds Concert, which is part of a world tour of Final Fantasy music. This of course tells you how incredible of a nerd I am, but I really love the music (and have been playing the games for what, fourteen years now?). I was really lucky to be able to go. I even was able to see the composer, which was pretty much ridiculously amazing.

Yeah folks. It is kind of like that.

Okay that would be awesome.

Anyway,

This week has been a busy week for everyone, for some reason or another. It seems several people I know or relatives of people I know are ill or injured, and so I would like to take this beginning-of-post opportunity to wish all of those folks well.

Also, there has been insane levels of work (at least on my end, and I know with other folks) being put into school. Around this time you get the whole ‘when is this term over’ feeling, and I once complained (unnecessarily loudly, I’ll admit) about how glad I was that the break was coming up (at that time) in three weeks. And he argued (correctly, I feel) that I would feel that way regardless of whether it had been the seventh week of a ten week term or the twelfth week of a fifteen week term. But still, the end looms in sight.

And that marks the end of serious time.

In other news, I have recently been speaking with one of my professors to try and develop my Senior Honors Thesis, which (I hope) will end up being a game. I wasn’t sure if that would end up being acceptable, but I took a brief look at the kinds of theses we have in our library (we house them all for mildly clueless people like myself). And there was a masters thesis (I wasn’t paying attention to what kinds of theses I was looking at) that was simply the user interface to a computer game, so I figure if I step down the level of seriousness -Senior Honors Thesis instead of masters thesis- and step up the level of complexity (I assume, of course, since I did not fully read and therefore cannot fully appreciate the student’s thesis) -by making a complete, or relatively complete, game instead of just the interface to one- we should be good. This is all hope and speculation of course. Nothing has yet been submitted. When everything is set up, though, I would like to describe some of my ideas.

On….. um… Wednesday? Some friends and I watched the lunar eclipse, which was really cool. Of course, it was also extremely cold – so much so that my camera would continually say that my brand new batteries were dead. But we had a lot of fun, and for you, I have a picture!
So take that.

Though a note for any of you stargazing folks out there. I don’t know what possessed me to listen to the news people when they said the time of the eclipse, because, as an astronomical event, it took like 45 minutes to get any really nifty shots.

And finally, this Saturday was the Cardinals on Wheels Chicago Symphony Orchestra trip. We had fewer people go than we had planned, and that was mildly disappointing, but that was due to about a hundred thousand things going slightly awry. But we had a small, devoted group, that was really excited to go and that had a lot of fun.
As for the performance, it was amazing. Really amazing. There was this featured solo pianist who was essentially the epitome of incredible. She was a very small older woman who would play the piano incredibly smoothly in some places, and in others slammed on the keys such that her hair would bounce. She was intense.
And a picture from before we left.

Hi folks,

So a quick post, but action packed!
This past week was quite challenging, as a couple of projects were due that involved some nifty but complicated data structures (one of which was a quad tree – think binary tree with four kids per node). On Friday the 8^th Cardinals on Wheels had our Winter Party, during which we had folks eat food and make No-Sew blankets to a donate to an organization called Project Linus. Project Linus, for those of you who don’t know, is non-for-profit organization that donates blankets to children with serious illnesses or who have recently lost a parent. So we had a ton of people put together these blankets, and I was able to drop them off to the Project Linus folks this last Saturday.
Next weekend looks to be really exciting for COW as well, because we are going to travel to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. And though we originally budgeted for the cheapest (and therefore most distant) seats possible, they ended up upgrading us to the main floor, which means we skipped another level of distance in-between. So exciting.

And also, this Friday I received a letter from the Office of International Programs, and I was accepted into the China / Japan study abroad program. I am really happy I was accepted, and so more updates on that as they progress.

And for now, that’s all.

Hey folks!I prefer not to talk about the weather, as it’s the stereotypical ‘I have nothing else to talk about’ madness, but this past week I felt it was of note for several reasons. As a commuter student with night classes four days a week, I drive home in the dark almost without exception. The white out conditions this past week were pretty much incredible. As I have been telling folks, earlier last week I was driving, a cloud of snow blew by, and as it passed, a semi truck materialized. Amazingly dangerous conditions, clearly. But amazing nonetheless.And also, of course, school was shut down on Friday - at least during the day - which as I am aware is a greatly uncommon occurrence.Also this week, I dropped off my study abroad application (I hope to study through our China / Japan program next fall) with some friends that are planning to study in London next fall. I’m really excited, and I hope things go well.Last Friday, despite day classes being canceled, Cardinals on Wheels had both our Cardinal Breakfast and Laser Tag events. When we take folks to Laser Tag, we traditionally have gone to Laser Quest in Downer’s Grove and we play three games solely with our group. The roads cleared up by the time we left in the evening for Laser Tag, and we sold out every spot. I think folks had a lot of fun and so I’m happy it went so well. I, of course, am terrible at Laser Tag. But our staff sponsor scored second overall in our second game, which surprised some folks, I think (including her).So not-so-candid, non-inclusive, probably terrible group photo. Behold!

Good afternoon folks,

So for this week, I have for your reading pleasure a collection of events from the week.

Cardinals on Wheels is going well – next week is both our Cardinal Breakfast (we bring in donuts, bagels, and assorted juices into the Cardinal Lounge) and our Laser Tag events, so that should be tons of fun.
A friend of mine recently submitted a collection of poems to a competition that (I believe) is being run by the college. I of course did not get my act together soon enough to submit my own work, but I hope hers does well.
All of my classes – despite their level of difficulty – have been fun, but in varying ways. One of my classes – which is a math class masquerading as a Computer Science class – reminds me that I really did enjoy math classes before I came to college (I tested out of the majority of my math general education requirements thanks to my high school Calculus AP class). Another one of my classes directly ties into the aforementioned, so that’s nice to see that link as well.
And then there’s game programming.

Every time I talk about it, every time, I keep thinking about those commercials you see where there’s (usually males 18 – 25: the target video game player demographic) folks on the screen going ‘oh man I can’t believe we get paid to do this,’ because those commercials are nothing short of ludicrous. Frankly, I would have incredible respect for an institution that aired a commercial about their game development program, and on it was person who looked like they hadn’t slept in a day or so, totally frazzled saying “I just spent three hours trying to figure out why the sound authoring software for this API wasn’t even starting until I figured out that in Vista you have to run it with administrator privileges every time, and then I spent another two hours trying to figure how to use software, and I still don’t know how to incorporate it into my game. If I were to get paid for this, I’d have it coming.”
Yep.

But to be honest it’s not all seriousness and bugs. During class last night, two students were playing a game on a laptop that was to be the premise of our next homework, and my professor yelled at them in an incredibly amused sort of way.
It was hilarious.