C'est la Vie

I had to register for classes this morning, so I assembled a schedule last night based on the classes that were "available" on UK's course directory.

Nothing much to complain about. Despite PHY 242 and EE 281, it's a fairly consistent schedule.

As it turns out, though, UK lists all of its possible sections as "available" even if the class, for whatever reason, doesn't exist (one of the professors declined to teach it, etc.). Unfortunately, I'd chosen some of these fake sections, so I had to do some shuffling this morning. Here's what I ended up with:

Hardly what I started with. To be honest, it's kind of a mess. But oh well. Maybe it'll work out alright. I've just got mixed feelings about that 6:00 Calculus 3 class. And I'll withhold my rude opinions about the 8:00 logical circuit design lab on Thursdays.

FLAR, huh?

So I've been casually running across these FLAR (Flash Augmented Reality) things for the last few years. Sometimes in YouTube videos, sometimes in the news, but I've never really messed with it myself.

Until I ran across a GE banner ad today.

I held the paper up the camera and out folded wind turbines and the golden gate bridge, followed by a sunrise through the marker image on the paper. Pretty dramatic; I was surprised at how well it worked. So then I started scratching around the internet for other similar novelties.

This one was a New Years promotion by the company that made the game "Katamari Damaci." They don't outright provide the marker, so it took a bit of Googling to make it work.

The car didn't work very well. And it was a little on the ugly side.

These fireworks were pretty cool. You wait for the picture to dim, then click to launch the rockets.


Um. . . yeah.

I saved the best for last. This one projects an interactive globe above the marker image, and a clock on the image itself. Give it a name and a zip code, and it points it out on the globe. Groovy, eh?

LINKZ:

• GE ad
• New Years Promo
• Car
• Fireworks
• Tounge
• Globe
  

If I May

So about this college thing. Not so big a fan. Every day, I cross campus thinking, "Is this really what I want to do with my life? Computer engineering?" And the answer is, "Eh, it's about all I could come up with. Unless the Travel Channel decides they want to pay me to travel the globe, I'm fresh out of ideas for what I want to do."

Up above
Aliens hover
Making home movies
For the folks back home

Of all these weird creatures
Who lock up their spirits
Drill holes in themselves
And live for their secrets
-Radiohead, "Subterranean Homesick Alien"

So I tell myself to learn to love it. Cut my losses. Call it even. Move along. But the grossest part of it all is that it just seems so cold to me. There's just not a whole lot of beauty to writing code and drawing schematics. I mean, maybe for some people, but not for me. I'd change my major, but what to?

I guess I've got a little bit of time to think about it, maybe. Like an hour or so.

But the icing on this cake of depression is the fact that if my GPA drops below a 3.3 at any point, I lose the bulk of my scholarship money. So what then? If I don't ace Calculus, I drive back to Murray and stay there for a few years, facing puzzled stares and responding to the more-question-than-statement, "I thought you went to UK. . . "

That doesn't sound fun at all.

So yeah, that's where I'm at right now. Struggling to maintain a high-enough GPA in something that I halfway-enjoy, halfway-dislike so that I can keep my privilege of doing it again for another semester or six.

Maybe I'm just generally bummed. It is, after all, a Wednesday. Those two things tend to coincide. Good ol' CS lab.