Uncategorized

I have had three bad experiences out of the three times I have been involved with changing tires.

The first time I had to change a tire, one of my dorm-mates was driving a group of us to go see The Tuxedo (one of Jackie Chan’s only bad movies). The guy driving the car was an idiot and didn’t yield when merging onto the IH-35 frontage road from Dean Keaton. We hit another car and spun around. Luckily no one was hurt but we did bang up the woman’s car some and gave her a flat tire. She was very pissed off of course. We tried to help her change her tire but the ground was not level so the weight of the car bent the car jack in half. She became even more pissed with good reason.

The second time occurred when I was employed at a blacksmith shop as a summer job. My car (really my brother’s Subaru Forester but I was using it over the summer) got a flat on the way to work. I jacked the car up and got the tire off when the car rolled off the jack. I had been an idiot and not but on the parking break. You would think a mechanical engineering student would have thought things through better. The car hit its front axle which made me concerned that I seriously broke something. Luckily I was able to get a hydraulic jack from my work to lift my car so I could finish changing the tire.

The Monday before last (11/28/2011) was the third time I had to change a tire. I was heading to the UT campus to give a presentation from north Austin when I had a blowout on Mopac (Loop 1). This was one of my worst fears; To have a flat tire on a highway. After the first two incidents, I was worried about changing the tire especially since it was rush hour and the flat was on the driver’s side of the car so car were whizzing by. I finished putting on the donut and lowered the car back down when I realized that the donut was flat as well. I called my brother and a friend to see what they thought I should do. My brother thought I should try to slowly drive to a gas station (I was near an exit) and fill up the tire an get home and fix my real tire. after talking to them, I looked again at my tire and I decided it was too low (on the rim) to drive on. I called AAA to get them to tow me back to my house. Luckily, the AAA guy had a compressor on his truck and was able to fill my tire up. After he was don, I got in my car to leave but my battery had died while I waited. I was able to flag the AAA guy down before he left and got a jump. I was finally able to get home and I decided to get new tires the next day.

Lesson to be learned is to not have me help you change tires since things will go wrong.

Last night I went bowling at Highland Lanes. I had a blast. I have not been bowling in quite a while and I had forgotten how fun it is. It also helps that I was bowling with some of my best friends. I also did some of my best bowling. I scored 116, 143, 180, and 167. I have scored that high before for one game but I normally would have lower scores for the other games. I normally average around 120. One of my friends, Pete Backlund, had an even better average score of around 173 which is amazing. I enjoyed watching everyone’s different style of bowling.

Today I saw the National Acrobats of the Peoples Republic of China at The Long Center with my friend, Cass. The acts were amazing. They showed great strength, flexibility, and balance. One act had 12 of the acrobats balanced on one bike. Another act had a female acrobat using her head to balance on the head of another acrobat. It is actually quite difficult to describe the different acts and how awesome they were. It was definitely worth the money and I would go again given the chance.

Picture of Cass on the balcony at the Long Center. (wasn’t able to get the best contrast with the ipod camera)

I have recently started replaying StarCraft 2:Wings of Liberty (Terran campaign). It is an awesome RTS video game that came out last year and was the long awaited sequel to the original Starcraft released in 1998. I am looking forward to the next two installments, Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void, the Zerg and Protoss campaigns respectively.

I am not very good at the multiplayer probably because I am too lazy to put in a lot of effort. My APMs or actions per minute are very low, I am slow to respond to the other players strategies, I lose track of all of the map, and I don’t know all the counters.

I have an interesting idea on how to expand StarCraft 2′s play-ability which arose from my inability to micro well especially using units various special abilities and from the invention of auto-casting. Austo-casting was a blessing that let me use healers since I never had the ability to click on all the units I wanted healed. When auto-casting first showed up, I thought to myself, “why can’t all my units automatically do what I want so I can focus on macro”. I wanted to be able to right my own scripts so my army would respond the way I want e.g. cast psi-storm when there are a lot of marines in a group. I want to be able to write the script myself.

The idea of scripting to micromanage my army lead to the idea for an all AI league. The players would create their own AIs an pit them against each other. There would also be achievements for beating the different levels of Blizzard AIs. I am not sure how hard it is to script AI in StarCraft since the last time I dealt with AI was for a board game with discrete moves. I also don’t know how popular this feature would be but there have been plenty of complex custom maps created so I figure there are players willing to put in many hours of programming. The games would be shown like replays so that the programmers could see were their AIs need to be improved. Most games that I have watched had players only having one or two main armies with maybe some scouts. I would hope that the players could make sophisticated AIs where each unit might act like an individual or maybe act in squads so there could be simultaneous attacks on multiple bases or armies. It would be awesome if the AI editor could create complex AIs able to predict the opponents strategy and counter it. I also don’t know how the insane Blizzard AI is made so I don’t know how easy it would be to create an AI to beat it. Is it truly a “smarter” AI or does it get advantages like higher health or knowledge of its opponents.

Happy 4th of July!! Also happy birthday to my god-brother/childhood friend Sam Minot!! This three day weekend/holiday has been fun except that there has been a burn ban so no fireworks (even the Austin City fireworks).
I just found this video taken of Bill Pullman (President Thomas Whitmore) at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown for the Master Pancake mocks Independence Day. It is an alternate speech at the airport.