The Ramblings of a Hazy Mind

I woke up this morning at 7:00. This is odd… I shouldn’t be waking up until 2:30 in the afternoon. Oh well, I guess my body is getting itself ready or working normal hours over the summer. Since I am now awake, I have come across a problem that I usually would not have noticed. We have cereal, but we don’t have milk, and we have bacon, but we don’t have eggs. This is wrong. No American household should have half of two breakfasts.

I think I will go to the store. Orange juice sounds good too.

So lately I have been thinking about the topic of… (here it comes)… love. Having had my fair share of experience in this area (experiences I won’t share here, anyone reading this probably knows a good majority of them. If not and you would like some stories: mike@thehazymind.com), I have quite a bit of a base of understanding about the topic in general.

So here is what I figure - I am turning 20 in three months (yes mom, I am really that old), and I should be thinking about this subject in a new way. I am not sure what that way is, nor do I know that how I have already been thinking about it is entirely a bad thing, but something sure seems off.

Anyway, since this kind of came out of nowhere, I will give you all a bit of a lead in on where this whole thing came from in my head:

Senior year of highschool I dated a wonderful girl named Chaslee Schweitzer (cool name huh?). Anyway, come graduation and early summer, I told her that I thought it would be better for both of us if we broke up (stupid idea, I know), and it almost killed me to do so. I still think I am right about that decision, and I think she agrees with me too. It was just a very difficult way to go about it. Moving on through college now.

Well, lets just put it this way. I am definately living up to my Computer Science major reputation. For the past 8 months I have had one sort of relationship. I say sort of becuase it was very short and I am almost entirely sure she hates me now. So overall, it has been a farily unsuccessful year of dating in the life of Michael Schuld.

Now my friends however, whooooooo, let me tell you. I have this small group of people that I basically spend all of my time with that I am not sleeping or working. Each of them (minus one, sorry Ryan) has hooked up with the love of their life in the last month or so, and it is just about killing me to see it. It’s like in Bambi with the whole twitterpation thing… only it’s EVERYWHERE!

I guess it isn’t all that bad though. I am a patient man, and I am sure that there is a gorgeous girl out there that the higher powers have deemed perfect for me that will just appear in my life like she was always meant to be there. I just hope it happens before I lose the rest of my hair Well, that’s all I can say on this topic for the preset, but I will close with a quote from a friend.

Mitsugi Saotome:
“If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth.

Earlier today, my friend Britt had a report for her Texts and Critics class that her boyfriend and I and a few more of our friends helped her out with. It basically consisted of a montage of songs I put together with some free sound editing software, some awesome dancing, and some totally amazing guitar playing (that we weren’t actually playing, but it looked cool anyway.) It started out with the most amazing Styx song ever, Come Sail Away, moved on through some Iris, and finished off with a 98 Degrees tune (just one night).

Overall I’d have to say it went pretty well, and she is definately getting an A for that class.

I went to check the assignment for my CS221 lab and realized I had another outlab due tomorrow as well! I hope I can get them both done :/ Here’s what I will have to finish before I sleep tonight (if I sleep tonight):

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Cribbage is an old card game, usually played by 2 people. Points are scored by having various card combinations in a hand. In Cribbage, many of these combinations are similar to other card games, two-of-a-kind, three-of-a-kind, four-of-a-kind and runs (numerically sequential cards of 3 or more). But also in Cribbage, combinations of cards that add up to 15 are important. (Face cards are counted as 10 points, and aces are worth 1 point).

In our version of Cribbage, we will be “dealt” n cards from a standard 52 card deck. The number n will be at least 1 and no greater than 13. It is the job of your program to calculate the score for the n cards.

For our purposes, we will not use card suits, and we will represent the cards as single characters, as follows: Ace=1, Two=2, Three=3, Four=4, Five=5, Six=6, Seven=7, Eight=8, Nine=9, Ten=T, Jack=J, Queen=Q, King=K

Scoring
Two-of-a-kind (a pair): 2 points
Three-of-a-kind (3 pair): 6 points
Four-of-a-kind (6 pair): 12 points
Runs (sequentially numbered cards of length greater than 2): 1 point per card in the run
Fifteens: 2 points for any distinct combination of cards that sum to 15

• Example #1 (n = 5)
• Hand dealt: 595T5
• 14 points (3 pair for 6 points, plus 4 15s for 8 points(10+5, 10+5, 10+5, 5+5+5))

• Example #2 (n = 5)
• Hand dealt: 62947
• 6 points (3 15s (9+6, 2+4+9, 2+6+7))

• Example #3 (n = 5)
• Hand dealt: 56788
• 14 points (2 runs of 4 cards for 8 points, a pair of 8s for 2 points, and two 15s (8+7,8+7) for 4 points)

• Example #4 (n = 5)
• Hand dealt: 45666
• 21 points (3 runs of 3 cards for 9 cards, 3 pair for 6 points, 3 15s for 6 points)

Your task is to write a program that reads a file of “dealt” cards, and returns the correct score for each dealing.

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Wish me luck!

It is 5:45 PM. I woke up about 20 minutes ago. I went to bed yesterday night at 12:30, so this is about 17 post falling asleep. My sister’s husband keeps calling me a lazy pig. The part he doesn’t realize (nor would he understand or care) is that As of 12:30 yesterday I had been awake for over 40 hours straight.

So really, if you think about it, I was getting 2 days worth of sleep. 17/2 is 8.5, which is darn close to the recommended amount of sleep we are all supposed to get every night. Now the only trouble is I’ll be awake all night tonight since I woke up so late today.

Hmm, I guess I’ll just get my lab for CS221 (Data Structures and Algorithms) done.

Since I was three years old I have lived in a house with only myself and my mother and sister. Hell, even the cat was female. Now, of course I had some male influence from my father, my mother’s boyfriend, and my friends (although most of them were girls too), but the large majority of it was a bunch of women. This has been somewhat of a bane and a gift at different times.

Now, although I am not the most effeminate person around (although the brits seems to disagree… BBC Sex Identity), I am definately not the most manly specimen around either. A few things that I have had as hobbies that some might know about (thankfully not all, although I guess I am just listing them to the world) are:

• Crochet
• Design (yeah the girly interior kind)
• Dance
• Singing
• Cooking
• Acting

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I see this list it doesn’t immediately scream GUY at me. This isn’t so bad I guess since nobody really cares what your hobbies are, and not very many people have seen me doing any of these things (minus some who have dated me… you know who you are.) Here’s the part I find most enjoyable.

Tonight, at the university, there is a dance sponsored by one of the dorms. A friend of mine (a girl whose list of hobbies is about the opposite of mine) is attending with her boyfriend. Having never worn makeup before or any sort of hairdo whatsoever, she needed some help getting ready for the dance, so of course I offered. Her roommates and other girls on her floor about died when they heard I was going to be doing her hair and makeup (although few of them bothered to try and say I shouldn’t nor make time themselves to do so.) I should probably be used to this kind of reaction to situations like this, but it still seems like they are saying I have some kind of incompetence.

Anyway, I spent from about 4:45 to 6:00 getting her all ready to go, and it turned out marvellously. As a bit of background for what happened next, her boyfriend has this problem where his face turns bright red whenever he gets embarassed or experiences any emotions related to this, and he always finds a way to pretend like it is something completely unrelated.

So here’s the best part. He was about 15 minutes late picking here up (fine by me, her hair wasn’t done anyway), so when he finally got there she closed and locked the door and made him try real hard and appologize first. Now, this may seem a bit bitchy, but she wasn’t serious, she just really likes to mess with him. To appease her wonderful sense of humor he got on his knees in the hall and started appologizing when she opened the door. Almost immediately his face was a dark red (almost purple even), which he made sure to mention was because of his tight collar… All I could think then was, “And those girls thought I couldn’t do it.”

Well, enough of me rambling about my great feminine side. I guess I can go back to being a guy again… heh.

“So there’s this girl…” Probably the most over used conversation starter in the history of the human race, and I don’t understand why people still bother to use it. Oh, well.

So, there’s this girl in my jazz band that I have been playing that eye game with. You know the one… well, just in case I’ll spell it out for you:

• You look over at them
• They look away quickly
• You stare for a while
• They look over at you
• You look away even quicker
• They stare for a while
• etc.

This has been happening for quite some time now, so naturally I assumed she had some sort of interest in me. I mean, how could you not? Well… I guess you have never heard me playing sax (most of the people reading this anyway - recordings are coming.) Anyway, I took the only logical step and asked her to dinner, to which she responded something along the lines of “really flattered, but terribly busy for the next couple of weeks,” along with, “maybe we can work something out next year.”

Now, being that the semester gets over in about 2 weeks and she lives anywhere but close to Bozeman, it will definately be next school year until I am even going to have a chance with this. So, what do you think? Should I bother worrying about it at all? After all I am a Computer Science major, and our affiliations with any female life forms are few and far between.

I would just hate to drop it completely and have her come back all mad saying “why didn’t you take a road trip to my home town and sweep me off my feet!?!” Right, that’s exactly what will happen…

Well, I had a jazz band concert tonight and it went fairly well in my opinion. My advisor from the university showed up along with about 8 of my closest friends, my sister, and her husband (who really didn’t want to come.) The songs we played tonight were:

• Alright, Ok, You Win
• My Funny Valentine
• South 21st Street Shuffle
• Spain
• Vertigo

The bolded songs are the ones I had solos in (yes basically all of them.) It was awesome to have so many people there just to see me play, especially afterwards when my sister’s husband decided that jazz band concerts might not be so bad after all.

Tomorrow, I am continuing my musical endeavors and taking a tour of the Gibson Acoustic factory here in town. My sister’s husband works there, but he is quitting because he got a better job at John Deere. Before he gets completely out of there though, he is going to take my friend Devon and I around to show us how the awesome Gibsons are made. It should be a great day, if it doesn’t snow again :/

Two months ago I had switched my calling plan to a lower amount of minutes because on the usage count on the internet and on the phone I was using maybe 1/5th of the time I was paying for. Obviously, I did not need to be paying for 500 minutes that I wasn’t using, so I cut the plan down to 300.

What the bills forgot to mention was that 90% of the minutes I had been using were IN and so were no being charged. The problem with this was not apparent until last month’s bill arrived and the total was somewhere around $150. Apparently they also don’t like telling you when your plan no longer includes IN support. So, once again I changed my plan, back to the previous type that included the IN calling and once again I assumed I would be using barely any minutes. Surprise, I check my bill this month and it is $80.

Now there is something wrong here, yes I have $8 in long distance to my boss in Seattle, but big deal $8+$40 DNE $80. So what is the problem? Well from the details of my phone bill I see there are two calls lasting upwards of 80 minutes each. This isn’t completely out of the question (after all everyone has one of those female friends that just talks for EVER!) only these calls aren’t to a long winded cohort, they are to myself.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t normally spend an hour and a half on the phone with myself. Not even listening to the few voicemails that I get (which I presume is what calls to my own number are.) All I can say is the people at the Verizon store will be getting a visit tomorrow and asked very specifically to explain what is going on.

Anyone else tired of being screwed by cell phone companies?

Hazy Mind goes online! -

April 17, 2005

Well, here it is. The dumping place for what goes on in the mind of one Computer Science student at Montana State University. Hopefully this will someday be of interest to some gorgeous girl that finds me entirely intriguing (or at least a little funny.) I guess only time will tell what happens in matters such as those.

I’m thinking I should include here some sort of introduction to what this blog will be about, but I cannot and will not atempt to predict what may eventually be included here (I promise I will keep it PG-13 to the best of my abilities though.)

Anyway, a bit about me. I am a student in CS at MSU (mentioned above), and I was recently hired at a startup company engaged in designing blogs for lawyers and law firms, so I have decided that a blog of my own is probably something I should look into since it is now the focus of my life outside of schooling.

I will be using the MovableType platform for my blog, which is the same tool my employer uses for their business. Since my familiarity with this product is a greatly needed skill in my new position, I thought this would be a great way to continue to expand knowledge in that area.