Dystopian Paradise

So, time to get back in the habit of this. I’m not sure how others remember to do this. I guess I should set up some sort of schedule on when I’m going to update it. I guess let’s pick Thursday’s. Now that Kassy’s going to band practice on Thursday nights I have a few moments to myself, and I typically relax most of the night.

Well, I just finished watching the LOTR trilogy again the past few weeks, and I can’ t believe how great those films are. I can’t wait until I have “The Hobbit” to add to my collection. I don’t know if others do this or not, but I have this weird habit of turning on a movie (or TV) when I’m trying to get some work done. I used to do this in college, and watched “Empire Records” so many times that I can honestly quote every single line in the movie from beginning to end, and my VHS cassette is somewhat worn out.

Lately I’ve been putting in crazy amounts of hours for work, and so I brought back this tradition, as a matter of fact I’m watching “Hit Me Baby One More Time”, a show about one-hit wonders who come on the show, perform their classic hit and then their rendition of a popular song from today. The audience chooses their favorite performer, and the “winner” get’s to direct $25,000 to the charity of their choice. I think it was/is originally a BBC program, as most any original TV in the States is anymore anyway.

Guess I need to get back into the habit, before I can take one topic and turn it entry, as opposed to giving you some stream of conciousness fluff. Anyway, I’ll try. :)

Yeah, what I said last month still applies. Sorry. I’m honestly not so much apologizing to you as to myself. I’ve known for weeks that I needed to post, but just couldn’t come up with anything original-ish.

In light of other current major announcments (here):

I’m graduating!

Hooray! I’ll finally be done with school. I’m taking the final course of my Masters of Science in Information Science & Technology this semester. On May 14th I will have officially completed all of the requirements of the M.S. program through UMR, and will walk across the stage to receive my graduate degree. Needless to say, with things as busy as they are at work, a 3 hour distance education course that meets 2X per week, volunteering with the youth at church it’s easy to miss out on some of the important things in life (like blogging, and friends impending weddings — Sorry guys!).

Well, it’s late, I’m tired, and it’s almost the weekend, so crap-tacular ending and all: Good night.

However, I now have in my posession the new laptop I was hoping to get. I don’t remember how many times I took my old Toshiba back to Best Buy, but they finally “lemon’ed” it out. I am now typing this entry on a brand new HP Pavillion zv5000. In a nutshell it has the new AMD 64 bit processor ( ~2 Ghz ), 512 MB of RAM, 1 MB L2 Cache, and 1600 Mhz system bus. It’s a lot better than my poor little old 1.1 Ghz Celeron, 384 MB RAM, 20 GB hard drive, and it shows it too.

Right now I’m looking to install Windows XP 64 bit edition and see what the future has in store.

Anyway, just wanted to share.

Worst. Post. Ever.

Although I don’t think anyone actually looks at this on any regular basis, aside from myself, I found out that Blogging was paying off yesterday. When I got back to my desk at lunch I noticed I had a voicemail (peculiar). I punched in my code and it said the voice mail was from some extention I had never heard before (more peculiar). I pressed the play button and immediately heard an old friend’s voice over the line (very peculiar).

It seems that a friend of mine from college, whom I haven’t talked to in nearly 2 years now (due almost entirely to my inability to keep up with long distance friendships) is coming to Austin for a few days and wanted to look me up. He tried several common friends to get my contact info, to no avail. Finally, he punched Richard Curtis Johnson into a search engine and found my blog. Noticing in my earliest post that I was working for NI he called up the front desk and asked to speak with me, and voila all my questions were answered.

Anyway, fun annecdote.

A website that I commonly check for interesting comments on software development has some advice for CS students that I think is great advice for most college students. For those who only read summaries (namely myself) here’s the breakdown, with my thoughts on each point following

1. Learn how to write before graduating.
This is very true, no matter what you’ve studied.

2. Learn C before graduating.
For those non CS types out there, C is the core skill that CS majors should leave school with. So the allegory is whatever your major, find the core skill and master it.

3. Learn microeconomics before graduating.
Since I’ve never taken microeconomics I can’t say whether this is true or not, but from Joel’s description I wish I had.

4. Don’t blow off non-CS classes just because they’re boring.
GPA is very important, and a large portion of your GPA will be based on classes outside your major. Do your best to enjoy them, but whatever it is do your best.

5. Take programming-intensive courses.
Again, progamming is a core skill for CS majors, but the crux of this point is you learn by doing, so do more.

6. Stop worrying about all the jobs going to India.
If your chosen career is moving towards outsourcing to India (or wherever) there’s not much point in worrying about it. The US is still going to need programmers, business analysts, whatever, even if we lose a lot of jobs to foreign countries. Wired had an article a few months ago on the intellectual economy that is moving around the world, showing that the US will likely step up and begin to create an innovation economy.

7. No matter what you do, get a good summer internship.
While this might have been a slight plug for his own company, the point is to get involved early and often in whatever industry you are going to eventually be working in. Internships are key to getting a lot of experience early, as well as making sure that the field is the area you want to be working in. While there are bad internships in good fields, it helps you to really evaluate whether you’re willing to deal with some of the downs of the roller coaster ride of a career.

Anyway, I wanted to bring these to the attention of some friends/family I know who are in college so I thought I’d just put it here instead.

I’m feeling a bit disjointed tonight, so I thought I’d just do a brain dump of things on my mind. This post probably won’t have much in the way of continuity so feel free to skip it if you’d rather.

The holidays are over entirely too soon. What with all of the big dealines at work in early 2005 it was difficult to really enjoy any of the time leading up to them, although the 10 days off sure was nice. Time with family was great, I always miss them so much when we come back home. Anyway, I’m back now and I’ll try to do this more often.

On a somewhat related note, I got a foosball table for Christmas ( and my birthday combined). Kassy & I are really enjoying it. I’d say we play it every other day or so.

Finally, Kassy & I have started a workout regimen at the fitness center where I work. I’m mostly doing cardio & a little bit of upper body strength training. She’s working on cardio as well but mostly lower body toning. It’s a lot of fun, more fun that I realized it would be. I’m especially enjoying my time on the recumbent bike. It’s a great escape from everything, and allows me to spend some quality time reading a book. You know the one’s with paper and ink and what not. I’m 3/4 the way through “Mere Christianity” and I’ll probably post a book review when I finish it, but just a teaser: It’s a must read for any Christian, although a little philosophical at times it is definitely an essential book.

So, as an early Christmas present my dad gave me a Lowe’s gift card. Thinking myself quite the He-Man, Home Improvement type, I set out to get a set of fake gas logs for my otherwise empty, boring fireplace. Having shopped on these for a few weeks, I knew quickly which I wanted to get, and stopped and picked it up on December 1st. That night as I unpacked the box of goodies, I realized two things:

1) The box did not include everything I was going to need, and
2) The sales person at Lowes was absolutely no help.

The next evening I returned to Lowe’s to pick up the hose assembly necessary for attaching the logs to my gas pipe. Upon arriving home I set into the fireplace like a beaver devouring the base of a tree. I don’t know why people equate beavers as being industrious and hard working, but none the less, that is the metaphor I’ll use. While trying to remove the existing burner from the gas pipe I ran into a slight snafu, after 10 years of heating, cooling, and neglect it had thoroughly fused itself to the gas pipe, leaving me no choice but to remove the 16″ gas pipe from the wall.

Now I had created a huge problem. No, no, no, the gas was turned off. However, to replace this pipe, it was going to require testing the connection to make certain it wasn’t leaking natural gas into my wall space just waiting for some unforseen ember to, putting it lightly, “really open up the living room”. OK, after some consultation with my repertoire of handymen (dad), I tried to see if I could get to the joint from the shutoff valve in my wall. Answer: no. OK. Perhaps from inside the fireplace itself, no.

Grasping for straws, today I went outside, and removed the vent from the side of the chimney, to find that I could access that joint from this orifice. However, it is going to require a mirror, a blade of grass, 2 pieces of Big Red, and a good flashlight. Actually, not the gum or grass, but it still won’t be easy.

At this point, I’m convinced my father works as a spy for Lowe’s and gave me this gift card in a now obvious plot to cause me to spend good gobs of money at said home improvement warehouse. I’m leaving now to go and get a replacement piece of pipe, and likely a pipe wrench. With any luck this project will be completed, only one week after it was begun. We shall see.

I’m not sure why I wanted to start blogging…I guess, because I’ve found it to be such a great way to keep up with friends from college (University of Missouri-Rolla, more on that in the future, I’m sure). None the less, here it is Saturday, September 4th and I’m about to quit lurking in the shadows, and post my first blog entry.

I’ve avoided this for some time because I didn’t feel I was as witty or original as some of my friends, and thus wouldn’t provide any interesting material for a blog, but I’ve realized over the past few weeks/months that I don’t care about any of that. I’ll be content if this is nothing more than my own personal dumping ground for stray thoughts on life, the universe, and everything. Even if no one ever links to me, or posts a comment, I’ll be happy.

I’ve always thought that one of your earliest entries in your blog should be an introduction for the readers, since you never know who is going to read your blog, and so I’m going to do my best to start this off on the right foot. Let’s get some of the preliminaries out of the way.

Name: Richard Curtis Johnson
Nickname: RC
Birthday: June 10, 1980
Currently living in: Austin, TX
Occupation: Programmer/Analyst
Hobbies: watching movies, playing with legos (especially mindstorms), video games (XBox), hanging out with friends, and goofing around with my computer.
Political affiliation: None…I vote independent of party lines.
Religious affliliation: Non-denominational Christian.
Favorites:

Movie: Lord of the Rings
TV series: Simpsons.
Bands: Five Iron Frenzy and Sixpence None the Richer
Food: Homemade cheese burgers.