DarqByte

34 inches? I know what you’re thinking about but no, I’m not talking about that. 34 would be selling myself way short anyway.

The latest chapter in my whole “make myself look and feel better” thing has arrived. I’ve been putting off getting new clothes mainly because I wanted to complete my weight loss first. I didn’t want to have to buy a bunch of clothes in a stopgap fashion. Unfortunately, my last two pairs of jeans bit the dust, so I was forced to replace them. They were Levi’s, and they were built rather well. The only problem was that it was tough to find 38-30s that weren’t below my heels. They weren’t truly 30s so I kept stepping on them and wearing down the bottom of the pant legs. For the record, I really needed 37s, not 38s. They don’t make 37s.

Now I’m in 34s! 34-30s and they aren’t too long. This makes me a very happy person. I’ve lost at least 30 pounds and 3 inches off of my waist. Good stuff. I’ve recently begun making progress again and I anticipate hitting the 175 mark by the end of this month or early February. That would be 35 pounds off since I started nearly a year ago. I think my target is 160, but I won’t really know until I get there.

I recently looked at photos of me when I went to just the mustache, the Robstache. Wow I’ve lost weight since then. I do look better. Still got further to go. Additionally, I’m going to try to start running in the mornings with Pepper (and potentially Laura). I was supposed to start this week, but being excessively tired when my alarm went off put the kabash on things. Hopefully I’ll start tomorrow.

And if I do start tomorrow, wow what a day it will be. Today I start my next semester of MBA courses. In 50 minutes, actually. I’m in Lied Library right now. But because my classes are on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’ve signed up to play soccer on Wednesdays. I was originally waffling on the decision, but Laura’s support for me switching days and the fear of getting really out of shape spurred me to sign up. In any case, tomorrow’s my first Wednesday day of soccer on a new individual coed team, and for some odd reason we have two games tomorrow… What the fuck. Two games? A doubleheader? I’ve done it before, but by choice not by facility scheduling. Running in the morning plus two soccer games in the evening. Wow.

And that’s not the end of it! I told my Thursday soccer team I’d make the games if they were late enough, which is basically 9pm or later. So the 9:10 game this Thursday? Yup, I can make that. And I’m hoping to run on Thursday morning as well. Which would make three runs (Wednesday, Thursday and Friday) and three soccer games from Wednesday morning to Friday morning. Wow. See why I think I’ll hit 175 this month?

In other news, I wish I had endless time to do everything I want to do. Not only am I trying to find time to work on OMGN 4, I want to write a memoir about my video game life until, well, now. I think it would be very interesting because I don’t think there’s much of anything like that out now. And I’m a pretty good example of someone who gamed a lot when they were a kid and make the transition to being a responsible (well, at least I think so) adult with a married life and a job and other normal responsibilities.

This brings me to another subject: video games. Specifically, the original Atari joystick. See, my friend Jonathan recently got a tattoo in Elvish from Lord of the Rings. He loves it and I’ve always wanted a tattoo and I’ve always loved video games. I wasn’t 100% set on what tattoo I wanted but I knew I wanted a video game-related one, especially after seeing Anne’s roommate Ed’s “Mario 1up” tattoo he’s got. See, I didn’t want a tattoo that was system- or franchise-specific, I wanted one that represented video games as a whole. Now I know the Atari joystick is still Atari, but it represents so much more than that these days. And I’m asking Jonathan to give me a nice illustration of it so I can verify I indeed want to get it permanently marked on my body.

Laura’s been making sure I really want one, and I do. I am, however, curious to know what you all think of it…

Anyway, that’s it for now. Chat at you all later when I know more about my spring courses and I can let you know if I think I’ll be on track to continue my pursuit of a 4.0.

So it’s the end of the year, and you know what that means! Yes, it means final exams at the end of my first MBA semester and self evaluations at work!

Food Poisoning

Unfortunately, it also means I got food poisoning… Not that it happens every year around this time. The last time this happened, Laura was either a Copy Editor or the News Editor for The Rebel Yell back when we were both in our undergrad studies at UNLV. That time was really awful, this one was just as bad.

To be truly honest, I’m not sure 100% that it was indeed food poisoning, just as back then I’m not sure what it was either. All I know is that I couldn’t keep any food or water down for very long and there were times (specifically, when I wasn’t keeping said food or water down) that I felt I was going to die. Not the most remarkable experience ever. Thus, I had to stay home from work yesterday, which I didn’t want to do, but hey… Not much I could do about it. I was pretty incapacitated.

Hell, I even considered playing some Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 that Laura got for me as a just-because surprise gift (She rocks! Love her!), but I couldn’t focus or concentrate enough to even do that. So I just laid on the couch, intermittently sleeping and “watching” TV and trying to eat and failing.

Today, though, I’m mostly back to normal. Still don’t feel quite right, but I can eat & drink and operate like a regular human being again. I anticipate tomorrow being 100% again.

Final Exams

So enough about food poisoning! Let’s address final exams. Rather, final exam. Just one this time around.

My Organizational Behavior class was structured with an optional final. This means that if you ended up with a decent grade, you shouldn’t take the final simply because if you do worse on the final than the grade you had going into it, you could seriously damage your grade. Thus, I checked my grade. Yeah, with that big beaming A staring me in the face, I’m not taking the final. Boo-yah!

So I only have one final then, and that’s Stats. Ugh. Not the class I want to be taking a final in. I’ve been doing alright in there and I have a shot at an A, it seems, but my group project needs to be pretty solid and I need to get roughly a C or so on the final to get the A. I think I can do it, and I really want to. I’m aiming to have the best grades of my educational career in the MBA program. So far I’ve accomplished bettering my grades at every level, having gotten a 3.4 (unweighted) in high school and a 3.56 in undergrad. If I can better that getting my MBA, then you could say I get better with age.

Self Evaluation

So it’s the end of the year and self evaluations are floating around work. That doesn’t really make me the happiest man on the planet, as I get to sift through an entire year’s worth of work to figure out what I’ve done well, what I haven’t and to note any accomplishments. That, and I’m not particularly good at being assertive and promoting myself very well.

These are things I’ve been working on improving in myself lately, with some mixed success. I figure this self evaluation will be one of my first opportunities to be more assertive and sell myself better within the company. I still haven’t moved up and I want to, so this is a prime opportunity to voice that.

I’m also never really sure how to rate myself. I never have been, really. Like when asked what my level of experience is with different technologies, such as HTML, CSS, PHP, Java, etc. I never know what to say beyond Intermediate. I want to say Expert, but when I say Expert, I take that as meaning I’m leaps and bounds better than your average programmer with those skills and technologies. When I say I’m an expert at something, I intend to convey that I’m THE FUCKING MAN.

Indeed, that feeds into my assertiveness and self promotion. I really should give myself more credit than I usually do. I know that I’m an integral, vital part of my department here at work and that a lot of the stability here is due to me (and my tremendous boss Randy Kochis, to be sure).

I do feel that since I’ve got such an effective boss that I’m a bit overshadowed and get pigeonholed too easily. I just feel that it’s difficult to really shine in my department here at work because Randy is so good at what he does and can take on more and more responsibilities easily. He’s actually one of the people I’m trying to model some of my career after, not a bad example if I do say so myself.

So yeah, my whole point here is that self evaluations are around again and I just hope I don’t over- or under-value myself too much this year. The first year I did these I undervalued myself pretty badly when compared to my superiors’ evaluations of me, and last year I overvalued myself just slightly…

Maybe I’m just destined to be a code monkey the rest of my life??

So I figured I’d give you a progress report on me in the MBA program as well as some other stuff. This’ll be relatively brief as I don’t have long to write.

I’m taking two classes, as I’ve mentioned before, stats and organizational behavior. Stats is pretty blah for me. I’m somewhat interested in the subject material, but the instructor is really tough to learn from. I don’t think his teaching style works too well for me, and a lot of other students in the class feel the same way. Nonetheless, I think I’ve currently got a high B in there, so as long as I can at least maintain momentum, I’ll pass. But I want an A, dammit.

I’ve been writing numerous case studies and doing group projects and craploads of reading for organizational behavior too. I actually forgot to print and bring the one due today with me, so I have to book it home to print it and bring it back to UNLV with me. Garr. But I’m enjoying the class nonetheless.

Finally, my meeting with the Career Services office ended up with them suggesting to me to work on OMGN for an hour a day. And I’ve been trying pretty hard to keep working on it. I posted my first review up on the site in a long time and I’ve been working on and off on the new database structure and codebase. I’m hoping to have it deployed sometime next summer, heh. It’s gonna take some time.

Well, gotta go!