A few of my friends asked me the other night, what do you need to get into UW? I told them, "You need to live in Washington." While that isn't all you need, it's the main factor sadly. The probability charts say that with the same grades/SAT scores in-state has a 90% chance and out-of-state has a 40% chance. I then added, "You also need above 3.0 and 1100 on the SAT to have a 90% chance of getting in." I had a 3.4 and 1210 on SAT (most of which was math, btw), for example. The difference between getting into the UW and going to community college after high school is about $10k per year (the difference between middle/upper and upper class), so it's nothing to scoff at for most people. Most middle/upper class students find that trading two years of their life is quite worth it. But what if you could trade four years for a decrease in pay by about $40k per year? Would you do it? If you'd give up two years to higher education for $10k, you would certainly not give up four years _and_ $40k. But I am. The technicalities are important, but the fact remains: I am throwing $40k per year and four years of my young life. Not exactly throwing away, though -- I am refusing it and instead living my own path. Instead of programming right out of high school at $60k per year, I've decided to go to the UW and make average $3k per year in my spare time and will be making ~20k per year when I graduate this June with a Bachelor's in Physics. Why? I graduated high school and got my AA degree in 1999 (age 17), the year of the dot coms, Y2k panics, and Monica Lewinsky. When I was 13, I worked for my father doing programs. I made $100 in one day and decided that year that I would not program for a living. That's right, I, who currently makes a living programming decided that I would not do what my father did. I would not work all day to make inane amounts of money and spend it on junk. I would not use computers to make programs for businesses. I would become a scientist and use my talents for the betterment of humanity. My dream has changed and I've even programmed for a businesses against my morals so that I could fund my physics education. I've even thought of programming computer games for a living. But I cannot and will not spend everyday working for money. Just the thought of 9-5 makes me physically ill. 7AM-6PM is no worse or better in my view. And the truth is that I do not need to work 9-5 or 7-6. Being single, without a car, and without massive entertainment budget, I can and have been living on $600 per month, something completely unknown to Gen-X Americans. If you do the calculations, it's $7,200 per year, well below the poverty line of $8,860 for a single adult. Of course, I don't buy clothes, I don't drive, and I am not counting my very expensive education which is going onto loans. Hopefully, you can see a bit of logic in my picture. A computer that does economic calculations would say "Illogical, cannot compute!" But I think that my computer understands. "If computers could scream, would we be so callous as to turn them off at night? We might, if they screamed all the time for no good reason." ^_^
I missed the last few days of Making of JF because I'm just being busy. What so busy? Huge changes to AltSci3D Manga Director and the errors that it generates. Did you notice that this page is the 256th Making of Javantea's Fate Page? To celebrate my overflow into the 16-bit unsigned integers, I'm opening up the source to the beta of AltSci3D Manga Director. Open Source people should be happy about that. In fact, I'm opening it up in this very page!
I wasn't going to do a Making Of JF tonight, but I read something that was very worth it. What was it, you ask? An article about Anarchists in Venezuela. If you've been too busy protesting the war on Iraq, Afghanistan, or otherwise, you might have missed the glaring conflict in Venezuela. If you keep your eyes on news, you've seen some very disturbing things coming from that neck of the woods. The basic facts are: Chavez is president, he is a socialist, and he has been ousted once or twice by opposition, but currently resides as technical president. Supporters of Chavez say that the counter-revolution was prompted by the CIA. While this is not confirmed by solid evidence, it makes good sense considering the CIA's history in Central America and especially with leftist governments like Chavez. And now I'm going to add my opinions. Unfortunately, I don't have much of an authority. What I know, I get from what I read: Drudge Report, Seattle Indymedia, and a few others. If I were in your situation, I'd look for better, more informed opinions than mine. Perhaps in a few years, my opinion may become much more informed on the topic. What I do have for you is a commentary on the correct way that an anarchist works. I applaud the true anarchists keeping it real in Venezuela (they are pictured in the center of my silly little pic).
I just watched all three games of the Kasparov/Deep Junior match after watching Cowboy Bebop Chessmaster Hex. It was pretty cool. Kasparov, Deep Junior, and all good chess players have one skill that I lack: giving up a piece for the win. I give up pieces, yes, but only if it's a choice between that one and one of higher value or one in my immediate plan. After watching Kasparov/Deep Junior, I decided to have a little Man vs. Machine game for myself: Javantea vs. gnuchessx. My gnuchessx is running on a 1.7 GHz Pentium 4 with 128 MB PC-133 RAM running a custom build of Linux 2.4.20, from Slackware 8.1, XFree86 4.2.1, and KDE 3.0. Why does any of that matter? The Pentium 4 makes gnuchessx extremely fast. How fast? It beat me using less than 5 minutes in all three games and I took 6 minutes going a bit faster than usual. The 128 MB of PC-133 RAM means that the processor is not limited by the hard drive speed. Everything used is on RAM, and only 4 MB is on my gigabyte swap partition. The Linux 2.4.20 means that the setup is free (as in speech) and since I downloaded Slackware 8.1, it was also free (as in lunch*). XFree86 4.2.1 means that I do minor updates on low level systems. KDE 3.0 means that I don't like spending 8 hours compiling a major update to high level systems like KDE and that Slackware is slacking on building binaries for KDE.
