PHPractice

I've spent all day working through these tutorials on PHP. It's been great.  I've been able to get the skeleton of a website set up on my laptop.  I should've been able to get this far into web development years ago, but no, I stuck with html and CSS.  Doesn't matter.  Check out the tutorials.  They have some great stuff.

Hours of Animating

I tried a bit more animating.  I'd forgotten how many hours one had to put in for just a few seconds.  That's probably why I stopped.

Working PHP!

After over a dozen wasted hours trying to get my laptop working as a linux apache server, I found a little program called WAMP, installed it on my windows machine, and had everything up and running in less than a minute.  It's this kind of thing that makes computers evil.

How to Get a High Score On Pandemic 2 Like a Cheater

I figured since my life is spiraling downwards, I should go give myself a false sense of satisfaction by placing first on the Pandemic 2 high score list.  And I'm going to teach you too!

First, here's a couple links you need:
Pandemic 2
Cheat Engine

1. Open Cheat Engine and Pandemic 2.  Click the little computer-with-magnifying-glass icon in Cheat Engine and search for the program Pandemic 2 is running in - opera.exe for Opera, iexplore.exe for Internet Explorer, or, in my case, plugin-container.exe for Firefox (though I'm not certain if that holds true for everyone).

2. Be a virus.  The key to a high score is speed coupled with total deaths; virus is the easiest to score high with.  And don't forget to choose a snazzy name; I'm using "Captain Doom".

 3. Once you get into the game, pause it and pull up Cheat Engine.  On the bottom of the Pandemic window will be your evolution points.  Take that number and multiply it by 8.  Put it into the Cheat Engine value search box and click "First Scan".

4.  By now, a list of lots of numbers has appeared in the left portion of Cheat Engine window.  Now go back to Pandemic, unpause, and wait for the evolution points to change.  Once they do, pause again and enter the new number (multiplied by eight) into  the value search of Cheat Engine and click "Next Scan".  Repeat this process until you have only one number in search engine to choose from.  It usually takes 2-3 searches.

5.  Double click the number (see picture above) and it will appear in the bottom section of Cheat Engine.  Now go down to the bottom section, right click the number, go to "Change record" and click "Value".  Now enter some multiple of 8.  I typically go with 80000, which gives me 10000 evolution points.

6.  Now that you have so many points, go to the disease menu in Pandemic 2 and buy all resistances and transmission methods.  Also, sell whatever symptoms you have that aren't helpful in infecting people.

7. Now go back to the game and let your disease spread (on high-speed).  It will not make it into all countries, but it will infect many.  And as it infects more people, increase the symptoms (focus on contagious ones) and when you have many more people infected than not, you can go for all of the symptoms.  This part takes some practice, but you do have all the points you want.  Just keep in mind you want to be fast.  Don't fret about countries you don't have, just kill the ones you do and do it quickly. This entire process should probably take less than ten minutes.

Using Cheat Engine to cheat actually works on a surprising number of games (not just internet-based either).  On some games, you don't need to multiply the number you're looking for by 8.  It's a trial-and-error thing.  This is why I can't play games anymore.  Whether it's Pandemic 2 or Fable, I just can't stop cheating.  If any of you find an MMO that this technique works with, let me know.  That would be the best.

So there's my break from coding for the day.  Thanks, that was fun.

Something I just made up.

Click the picture to see the animation!  I feel this animation adequately expresses my mood right now.  If you'd like to make your own suicide stick figure, you can download the Pivot animation program and send it in!

UT Austin

Since one of the colleges three I took courses from submitted my transcript late, apparently my application at UT Austin is effectively dead.  They'll only consider it if not all of their spots are filled, and they usually have more than twice as many students applying than they take.  If I'd known this shit were possible, I would have applied to some other top comp sci school to take its place.  But of course, almost every application deadline was March 1st.

Unless I'm saved by Carnegie Mellon or Cornell, I don't know what I'm going to do.

I hate linux

At first my afternoon was going pretty well.  I wrote a simple binary search tree for my Data Structures course and was finished by six.  Then I figured I'd get started learning PHP.  And now, six hours later, I've only just managed to get Apache and PHP working on my laptop.  Most of my time was spent figuring out the default directories for everything, as I found my sense of digital direction goes to hell on a linux system.

Now I understand what my parents felt whenever they were bewildered by Windows computers.

I guess my competence in linux stops short of installing anything.

Oh, and more bad news for college.  UT Austin now says my application came after the deadline even though everything arrived beforehand and they even have records saying it did, so I'd be on the list of the very last people considered for admission.  I have to call them about that tomorrow.

If I don't get into any colleges I've applied to, I'll have to apply to New Mexico Tech.  And that's an option hardly worth considering.  Honestly, if I don't get into any of the schools, I'll probably just off myself instead.  Things are easier that way.