Update

Hiya everyone =] Things have been going well, been busy busy with school, I've got less than two weeks left in this fall semester and so it's even busier now.

Well, my big news is that I've been accepted into the Computer Science: Computer Game Design program at UC Santa Cruz in Fall 2009! This is a selective major and it's taken a long time to get here, I'm up to 8 years of community college. (most of those years spent working) I've already looked at the curriculum and courses at UCSC, and I'll be in classes like: Game AI (artificial intelligence), interactive storytelling, game theory, many graphics/animation programming courses, and 3d/digital media art courses. My last three quarters will have game studios where the team based game development projects will happen. I should be finishing at the end of spring (June) of 2011 and will have my first graduation evar! (I accidentally dropped out of high school) After that I'll be considering graduate programs in computer science.

So yeah, fun stuff, as for what I'm up to currently:

Calculus 2 has proven to be my most difficult class evar. On ther other hand,

Physics: Mechanics has been the most fun class evar! We've had labs with ball shooters and fan cars and the stuff is all really interesting and useful for game programming. It helps to have a great physics teacher, she's really into it and gets us to exploring concepts in depth.

Economics online consists of three tests and two essays over 16 weeks, there's no discussion, no incremental progress, and no incentive for me to read the book, I just pop open the book for the tests and hardly learn anything from it. It's pretty boring stuff anyway. The final economics research paper is going to take up some good time soon.

Computer Science: Data Structures is a class I took in high school, and it's just 10 programs to write, no tests, so it's nice and easy. The final project coming up is to convert the midterm project into binary tree storage. The midterm is a contact book. Simple stuff.

Next semester I've got English 101 and 205 in 8 week sessions, and Discrete Math (for when you don't want people to know you're doing math i guess), and compsci: assembly programming, which will be new to me. I also need to take Linear Algebra in either Spring or Summer, it seems like it might be too much to add on to my spring schedule, but it'd be nice to have all my community college work done this spring. I've considered going to UCSC for a class in the summer, would help my schedule along, although it's costly. hmm.

This weekend (Dec 5-7) I've got a Ludum Dare 48 hour game development competition. Always a blast.

The garden is growing, many broccoli and cauliflower and swiss chard and peas and some nice looking winter squash have been vining up a tomato cage very quickly. There's other stuff too, will post about the winter crop soon.

Will write more later, ciao!

Ciao

Ciao bella/bello's. Io sono Bryan. I've been learning bits of italian just by being near Maia, my roman girlfriend, and yesterday I started an online Italian course at www.livemocha.com It is free and has a good community and learning system. I need to be bilingual to transfer to a UC in a couple years so buona fortuna! That's good luck/fortune, which is actually bad to say in Italy. They say "In bocca al lupo":"In the mouth of the wolf", a sort of reversal where the recipient already has such good luck that bad wishes aren't even enough to stop them, the reply is "crepi il lupo":"may the wolf die", morbidly delightful!

Over the weekend I did quite a lot. Saturday morning I was up at 7:30 biking to Pro-Built Wheels by Penasquitos Canyon to get a ride with about 40 other volunteers for San Diego Mountain Bike Association trail work in PQ canyon. We hiked to a section of trail I hadn't been to before, above "the duck pond" on a rutted straight fireroad called 'the shitz'. We got the training, the plan, and started picking, shoveling, raking, hoeing, the fireroad into a swooping doubletrack with solid embankments to rail on and water drainage to prevent further rutting. We fit it all within the fireroad and it's deeply rutted sides, and there are plans to add a new more permanent trail near there as well, once the environmental and geological studies are done. It was a solid 4 hours of work and the trail is awesome now. I rode to it on Monday and rode up it, it's quite steep still, but I hardly had any skidding, which is bad for trails. Coming back down it was fast and fun and I had no skidding. The trail leading to there from the main canyon is great fun too.

[Link] PQ Corkscrew pictures

When I started into PQ canyon on Monday on my way to school, on the west end, about a half mile in the hillsides were blackened and there was a firetruck and people working on the edge of the scorched earth. I talked to a firemadame there and she said there had been a fire sunday afternoon and they were just making sure it was all out. 17 acres burned, which is about 3 hillsworth. It had been quite hot this weekend. Pix and vids to come.

[Link] PQ Burninated pictures

Maia and I also finished weeding the main garden area this weekend, to prepare to plant our seedlings. We've got 4 wittle squashes ready to plant and a dozen others that will be ready soon. Pixtures will come.

[Link] A good guide to starting a vegetable garden

After the trail work on Saturday, Maia and I went to Lake Hodges to demo some Santa Cruz bikes, but they were closing up early, so instead we walked down to the lake and rented a row boat for 8 bucks! What a steal! We rowed around the lake for a couple hours, unfortunately we didn't know we were going out here so no beer =[ but it was a nice workout and a new adventure for me! We'll try it again with an inflatable raft for comfort. I'd rather go on a cloudy day, even with sunscreen on I got burned out there.

Over the weekend we also saw two good movies: Juno and Wristcutters.

Ciao!