carlo angiuli (blog)

Third place at UIUC’s Solo Scholastic Bowl tournament! Hunter Fast deserved first; somehow Nick slipped through the cracks and got second.

I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.10. It’s definitely worth the upgrade, if you’re a WordPress user. The interface looks a little different, and there are lots of new features, like auto-saving posts.

I just beat Half-Life! Do you know what that means? It means that I’ve completed Game #1 (Half-Life, FPS) on my tour of the genre-defining games! (That, and I’ve passed my occupational hazards training for becoming a physicist.)

Any suggestions for the next games in my epic tour? Rules: They must have single-player modes, they must be considered seminal in a gaming genre, and that genre must not be first-person shooting again.

I just resized my running NTFS partition in five seconds from within Windows XP! How is that possible!?

Second semester is almost upon us! No more high school finals!

John points out that I haven’t written a Monday Mathematics column in forever. I have decided that I’m going to remove the restriction on “only algebra required” and just write about any topics I like. They should remain accessible to anyone interested in math, and become more interesting, too! So, yeah, I’ll get on that soon.

John and I are teaching the beginning of Linear Algebra next semester. You can find our official class website right here. It should be quite enjoyable.

But first–Aegis conference questions and Indiana housing!

http://www.pocketchangenyc.com/speedating.aspx

Well at least they’re completely open about their motives.

Third place individual with 20 tossups in four rounds, behind Greg P. (22) and Greg G. (24).

Fourth place team, after tying on an ambiguous bonus part (the state in which “George Bush” was born–Massachusetts or Connecticut? Which one?) and losing a ridiculous sports tiebreaker in the semifinals (”Who was the fourth-place team in the NL Central in 2004?”).

Note to self: Unlike another question vendor, never let Aegis forget to specify which George Bush.

Now, you know I’m not really any sort of gamer (except a bad one). While changing that is hardly a priority, I have started playing Half-Life. Yes, the original Half-Life. No, I had never played more than a few minutes of any first-person shooter before yesterday.

So why pick up Half-Life? I figure it’s the canonical FPS, and by today’s standards requires minimal resources. (That’s a good thing for my computer.) And the graphics, while nowhere near those of recent games, is plenty good enough.

Besides–and this is the most important part–I have to be prepared for possible occupational hazards in my future career as a scientist. Who knows, one day I might cause a resonance cascade in my Anomalous Materials lab, creating a portable through which a hostile alien race enters the facility, and I’ll be forced to fight off the creatures and U.S. Marines while trying to escape alive. Having played Half-Life first, I’ll have the experience necessary to escape alive.

Of course, that’s not really why I’m playing Half-Life. We all know I’d be able to escape anyway.