I've been holding out on this news for quite some time now, but since everything seems to be falling into place like a well played game of Tetris I will let all the cats and their friends out of the preverbial bag.
First, and most importantly, I have finally gotten my GED. I will brag a little and post my scores:
Reading - 96%
Writing - 82%
Math - 99%
Science - 95%
Social Studies - 99%
Now those little percentages are how many people taking the GED in US are stupider than me, to put it not so nicely. Rather surprising, really, because I found the test to be incredibly simple. IMO, my essay did suck pretty bad. I was supposed to write about how I expected to be remembered which was kind of a lame topic to begin with. I am, usually, a fairly concise writer so coming up with 25 sentences on this topics was really, really hard. In the end I kind of wandered off topic talking about something else completely, but I had about 5 minutes to come up with an extra paragraph so I expanded on something I'd touched on earlier. It sucked, trust me.
Since I have now hurdled hugh school the next logical step is college. Funny thing is that was lined up before my GED was. I have been accepted at Full Sail's school of awesomeness and will be taking the Digital Arts and Design degree. This means I will have to relocate myself to sunny Florida. Do I mind? Hell, no. Do my parents mind? I don't think so. Does everybody else mind even though it really isn't their business? Yes. I've gotten more "why would you move to Florida" comments than I care to count. But, that aside, I'm going to be attending the "behind the scenes" tour this weekend so I'll have plenty to blog about whilst I'm there or when I get back. And don't worry, there'll be pictures and maybe some video.
Speaking of video, I'm going to be making another faux commercial. I've got the script ready, all I need to do is film, write some music, make some visuals, cut it all together in iMovie HD and put it up on YouTube.
Speaking of music, Chris got his electric guitar Monday and has been teaching himself to play (as have the rest of us). I will say this much: playing guitar is a bitch. I thought the piano was bad. At least it's pasture is much more spacous. Chris seems to be concentrating mostly on memorizing chords while I went and taught myself how to read tablatures and am trying to play stuff that's way out of my league (in my defense, however, I can play the first three notes of "Sweet Child O Mine").
And, speaking of iMovie, I kind of moved away from OS X. I'd been using it exclusively for quite some time and then Photoshop died. So I decided I'd redownload it for Windows (I'm a bastard that way) and I haven't really booted out of it since except to copy some files. I've finally gotten more or less used to Vista. The interface, IMO, is more complicated now than it had been (especially the network dialogs). So I am, once again, a Windows man.
Well, I believe that shall tide the masses over at least until the weekend. Keep coming back as I will be blogging down in Florida (assuming our hotel has complimentary G, but it looks grim at this point). We shall see... we shall see...
The last real missing piece of the redesign is now in place. Just take a look to your right and you'll see what I mean. To save having a really short post I suppose I can give a general update on what's going on.
Let's see... I'm still a cashier/cart pusher. I'm enjoying Halo's online play immensely. I'm almost to the floating continent on FFVI. I enjoy going to college with Elvis on the weekends, and I'm thinking of moving out. Yes, you read that correctly, I'm going to college with Elvis ;-).
Seriously, though, I am making plans for moving out of the house and into an apartment. A couple of hurdles I need to get over are lack of GED and car, but otherwise I think I'm in a finacially tenable position to pull it off. Jeff also wants to move out and board with me, which would be cool. I'm already dreaming of the awesome Smash Bros. game-a-thon parties I could host.... oh, yeah.
I really need to quit with the "..." in the title :-P.
I am old. I know I don't look it, but I can feel it in my heart of hearts. Why, I feel all thin, sort of streatched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread. That can't be right. I need a change, or something. In almost two months I'm going to be twenty and what do I have to show for it? A job, sure (more juicy on this in a sec), but as of yet no driver's license, no high school diploma and not much of a plan for the rest of my life. Well, having been kind of depressed the last few days I've decided to do something about it. Tomorrow I'm going to schedule a driving test for next week and a testing date for the GED (probably sometime in late April, early May). I am bound and determined to accomplish at least these two things before my teenage years are forever behind me.
Now, the juicy details. As you all know I am working in groceries labelling overstock and putting it on shelves in a position I'd since been calling "Overstock Manager". Well, I recieved my official designation Saturday: Grocery ICS (Inventory Control Specialist). While being a "specialist" is cool and all the real interesting part happened yesterday. I recieved an e-mail from one of my old layaway/cashier pals Blake congratulating me on my promotion to department manager. I laughed it off and told him he had the wrong guy, but this morning when I was doing training modules it had me listed under two job codes: ICS Team and Department Manager (dept. 92, dry grocery). It's so nice when they tell me these things :-P. In not even five months I've gone from a lowly layaway runner to a department managing specialist. I figure if things continue at this rate I'll be CEO of the company by the time my first year anniversary rolls around ;-).
Well, there's no more interesting news to report and thus I will sign off and go eat some food. Peace out.
After writing a beautiful, heartfelt post on Blogger and having it lost because it was never able to upload the stupid thing, I am now using Wordpress. It's completely in house (i.e. on my server) and shouldn't have any of these inane issues. Now, on to that heartfelt entry :-).
Today, Friday, March 17th marks my official last day as a cashier. Starting at 4am on Saturday I will be an Overstock Manager*. Al I looking forward to it? Yes, yes I am. Not only is the cashier job driving me insane right now, but it'll be nice ot have my day back again. I plan on using the extra time to start working towards my GED. I hereby solemnly swear that I, Matthew Scott Hackmann will obtain my GED before May 1st, 2006. There, it's in magnetic bits, can't back out now. It really is something that needs to be done, and Wally World will reimburse me anything I spend on it too :-).
My emulator is coming along quite nicely, though there are more annoying hurdles to get over yet. I can basically say that Mario Bros. and Metroid are completely playable (last I checked). Zelda and Stringer (my two new scrolling test apps) are still buggy (like it's on the wrong table all the time), but otherwise everything is looking pretty sweet. However, I'm going to hold off for now while I pursue a new project.
My Uncle Dave (hey dude :-D) was nice enough to give me his old Handspring Visor (circa 1999) and that will be my new programming toy. The only thing I really have in mind for it right now is an app to take to bowling to score games and give statistical reports on the fly. Luckily Palm has all their development stuff opened up so that'll make it much easier.
I can now say I've played Doom on my iPod. Last week, while still swept up in the initial "wow! this is cool"-ness of the whole iPod thing, I installed Linux on it and played Doom. However, it was borking up music playback on the Apple side of it so I toasted Linux and have my music playing greatness back. I'm really getting into podcasts, my favorites being this WEEK in TECH (TWiT), RevoGaming.net, and Diggnation (gotta love Kevin Rose). Also, I bought an album full of SpongeBob goodness and the theme from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (for you old timers, the original Eagles version).
Well, I believe that's all I needed to say. Just remember, vote for Pedro and all your wildest dream will come true :-).
It seems like the biggest problem to us getting out of our house is no problem. The people who are buying our house have basically set everything in stone and so now our house and the house we're getting will all have "Sold" signs. So now the packing begins (our room'll be a nightmare :-P) and in probably about two weeks we'll be in our house :-D. btw, here's some info on our new house.
A couple days ago I picked up my free version of Linspire and I decided to try to move over to Linux full time for a month. I got it installed and it was certainly nice looking. I went through some trouble figuring out how to use apt packages but I started to get the hang of things. And then the trouble set in. PHP was giving me problems with MySQL, depending on what program I tried I couldn't get the sound working/synced on DVDs (or avis) and Lsongs, while nice, obviously was running on a low priority because it would cut out frequently. And things went down from there. So, I'm back on a fresh install of Win2K3 and it's nice to be home.
Got an interesting piece of mail the other day about a college down in Florida called FullSail that specializes in film [pre/posp]-production. It's quite interesting because next to game programming the realm of film is my other big area of fascination. So whether I'm going to DigiPen or this place is kind of a toss up. I guess I'll worry about that when I get there. Right now I have to keep studying for ye olde GED and get a job (so I can buy my laptop ;-)).
Well, that's enough for today. Stay tuned.