Zac's Weblog » school

Finals Tips

Zac White — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 18:19:11 +0000

Tips on a successful final’s week:

Study many days early and don’t think much of it. Then rest a lot and think about while relaxing a bit. For a hilarious take on this strategy, see this episode of “the show”.
Get plenty of sleep the night before.
Take the whole test time to write a crapload of explanation for your answers. You don’t get to go to the professor on this exam to explain yourself, so make it count.
Don’t eat Taco Mayo (think nastier than Bell) before a 2 hour final.

Good luck! Of course, you probably are done. In that case, you probably failed because you didn’t have this stellar advice. My bad.

Music and Snow

Zac White — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 20:26:33 +0000

Yay! I’m a NNW dinosaur!

So I guess I’ve been pretty busy lately, but I got to see The Decemberists in Dallas, Texas a little more than a month ago. Man, they were amazing. Their new album, The Crane Wife is a must listen to. If you are in any of these cities, do yourself a favor and mark your calendar and buy a ticket. Laura Viers has also caught my ear recently. She sings a duet on Yankee Bayonet in The Crane Wife and her solo stuff is quite good.

Something a little strange happened the other day. School was actually cancelled for 2 days due to snow/ice. It was awesome. 4 day weekend! Played some snow football and basically just did nothing.

School is about to end, just one more week. I am quite looking forward to that. It is going well and all, but I’m just kind of tired of it now. I’ve got some neat little coding projects planned and some plans to expand on previous projects. I’m hoping the break will be productive in that respect.

Note: The site looks a little funky because my .mac ran out and there are some support images hosted there. I renewed, but not I just have to enter my activation thing so it should be back to normal tonight.

WWDC Poster

Zac White — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:45:03 +0000

In case anyone is interested, I did a poster for the WWDC scientific poster session on the Mac based rover I worked on. Maybe we’ll get written up on the Apple webpage, or get into the newsletter! That would be cool. Apple is eventually going to put up PDFs of the posters, but until then, here it is all zipped up.

Poster PDF (zip 5.46MB).

Appleication

Zac White — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 01:35:37 +0000

So I applied to Apple’s Internship program. We’ll see what becomes of that. Man, it would be so cool to get to go to California to work for the Summer. I really want to live in California at some point in my life. Just to be in the Silicon Valley area would be great.

I get this feeling every time I apply for something that I really am not good enough. Part of the problem is that I just know how many amazing programmers there are out there so I feel weird trying to get a good programming job even though I am a pretty good programmer (probably in the 87th (or so) percentile). Even though I’m not the best, I think that I really could make a positive contribution to Apple and them to me.

I really don’t feel a very strong need to work for Apple specifically. I would love to work at a more independent software development company like Panic or OmniGroup, but they really don’t have internship programs to speak of. I might just email them my rÃ©sumÃ© and see what happens. Can’t hurt, right? Too bad Google doesn’t need a Cocoa programmer intern. Apparently they have an Engineering internship position that requires a BS, so no go. But they do have an Human Interaction internship that just requires pursuing a CS degree. I’ll think about that one. Pixar also just started a huge project to convert a lot of their old programs to Cocoa and yet they have no Internships for that kind of thing on their site. Man, they are missing out on a hard working/smart guy who will totally code for a place to stay. So maybe I’ll just start spamming all these companies with my rÃ©sumÃ©.

California from the album “Blue” by Joni Mitchell

NHS, Botball Champs!

Zac White — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 04:24:23 +0000

NHS has WON the 2005 National Botball Tournament in Jacksonville, FL!! They scored 80 points on their first seeding round because of a judge’s error. They next round they scored the highest score ever to be scored in botball…an astounding 164 points! No one could match it all day. In double elimination, they played some amazing rounds and were undefeated going into the final head to head match. NHS’s robot messed up and missed its target by millimeters, sealing the victory for the other team. Having one loss each meant that the winner of the next match would become the 2005 champions. They light came on and the arm that John designed slipped over the highest scoring object on the field, botguy. Perfect! It then brought it back but….disaster! In the middle of the motion, a piece broke off and the entire arm fell over! This pushed botguy off of the table, making it score 0! Luckily, the arm got the ball(30 points) and “Gibby” a few trash (3 points). The final score was 27 to 33…NHS! These guys did an amazing job on this robot. They spent the night before the competition at the beach. Entirely unlike all the other botball teams, which were working franticly on untested designs. Great job guys!

Waiting for school

Zac White — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 13:57:49 +0000

I have a really crappy class that is very stupid. If you are in the college of engineering at OU, you have to take this bullshit class that is supposed to acclimate you to the college of engineering. We just listen (well listen is a strong word) to speakers for an hour and then go do some 3rd grade activity like a scavenger hunt. It starts at 9:30 in the morning too. Oh, whatever.