The BVW saga continues. Today was the last day, and the show. Unfortunately, today did not go as well as yesterday. Last night, groups were rehersing, fixing, and then cutting videos. It was going smoothly for a while. The problem was that there was no cutoff. The groups that were last thought they could take forever, and they weren't even the only ones who thought they still had more they had to do. What people didn't realize is that they might have wanted their worlds to be better, but if they wanted to have a show at all, I'd need a substantial amount of time to make sure I have all the worlds, sync the bits between all 6 machines, and test everything to make sure it is ready to run smoothly. It's my neck on the line when things break because of that roll I put myself into. I'm tired of Randy telling me I didn't test enough and that I need to be more paranoid because it isn't good when things break in a real demo. I was trying to do that. Trying very hard but I can't do my job if people don't want to let me. If I do this again next year, there are going to be some changes, including hard deadlines.

I ended up decided the deadline would be 4am. I said that at 4am everyone would have to stop and leave everything to me for 3 hours. After that if they wanted to do some more they'd probably be able to but they'd need to talk to me to actually get their changes updated. I went home for a record short 45 mins of sleep. When I got back, what I wanted to do did not happen. People were just always working.

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Today was the 3rd day of BVW show stuff. We woke up early in the morning and loaded into McConomy. It went much better than the last two days and I felt a lot better about it. Will Bosley is my angel. I really respect him as stage manager. It's another type of job I think I could do well or at least I'd like to try but that I know Randy would never trust me with, but I can't complain because Will is clearly the best choice for this job. Things really did run so smoothly today. Also people weren't getting on my bad side as much. I don't know if sleep is a factor. I don't think it is for me since I was plenty well rested yesterday that I don't think it was the cause of those problems, and I was still fuming mad when I woke up today. Maybe everyone else got some sleep and we're all getting along better today.

I stayed up late last night being very upset. I didn't want to wake up and come in today but I knew I had to and trying to come in late would only make things worse. When I woke up though, I was still pissed. I came in because it was my job. When we started doing things I just went into work mode where I focused on the job I was doing. I was ready to snap back into my mood if anyone said anything to me about it or said anything snappy to me or if the setup got to chaotic, but none of that happened. The more and more of the setup that went well the better I felt until the day ended up turning out pretty good. Order reigned supreme, the clouds parted, a beam of light shown though, and all was good.

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Today was a continuation of the hell that was yesterday. I'm so tire of it that I could cry. The worst part of it is that I have 2 more full days of it and I don't think I can quit, but I can bear to stay. The jury went well, in that we were able to show everything with only minimal failures and delay. But it sucked. For me it was like swimming upstream and I can't take it anymore. At the end of the day I finally snapped, I decided to punch a wall to release stress and when even that wasn't tollerated in the eyes of my hypercritical peers, I totally flipped out and left. I don't know if I'm going to go back tomorrow. I feel like I should, like I'll probably regret it if I don't, but If I do that then they will have won.

It's just that everything everyone has said to me over the past two days just makes me feel like I'm not respected at all. And I know people appreciate the hard work I do, but that's not the same thing. Why do you suppose that if people appreciate what I do, they work so hard at trying to not let me do it? If you really appreciated me, you wouldn't shit on me all day and then appreciate that I stood there and took it, you'd appreciate that I have a way of working that would make everything run even better than it did for both of us and let me do that. I enjoy taking a very tough situation and making it run smoothly, but only when I can do it my way which means using organization to simplify things. I feel that I am worse than a normal person at dealing with with tough situations by brute force because I am used to a better way.

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This Wednesday is the BVW show. Tomorrow (Monday) is the jury to decide which worlds get into the show. Today we spent all night trying to set up for tomorrow. The setup is really complicated due to the myriad of different setups worlds have. One world is so complicated that it single-handedly doubles the complexity of our setup.

As much as I should enjoy this kind of work, I am extremely upset right now. This is one of the standard things that piss me off. I like order and organization. I am known as someone who can do amazing things in a tough situation, but that is because by being organized you can break a hard job down to easy pieces. I'm only good in the way I am when I'm allowed to do what I do. Even though I'm willing to tackle a hard job I hate hard work. I can almost always break something hard down. I'm willing to do hard jobs when I can do them on my own terms, but I get absolutely furious when I'm not allowed to do things my way but I have to do the hard things the way others would. I feel like saying, "If you think this way of working is acceptable then you fucking do it," and then walking away, but I usually don't.

Dave is far too nice, I think. Yes, I am about enabling the class and letting them do interesting things, but I do not appreciate groups just deciding what is going to happen for them without consideration of how it affects others, least of all the TAs who are the ones they are expecting to do what they say. I hate that this is acceptable. If I were running the show there would be strict rules.

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Plenty of interesting stuff has happened this week. For starters, I've been running. I actually was able to get up and run 4 miles Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, which was my goal. Today my time really impressed me. I ran it in aproximately 32:30 which is a better than 8:30/mi pace. If 3 times is a tradition then hopefully I'll be able to continue doing this every week. It is tough but enjoyable.

I had some late nights but we're moving forward on the AIBO. Some BVW groups are working with it this week and I've been helping. It is tough work but rewarding. I really like helping out. Maybe that's why I also agreed to help another group with an input device issue. I'm probably spreading myself too think. After all I have my classes and projects to do also. Perhaps the reason I want to be so involved with BVW now is because I never really liked any of my worlds all that much.

On Wednesday we went to see the Pirates lose to the Cubs. I don't mind losing, but the game was really boring. Not much happened. I feel bad for people who wouldn't normally go to a game who came with us. They didn't have a good opinion of watching the sport before and this didn't help, I'm sure. When in fact a baseball game can be very exciting. I'm sure I'll put that in my write-up.

Today my animateering group had its quarter presentation. It went really well. Now we seem to know exactly what we need to do. The faculty mostly thought we were on the right track. The tough part is how busy our group is with other things and now it looks like one of us may be leaving.

Orientation happened. It was fun. Both for the freshmen and for me, a new grad student. The ETC is definately intimidating but exciting also. There are a lot of cool first years so hopefully we'll have some fun.

Classes. The first day of improv didn't really amount to much. Brenda Harger was out of town so we just watched some movies. Today was the first Visual Story class. I'm a little worried that it's going to be tough. We had to fill out these sheets that asked us some things about ourselves, I think just so they can get to know us. It probably wasn't supposed to be hard, but one of the questions was "What are the 3 best movies you've seen in the last year or so and what makes them good?" I hate answering questions that ask me to list something. In fact it was the only OkCupid profile question I refused to answer. And it made me realize that I haven't seen any really good movies this year, that I can remember.

I got assigned to a ETC project. I'm on Animateering. I think my first choice would have been Panda since I actually use it and I'm teaching it so I'd like the chance to make it better. All things considered Animateering is a pretty good place to be. Today we had our first meeting. It sounds like our goal is to take the simple puppeteering interface that was developed before and turn it into a mega narative storytelling and movie recording station for kids, to be installed at a bunch of different children's museums around Pennsylvania. That could be really cool.

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For those of you who haven't seen my schedule... So I'm officially insane I think. I do too much. I wish I could deal with classes. I really envy people who can. I should be writing a paper now, but no, no I'm not. I wish I could be a good student, because I always had friends that were and I never felt good enough for them. But I just can't get into my classes. I don't really care about them. Everything else I do is just so much more enriching and rewarding. Why do I even have to take classes? Somes I wish my teachers would realize that the other stuff that I do is actually much more important than their class and cut me some slack, but that won't happen.

Speaking not being able to get into my classes, I finally got into my computer engineering class. Funny story. I got 101 on the first exam. It was supposed to be out of 100 but problem 1, which was supposed to be out of 35 points, if you added up the parts, was actually worth 36. Apparently the TA's noticed it when grading but thought it wouldn't matter because no one would get 101. I did and apparently there was some pressure on the grader of the last problem to take off points so I wouldn't. Anyways, in class all the TA's are giving me shit about it, and the professor decides to announce to the class that someone got 101 and then look around the room for me. Luckily he didn't see me, even though I was right in front of him in the second row where I always sit. So after the class I go up to him and ask him, "So can I be the class now?" He laughed and told me that there must be an open spot in some other section and go talk to Dean Kale and get in but still go to my lab section with my partner.

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