Xatal

There go my grades.

Yesterday I bought Left 4 Dead, the new zombie survival game. Already, I’m hooked.

In Left 4 Dead, you and three other people fight off hordes of zombies as you charge through the levels. The thrill of the game comes from the online play, where you can use microphones and really take on zombies. A game like this has been my dream for years, and I’m glad to finally have a chance at it.

New, Left 4 Dead sells for about $50, but you can buy four copies on Steam for $150. If you can find three other people to split the cost with, it amounts to about $38, which is cheaper.

This is a game worth getting.

So as of today, I’m back in Santa Cruz for another action-packed quarter. Winter break was pretty fun, but it went by far too fast. It feels weird being back.

Classes start tomorrow, but my schedule for this quarter is pretty easy on Tuesdays, so it’s going to be a gradual start for me. Here goes nothing!

Oh God.

You've got mail!

So I have several e-mail accounts for xatal.com, most of which forward e-mails right to my Gmail account, where I handle all of my e-mail.

Recently, I noticed that for some reason my disk space usage for e-mail was incredibly high when compared to everything else. I couldn’t figure out why until I took a look.

I realized that all of the e-mail that’s sent to a nonexistent account is still kept around. I also realized that I had a cron job (basically, a scheduled task) that was designed to run every ten minutes still set to on, and it’s been going for the last couple of years. Whoops.

Cleaning it out took quite a while.

It’s amazing how fast it passes by. It seems like just five days ago I was coming home with three weeks off. Now I’m down to my last five days.

It’s been a great vacation though. I’ve managed to see almost all of my friends back home, and have spent plenty of time with everybody. I’ve been out and about enough, going to the Emerald Bowl, Sonoma State, and a Guitar Center in a nearby store. I have plans to go to a large mall a couple of hours away, and I may go to the snow over the weekend.

I’m still working on the redesign for the site. I’ve got two “beta” designs ready, and I’m working on a third. I’m going to post them in a day or two to get some feedback from everybody, and then go with whichever one is most popular. I’m not a designer, but I’m still trying to make something that I can be a bit proud of. I wish I knew how to use Adobe Illustrator better (read: at all)…

Anyway, I hope everybody has a wonderful New Years Eve! Don’t forget to add a leap second!

Last Sunday, I took my girlfriend to see Sonoma State University. She’s unsure of where she wants to go to school next year, so I figured I’d take her to a few schools so she can have a quality tour to remember them by.

Right now, Sonoma is her top choice for a CSU, and since I’m always curious about schools I’ve never been to nor heard much about, I decided to take her to see it.

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When I was coming back from Santa Cruz, my family pulled a fast one on me and told me that they’d bought four tickets to this year’s Emerald Bowl in San Francisco.

I’m not a big fan of college football, since UCSC doesn’t have its own team, but since Cal (UC Berkeley) was in it, I took some interest. My brother goes to Berkeley, which is the main reason why my family decided to go.

The game was against the Miami Hurricanes. At first I was a bit unsure of whether or not to root for Cal, considering that I don’t go there and they turned down my application, but in the end I decided to support them a little bit.

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This year is flying by already, and it’s really been catching me off-guard. Senior year in high school flew by as well, but I’m even more surprised that this year is going by faster.

This is my last week of actual classes, and after that comes a week of finals. I’m unlucky enough to have a final on the very last block, so by then many will have already gone home for the holidays.

In a sense I think it would be pretty cool to have Christmas here — sort of a Harry Potter-esque thing — to wake up with friends and unwrap gifts, hang out under a Christmas tree, and so forth. But of course that’s not going to happen. My roommate and I put up some Christmas lights which actually look pretty cool, we might actually keep them all year around.

Again, I’m sorry for the big lack of updates. I’m pretty upset with myself, since I’d been meaning to write a good amount of posts last month, what with applications being due and all, but I didn’t. November was a really disappointing month for myself, and I’m sorry to my readers for that.

So after being sick for about two weeks, I’m finally back to normal for the most part. And it feels great!

When I first got sick, my throat became awful. My tonsils were swollen and pretty disgusting. Since another guy on my floor had tonsillitis at the time, I assumed I had somehow contracted it from the same source as him, and that tonsillitis was what I had.

But soon he was feeling better, and I was feeling worse. As the days passed, my tonsils got worse and worse, to the point where not only was it painful to swallow, but my voice sounded incredibly funky. I could barely eat, and drinking water was tough too.

The Health Center here scared me half to death when they told me I might have mono. The thought of being sick for months is pretty scary, especially at college. However, they told me that 95% of students will have mono by the time they leave college. In fact, most people don’t even receive the worst of mono — it might just stop at a slight sore throat and that’s it. I was unlucky, but at least I know I won’t get mono again.

I started gargling salt water, and my throat began to heal a lot. After a day or so, I was able to talk more and swallow a little. After 5 days, I can swallow normal and my voice no longer sounds like the cookie monster.

One complication of mono is that it makes the spleen swell and irritates the liver, so I still have to take it easy for a bit longer. Little things also tire me out more now, such as going up stairs (and let me tell you, this campus has a lot of stairs).

But I’m doing a lot better! Be ready for more posts again.