october

excitebike

justin scawful • 23 oct 2020

i recently got my acceptance letter from the university of illinois chicago and i'm super excited. i was starting to feel really discouraged with school and how difficult things have been online and that news really made me feel a lot better about this all being worth it. it's looking like the next semester is gonna be online but since it'll be low level computer science courses and some math i think i'll survive. it'll be difficult i'm sure but at least it isn't like a four hundred level course. i'd really be fucked then. i think i'll be taking program design ii, computational mathematics, linear algebra and the engineering orientation course. i still have to talk to an advisor to be sure but based on my own planning i did a few months ago that's what i'd be taking. at least with classes being online i won't have to make the commute and i have more time to figure out getting a new car. i've got an old 02 toyota sienna with like 230k miles on it and despite it being reliable i know eventually it's going to give out on me and i'd like to get something nicer eventually. i've done the whole shitty car don't care about how i look life for a few years now and i just kind of want to not look like a bum. like i don't need an amazing car i just prefer a smaller vehicle over a big ugly brown minivan.

fall sunflowers

justin scawful • 6 oct 2020

i've been in new jersey for nearly a week. it's been a nice break from school honestly, even though i still have assignments to do it's a less strenuous week in terms of the workload so i've been able to look away from it for a bit. i'm definitely uncertain about how my physics class is going since i didn't do well on the first exam. i'm just taking a lot of classes right now and the amount of work required to perform well in all of them might be too much for me right now. the increased workload to compensate for online classes is overwhelming. i just don't want to drop the class because i want to get into uic. but at the same time a bad grade would not be good for my gpa.

my girlfriend and i went sunflower picking the other day and it was a lot of fun. we picked ten of them together and took some cute pictures. she hasn't been feeling well so we haven't been able to do a ton but it's still nice spending time with her regardless. i enjoy spending time with her family and talking to them.

my friends in the zelda rom hacking community have put out a demo for the prototype project for people to try. i haven't been able to pay a ton of attention to the discourse since i've been on vacation but it's still cool people are able to see the game.

i've been getting into mobile app development programming lately as well. i've been trying to learn swift and flirting with kotlin as well. i think i prefer the ios platform since i'm pretty caught up in the apple ecosystem but i still think it's good to have some variety in what i do. i was thinking of an app idea which would do calculations for options trades and show potential profit/loss margins. there's websites that do it well already but i think it'd be good to have a mobile app with a friendlier interface. it's just gonna take a lot of understanding of swift and ios to make something actually useful. plus that apple developer yearly fee is pretty steep to get involved with. regardless i think it'll be good for me to specialize a bit more than i have been with my previous endeavours with c++ since i'm not sure if that's the career path i want to take even if more complex languages like that are more interesting to me from a problem solving standpoint.

the market has been doing well since trump got out of the hospital with covid. the apple event for the iphone 12 was announced for october 13th and i'm looking forward to how that makes the stock perform. i've got an options contract for apple that expires the 16th which has been doing terribly since the massive correction but i couldn't bring myself to sell it at the last apple event. i hope it wasn't a mistake to hold onto it. now it's a matter of do i sell leading up to the event or see if the response is generally positive afterwards. from my experience holding it isn't always the best move especially leading up to the election with all that uncertainty still in the air. i can't imagine anything so amazing happening with the iphone 12 that justifies a positive vertical movement.