GoneWacko’s Blog

Concerning the person that is me

Well I finally got around to writing a page about me.

It’s currently quite small, but it’ll grow over time.

Plus it’s got something geeky. It calculates my age every time you load the page :o.
It’ll probably not be EXACTLY correct because I tried to make it ‘Leap Year Compatible’, which may mean it’ll be off by 1/4th of a day. Or maybe it’s not correct at all, but that’s something I’ll discover sooner or later.

You can find the page by clicking on the ‘About Me’ tab at the navigation bar of this page, or by clicking here.

For the people that are just fascinated by my age calculation code, here it is. Although, as said, I’ve not thought it through in great detail so it may very well not be correct or a very unlogical/inefficient way of doing it.
<?php
// Server time is GMT, I was born in GMT+1
$birthdate = mktime(0, 0, 0, 6, 20, 1988) + 3600;
$birthdate = time() - $birthdate;
$birthdate /= 31557600; // a year, in seconds; 365.25 days.
echo $birthdate;
?>

Furthermore, I also updated to WordPress 2.0 and then reverted back to WordPress 1.5.2. In this process, I appear to have broken the Category links to the right of the page.
I’ll fix that some other time. Or maybe I won’t. Ha!

Early Bird

Well, here I am, sitting in my classroom at school with my laptop.
I just concluded that I wouldn’t be starting for another hour. I got up at 7 AM (which is quite late compared to other people, perhaps, but for me, it’s relatively early) only to find out I could also have gotten up at 8.
Typical.

Currently I’m working on two projects at school, a game for a mobile phone (the course is creatively called ‘Game’) and a case study for database design (course ‘DbApp’ - Can YOU guess what it stands for?) concerning an imaginary airport, where I have to build the database for things such as checking in, ‘flight management’, gates, etcetera.
Quite interesting yet quite boring.
The game course was designed to teach the students all about OOP.
I could already do basic programming 5 years ago, 7 years if you count QBasic. OOP is something I already did 3+ years ago, mainly with Borland Delphi.

So the course has been rather boring so far. However the lectures are over now and we’ll just be building our (did I mention they were 2-man projects?) game and database.

So, we got handed an engine with the task to write a game. We chose to write Arkanoid. For those who don’t know what Arkanoid is: Here’s a screenshot. Please note that this is not a screenshot of the game we have at the moment, but something I just took from some random site using google image search.

As I write these last words, the classroom is beginning to fill up with classmates. Guess I’ll get to ‘work’.

I detest your abandoned blog

[02:27:48] <@kopa> # GoneWacko Says:
[02:27:48] <@kopa> December 9th, 2005 at 6:59 pm
[02:27:48] <@kopa> ‘Possibly’
[02:27:48] <@kopa> I’ll write before 0:00 AM GMT+1; I swear (with my fingers crossed)!
[02:27:58] <@GoneWacko> xD
[02:28:21] <@kopa> Let’s see.
[02:28:28] <@kopa> Today is the tenth, 2:26 AM
[02:28:38] <@GoneWacko> -_-
[02:28:49] <@GoneWacko> I was playing WOW
[02:28:57] <@kopa> Ask yourself, GoneWacko.
[02:29:02] <@kopa> WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT?!
[02:29:15] <@kopa> YOU wanking off to WoW, or WE wanking off to your blog?
[02:29:22] <@GoneWacko> seriously wtf is there to write about
[02:29:49] <@kopa> GoneWacko: Has NOTHING occured in your life?
[02:29:55] <@GoneWacko> nope
[02:30:04] <@kopa> Really?
[02:30:21] <@kopa> Still doing great in school?
[02:30:25] <@kopa> Stressed? Easy?
[02:30:48] <@kopa> Met any old friends?
[02:30:57] <@kopa> Anything funny happened?
[02:31:08] <@kopa> What about that girl, you could write about her?
[02:31:20] <@kopa> The train ‘incident’.
[02:31:41] <@kopa> What about WoW?
[02:31:45] <@kopa> Anything cool on that front?
[02:31:49] <@kopa> Any EPIX ITEMZ?
[02:32:04] <@kopa> Are you going somewhere in the near future?
[02:32:20] <@kopa> Your thoughts on the newest things?
[02:32:25] <@kopa> XBOX 360?`
[02:32:45] <@kopa> Any new games?
[02:34:38] <@kopa> Etcetera, etcetera.
[02:37:15] <@GoneWacko> nope I’m still my boring old self.
[02:39:53] <@kopa> GoneWacko: Bah, common.
[02:40:00] <@kopa> Tell that Train thingy again at least
[02:40:03] <@kopa> It was interesting
[02:40:07] <@kopa> She might even see it(!)

Hmm hmm.
Fine.
I shall now copy-paste something I wrote on TT-Forums. 'Tis long, but you asked for it.

So. Friday the 25h of November. The Netherlands.
Snow and rain have thrown the country’s infrastructure into complete disarray. Trains won’t go or will only go half way, freeways and even ‘normal’ roads are full of traffic jams. I go home from school. I have to take two trains: one from the school to the central station of Arnhem and then one from Arnhem to my hometown, Ede.
My first train has a 20 minute delay because of the bad weather. It drives to Arnhem. I go to the platform where my train should be, but I conclude that EVERY train in the netherlands is either cancelled or very very delayed. Trains are missing personel or can only drive half their route because of derailed trains and fallen trees blocking the way.

I see a train pulling into a different platform. I know this train will go to Ede so I get into it. (it’s what we call a stoptrein: I stops at every station on the route as opposed to the sneltrein which only stops at the larger/more important stations)

Oookay, enough with the strange narrative technique. On to the important stuff:

As I stepped into the train, I looked into the eyes of a girl and then I went and looked for a seat. Before I sat down, the girl asked me whether the train would to go Amsterdam. I didn’t expect that she would start talking to me, so in a mixture of surprise and shyness I said: “I don’t know. <interval>… I hope so”. Then the girl sits down 2 seats away from me and asks a man if he has any idea.
We sat for a minute or so and then the girl walked out of the train.
Moments later the speakers on the platform said that the sneltrein to Utrecht, which also stops at Ede and would normally also go to Amsterdam, was about to arrive on another platform. The man and I got our stuff and started walking because we thought this train would be there sooner than the stoptrein we were in.

When I waited on the platform, I met the girl again. She walked up to me again, said something like “you’re here too?” and then just stood there for a moment, after which she went and asked for information from a Dutch Railways representative. After some time I decided to go to the man as well, but before I could ask my question I got my answer, and the girl is gone as well.
After a little more waiting, I decided to go to the stoptrein on the other platform again because my other train still hadn’t arrived.
At the top of the stairs I met the girl again.

She asked me how I would be travelling. I said “I’m going to Ede-Wageningen”. Apparently she was under the impression I was going to Amsterdam (my quick response somehow featured the words ‘i hope so’ earlier on, remember?) so she asked me “and then?”.
I said “Well I live in Ede, so… (I won’t travel any further)”.< — I didn’t actually say the latter, but I just added it here to make things clearer.
Then she said something along the lines of “Oww, idiot”, in a nice if not sweet kind of way, and quickly rushed off to a different train or platform.

That was the end of our conversation.

The moment I sat in my train that was going to Ede (not the stoptrein after all because it didn’t have a crew), I felt a little bad.
Our conversations were very very short, I didn’t even know her name. Still I felt bad; I wished I had asked her for some sort of contact information so we could keep in touch. It wasn’t love or anything, she was just a nice girl (i’ll admit she wasn’t exactly ugly either, imo)
I thought of what might have happened if I

* Had walked up to her and asked her for contact information
* Had given her advice on how to travel, anyhow (which would funnily enough mean she’d be in my train for about 25 minutes which would have given me ample opportunities to talk)
* Had travelled to Amsterdam (hah, I wouldn’t seriously have done that, but still, my mind was going through every possibility at high speed)

Thinking back, I still find it to be a damn shame that we just parted like that.

—

So, having written so much text, I’ve forgotten what my questions and or conclusions were going to be, so I’ll leave it at this:
What do you think?
and
Ever had anything like this happening to you?

Happy now? :p