Matt’s News / Blog

Apparently, I’ve cause a bit of a flame war in the Echo with my blogging opinion piece in the Echo two weeks ago. Last week, someone wrote a rebuttal to article calming that blogging is a waste of time. I this weeks Echo, there were to more letters-to-the-editor about blogging. One called it ’self-idolatry’ and the other said blogging is inherently neutral. Both of the negative letters had a very skewed view of blogs. Mainly blogs are a place where people whine and complain about the world and tell how depressed they are. While some of their points are valid, such as blogs should not become the only form of communication one has with their friends, many of their points were off base. The letter claiming that blogs are inherently neutral was much more accurate. Blogs, like anything created by humans can be abused, but that does not mean that all blogs are evil.

Tomorrow, (technically later today), my step-grandma and my mom are coming down for grandparents day. It will be nice to see them (and not eat in the DC for a few meals ). That’s pretty much all I have to day right, except I’m going to bed. That’s pretty exciting isn’t it? Yep.

I’m taking a class this semister called Language Structures. It’s a computer class that talks about different types of programming languages. So, we’ve had projects in a few more obsure programming languages. I just finished a project using the forth programing language of the class, haskel (others: java, small talk and prolog) being the others. The hard part of these projects is learning to think in the language and understand what the code means. Last night, I worked for a few hours on the project with little success. Most of my attempts at solutions were trial and error. I wasn’t ‘getting’ the language. Once you ‘get’ the language, solutions attempts move from trial and error to attempts that are much more crafted and verified. I had one of these break thoughts tonight. At the end of yesterday, I had very little accomplished on my project. Today, after a night’s sleep, I wrote the rest of the project in a short amout of time. This is one type of thing that makes computer science interesting and exciting. Learning new things and then applying the new knowledge to solve problems.

I know taxes were due a few days ago but I was thinking about the whole tax system in the U.S. My theory is that the government does not reform the tax code to make things simplier and more straight forward not because they would loose money but because it would reduce jobs. If the tax code was really simple there would be little need for complex tax software, tax services and lots of tax accountants and tax lawyers. So, many people want the governement to create jobs, and one way the seem to be doing that is by making complex tax codes. Just a thought….

Yep, I’m from Michigan, so are my parents:

For the second year I’m on Gerig’s intramural softball team. It’s pretty laid back and fun. Today, for our last regular season game we had a big win. This tied us for a spot for the play offs. So tomorrow we have one more game. I’m excitied!

This past weekend I went apartment hunting with my soon-to-be apartment-mate, Steve. We found one: Forest Oaks. It looks pretty nice. It has all of the appliances that will well need which is a big plus. The location is good. It’s only a min or two from Best Buy. (This could be dangerous!) Not too far from work and on the side of Muncie closest to Taylor. I’ll be officially moving in on May 14th, so this will give us some time to move things over there from school and get things set up. I’m pretty excited!

I have been blogging for one year. Wow. Time has gone by so quickly!