Math Man Goes Surfing

So a few things going on. Went body boarding, got my first check, setup a bank account here, got a replacement hard drive for my HP, and saw a HUGE alligator!!!

Yeah so we went to the beach again stayed there pretty much all day, went swimming and boogie boarding on our new boogie boards (only the best from Target). It was awesome, it was about 80 degrees (just pristine weather on coaco beach) the waves were huge. Coaco Beach is an awesome place, I think if I ever lived there I would pretty much lose all touch with reality and the rest of the world cause nothing matters when your hanging out on the beach down there, its awesome!

Also on the way down to the beach we saw a HUGE alligator just meandering along in the grass next to the highway, this was a big sucker at least 6 feet long and fat, big head, fat body, I was amazed. Its weird though when you tell the locals you saw a huge alligator they just kinda look at you and say "uh huh, you see them around" like its no big deal. I don't think a giant pre-historic reptile that fears nothing, would eat you without a second thought, and is scooting down the road like he owns the place is anything to be blas'e about but thats just me I guess.

So in other news, we got our first checks in (yeah! its nice) and I setup and account at Wachovia today, also my laptop starting coming up with a SMART error, which means [geek alert] that the bad blocks limit has been exceeded and an eminant failure is soon to come. I called HP and it was no sweat getting a hard drive sent out (SMART errors are easy to diagnose). Now as soon as this post is posted I'm going to pop in and restore from backup (FUN!).

Note to Future Students:
Back up your hard drives! If you loose a program that you've been writing for a week and its due tomorrow your are SCREWED! There just isn't time in this school for major delays, you will end up failing the class which is very easy to do at Full Sail. Things are so fast paced and they have such high standards its very easy to crash and burn on a class, it happens al lthe time in fact its normal here. Half the tests I have taken I wasn't really ready for, I didnt even realize there was going to be a test. Most people are caught of guard by the speed of things around here, so lost data is the last thing you need. What can you do to fix this? Easy, just get and external USB drive at least 200GB and back up to it (a full system backup) using the built in windows backup [Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Backup] If your in game dev and you have an HP laptop, then be sure to create the DVD backup (it asks you to do this automatically). This will let you put your OS back on the system, then you can restore your most recent settings using the full system backup on the USB drive.