Sharan Volin

This morning I had to say goodbye to Kitty (see the userpic or the Facebook album I created for him).

( The story of Kitty )

So Kitty was a great little cat. I'll always remember him, and his cute habit of lying with his paws crossed (I suspect that's part of the reason he was constantly being mistaken for a girl his entire life). He was one of the mellowest, sweetest cats I ever knew. This apartment is going to be really empty without him:(.

I'll probably get another cat (or 2 - I miss having multiple cats) soon, but I need to clean up the place first and get the living room carpet steam cleaned.

There's been a lot of stuff going on lately that I haven't posted about here, so I thought maybe it was time for an update. I just finished a serious Semester From Hell. So bad, in fact, that I have decided not to go for the masters at USC. I'm really fed up with the whole student group projects thing, and the masters is very project heavy. Besides, I've realized I probably don't even need the masters to get a game programming job. If I do anything (and I suspect I'll take some time off first) I will probably do something more on the music/audio side, since I really do want to specialize in game audio.

Things outside of class haven't been so great either. As I posted the Universal job ended, and I've had some promising leads but so far I'm still unemployed (breaking my record of being unemployed for 1 month in the middle of the dot com crash). I had an interview at a game company on Friday, and I have a phone interview for contract work tomorrow, so hopefully something will happen.

On top of everything, a couple of months ago Justin announced that he was moving out. After being roommates for over 6 years I'm understandably not too happy, and I miss him and the cats (he took 3 of them, including Kitty Cat, who had decided he was my cat and was sleeping on my bed every night (I really miss him:(). Also having my rent double just when I lost my job did not exactly help matters at all. I don't want another roommate, though, and I couldn't anyway because we cleared out the storage locker so this place is pretty full. It's going to take a while to get things straightened out even now that classes are over.

Also, Kitty's been diagnosed with a bunch of medical problems lately. He spent a week at an emergency hospital and was diagnosed with chronic renal failure. Then more recently the doctor was worried about him breathing heavily and they thought he had heart problems. They did tests and his heart was in the normal range but he had a lump in his lung. He's been on antibiotics and he seems to be breathing better, so it may just have been an infection. But his heart was still beating really fast so the doctor gave him heart medication to slow his heart down, and it seems to have done wonders, since he's more active and alert than I've seen him in years (if ever). Fortunately he's adjusted well to the other cats leaving. He seems to like having the place to himself. The other cats, on the other hand, were totally traumatized by the move.

With all this chaos and some unrelated crap going on I can't really talk about it's really starting to look like Baycon probably won't be happening. I don't even know if Justin's going and if he doesn't go I definitely can't afford it. Plus, finding a pet sitter to deal with all Kitty's medical needs at the last minute would not be easy.

Yesterday I decided to get out of the house and went to a meeting of the Greater Los Angeles Writer's Society, which was nice. They were talking about Writers of the Future and showed a DVD which featured an interview with edgreen86, among other people. I even got a copy of the dvd.

I did also get to go see Asia again at the Canyon Club a couple of weeks ago, which was nice. Another great show! But I also had to unfortunately miss Symphony X for financial reasons. I already had the Asia tickets at least.

So there's been a lot going on, including a lot of stuff that hasn't been fun. But I'll get through it eventually. *sigh* At least I survived another semester. And unless I decide to take a full time game job and cut back my classes I'll actually be graduating in December! At this point I'm really looking forward to this being over with.

Well, last night I made major progress in my major goal for the summer, working on Rockers Online, which makes me feel a lot better about the fact that there's only about a month left before classes start up again. I've uploaded a few minor changes but the big part has been happening completely behind the scenes, and I haven't even posted about it ON Rockers Online because I'm doing major work on the database and the less I have to copy over from the live site before this goes live the better. As it is I'll have to copy over the user poll information from the live database.

( Click for tech-geek details )

So it looks like there's a good chance I'll have this project done before classes start, and be able to actually start updating the site once in a while! I think throwing myself into school over my head really has made me more productive, since I'm getting a lot more done now outside of work while working full time than I ever did before I went back to school.

In other good news, Kitty went to the vet this morning. His eye's much better and he no longer has to walk around with a cone around his head constantly bumping into things! I'm sure he's happy now! He basically had a type of herpes most cats have since birth, and his eye was watering for months and he managed to scratch his face up really badly rubbing at it. It's better now, although it could always come back. Other than Lysine twice a day until August just in case he doesn't need anything else for this:).