Sour Swinger Predominantly follows my Army & Iraq Deployment. Also has some Geek, School, and other talk.

With regret, I post again about a death of a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh. Worse is its only been 6 months. Professor Keiko McDonald drowned over the weekend while fishing. She died in the hospital, Sunday morning on the 14th of September.

I had the pleasure of attending her Westerns and Samurai class last semester. If you ever wanted a class that breaks from the typical monotony of lecture, Prof McDonald’s did it. Everyday she’d bring in candy to hand out for those who answered questions. It was a novel idea as it encouraged the class to participate. I still remember my class’ initial reaction of surprise and that great feeling of being back in grade school. Though what stood out even more was her humor. There wasn’t a moment where she didn’t have a smile on her face. She would always make comical remarks and laugh. Boy did she laugh a lot. Sometimes laughing so hard, she would have to pause and catch her breath before continuing to speak. LoL. Her ability to put smiles her students’ face was a genuine skill.

My friend Adam, who also attended that same class with me had this to say about her:

“Westerns and Samurai was undoubtedly the best class I have taken here at Pitt. She was the most upbeat, passionate and exciting professor I’ve had. I remember at the beginning of class she told us all about her love of fishing and hiking so I guess it’s a little comforting to find that she passed away doing something that she loved. She will definitely be missed.”

McDonald’s Post Gazette obituary.
Her teaching webpage at Pitt.

To Pittsburgh, my home for the last 3.5 years of my life and home for a total of 4.5 years of my life.  It is with great regret that I have left but not because of you Pittsburgh, but the friends I have there.  Honestly I dislike PA and can’t wait until I can permanently live somewhere out west.  If all goes according to plan (i.e. I don’t get killed overseas) I will return in 2010 to finish out my last year of school.  Unfortunately everyone I know will have graduated.  Save for the few who will continue on with grad school or work in the surrounding area, I probably won’t see many of you ever again.  No worries though, since we’re in the cyber age and I know I’ll always see yous online.  All my friends in Pitt have come from two sources, the Cycling and Geek club.  Two distinctly different clubs to compliment two distinctly different sides of me.

My first shout out will go to the Panther Cycling Team, my first friends in Pittsburgh. I was part of the original crew who participated in the club’s birth way back during the fall of 2005. It was during this time frame we also developed a great friendship with CMU’s cycling team.  I still remember the morning of one of our races, Nick had gone dumpster diving and found a huge trash bag full of donuts for us to eat. LoL. Or the time Penn State snuck their jersey on to Abbey.  To look back and see all the changes the club has gone through still amazes me.  The old crew has all but disappeared and has been replaced with newer members.



Unfortunately this past year I seemed to be non-existent with the club, a consequence of the my heavily increased army duties.  I only raced once (which was a disaster) and hardly participated in any cycling events.  Kinda odd considering I lived in the cycling house.  I still got to meet and befriend many of the fresh new faces.  I wish all my fellow cyclists well and hope to see a thriving club upon my return.

Being one of the “old men” in the club I’ll leave yous with one bit of advice.  To re-establish good relations with CMU.  The Pittsburgh Steel City Showdown race was a heavy drain and probably too much for our two small clubs to handle.  I won’t point fingers and I didn’t get involved (perhaps I should have), however it was upsetting to see our two clubs get bitter with one another.  I hope amends can be made and mistakes forgiven.

My second shout out will go to Pitt Geeks Club.  (Note to self, should have gotten large group shot of club.) Though I was found in the L2L during my first year with Pitt, I didn’t meet most of you until my second year.  I never imagined I’d meet so many people who were as geeky and in most cases geekier than I.  How many people would say “Awesome!” when you boast about spending your Friday night cranking out a game in 24 hours for a coding competition?  Where else could you find people wearing comical shirts that say “There’s no place like 127.0.0.1″?  Or have intellectual debates from superman vs batman to the evolutionary purpose of boobs.  Then of course there’s that whole 1 = 0 talk.



I learned a lot about myself from being around yous and have come to embrace the geek in me even more.  There were no other geeks like yourselves in my high school and I never found such a group of friends with whom I related so well.  I will surely miss all the unique conversations and fun times we had in the L2L.

Thankfully I’m not the “old man” in this club.  That privilege goes to Pete, however I will leave you with this one bit of advice:

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It’s always unfortunate when you hear of someone who dies so young especially when the reason is unknown. I’ve seen Matt around the Computer Science building for a few years now. Unfortunately I did not know Matt too well. I first met him in my CS1555 Database class way back in 2005. I think he was still an undergraduate at the time. He then proceeded into the graduate program and got involved with robotics research at our school. During the fall of 2006, he was my TA for CS1501 Algorithms class. Its very rare for me to attend recitations, but I found Matt an exceptional TA and I always managed to get something out of his class. As such, that was one of the few instances where I made sure to be at recitation.

It came as a surprise, when fellow friend, Mike, told me of the news. On 30 March, Matt passed away. My initial thought, was he killed in some type of accident? Unfortunately no. I will keep my ears open to when they figure out what caused his death. From what I hear (this is one of those what a friend of a friend heard), is that on Sunday Matt was out playing basketball and made a comment about not feeling well and went back home, into bed, and never woke up.  From Matt’s Cousin, “He collapsed at home after playing hockey last Sunday. Medics tried to revive him but could not.”  My sympathy goes to Matt’s family.

His obituary can be found on the Post-Gazette. They’ve also set up a guest book for condolences.

Tomorrow, well today seeing that’s its 3 in the morning, I have a 4 page essay due for my Samurai and Westerns class.  The professor gave us 2 weeks to complete it.  One would think to start within a descent time, but nope not me or a few others.  As of yesterday Adam, Lenny, Joe, and I didn’t even start it.  Ryan was the only brave soul to have completed it.  So come 7pm last night I came to a crucial point in my time scheduling.

I had to start that paper.  It was due the next day.  I couldn’t possibly do it the morning of.  That’s reserved for my day before an exam study cram.  Ever fiber in my bone said fuck this essay.  So what did I do?  I went to bed.  That’s right, at 7pm I’d rather go to sleep then start the essay.  I actually slept quite well.  I woke at midnight ready to not only start the new day but great it as well.  Now, I find myself here blogging instead of starting this damn essay.  I should probably start within the hour.  Think I’ll play some games first.

Wow so its been nearly one month since my last post! Alot has happened since, and I’ve decided to break up this post in many tiny ones. Basically since my last post I had finals, then my Army weekend, short visit to Philly, back to Pittsburgh briefly, quick stop off in Ohio, up to my brother in New York, back down to Philly, trip to the Bahamas, a wedding in Washington DC, and finally arriving back in Pittsburgh for the start of class. I really need a vacation from vacationing. Traveling definitely wears me out.

I’ll start with the Military update. My deployment dates are still projected to be the same. Mobilization around Sept/Oct with an in country arrival Dec/Jan. Our training schedule has been accelerated to get us up to speed in time. For a first (at least for me) my unit will be conducting Muta-7/8s. Meaning drill will last from Thursday until Sunday. This means I must leave Wednesday night to make the Thursday formation. Because of these lengthen drills I’m forced to drop a class taking me from 16 to 12 credits this semester.

Drills during the fall semester have been pretty solid as in going from 0500 until 21/2200. Leaving no time to work on homework. I expect this semester drills to be the same. Typically, I schedule all my classes for Tue/Wed/Thur to compensate for drills. Unfortunately there’s no way I can schedule classes solely for Tue and as such will miss each class at least once a month.

SRP is scheduled for the last week of finals which means I may have to take some tests early. SRP (Soldier Readiness Process?) is basically a 5 day medical eval process to ensure every soldier is able to mobilize. Rule of thumb is to take care of your dental prior to SRP. Army’s philosophy is to simply pull any teeth that may have issues. Yikes!

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So…hell started for me around 0630. From the moment I woke until 1700 (minus eating food & bathroom) I wrote a 5 page philosophy report. Mentally exhausted, I’ve been sitting around de-nullifying my brain. I figure I come on here and waste more time by posting this. LoL. Why is this still wasting time? Because I have a 9 page film analysis report due by noon tomorrow. Didn’t start and its part 2 of my final for the class. Yup, that means about 25% of grade. The philosophy report was 33%. On top of that I have by 2300 Saturday to finish a Sudoku game written in JavaScript. Never mind the fact I’ve never even attempted JavaScript. LoL. Not really complaining as I accidentally misjudged my schedule and this last minute stuff is my fault. I.E. yesterday I took my first final. A final I thought was next week…yeah probably didn’t do to well. Oh man, I’m not getting any sleep tonight. I already know I’m pulling an all nighter. The question is, can I go two?

So apparently my stupid professor who raves about Perl has ended his talks of it and has switched to PHP. This, of course, was expected. The class is Web Applications and will cover a lot of different languages. However, I don’t understand why 2 months of presentations on Perl only yielded 1 programming assignment? A programming assignment that didn’t touch half the things we learned. Learned is not right…how about read from a power point presentation. Several students, me included, have complained through the proper channels about how horrible this professor is. I’d love to vent all the idiotic things he’s done but its not worth my time. Suffice to say, nothing will happen because he’s been hired for research. Teaching is just a secondary thing. Its a shame, but far too many professors are simply hired for research and not for actually being able to teach.