Posts from — February 2004

Important omission from the last post… Michelle made the trip from Ohio and surprised everyone at last night’s KKY event! Very awesome.

Today was a long and 60% uninteresting day. I was expecting to get a little brother, but circumstances prevented that from happening. In retrospect I miss having the opportunity this semester, but I don’t regret choosing not to bump one of the other bigs off (I was ahead of some technically). I have another year for that, and plenty to do this semester, so it’s fine. The new class seems really fun, I’m excited about it.

This weekend has relatively few things scheduled, so I hope to make some headway with the baseball web site. My parser is due on sunday night, so I need to get on that, plus the second exec meeting is on Sunday, and I have no shortage of topics for discussion.

Finally, to a friend in distress: hang in there, everyone’s on your side, we can win.

I hate it when toothpaste gets like this. I try to wash out the opening (what do you call that?), but that just makes the toothpaste inside watery. What should I do?

This is officially the stupidest post ever.

Today started out pretty poorly: missing an important class, trying to get a homework in for that class and the prof not being there, printer out of paper, locked out of the building. All within 45 minutes. Hopefully things will improve.

I find that I’ve been using the “extend” button for deadlines on my task management system too much lately.

I just finished reading through a bunch (maybe 2/3) of the materials that I got from pete. Lots of interesting stuff in there, much of it dealing with crises of bands past. All of the letters to and from the Lafayette athletics department are really funny because they’re passive-aggressive. Reading through it made me realize how much we need to recruit this year. We simply cannot survive with freshman classes of about a dozen. Work in progress.

This also made me realize how much is not preserved because we do things by email now. This is good and bad, I guess. I don’t really feel like delving into this now, so I’ll stop writing.

I talked to Drew Hoskinson, a friend from elementary school who moved to Denver for about an hour today. I’ve only spoken to him a few times since elementary school, so we had a lot of catching up to do. He’s doing well… studying poly sci and french at the air force academy. He’ll be in New York City for a month over the summer, so we’re going to try to arrange to meet at some point. He reminded me about how we did a little bit of “programming” on his computer when he lived in Avon… I had totally forgotten about that.

I still have to call Peyton back… he called during the Lehigh/Lafayette basketball game so I couldn’t really chat. Lots of stuff to do over the next couple of weeks, spring break should be really relaxing.

I listened to radiohead’s ‘amnesiac’ album, it was good and I’ll listen to it again tonight, probably.

Lots of stuff to do this week, I shouldn’t be this relaxed right now… time to do some work on my parser.

I paid for another year of LJ… things are going well so I figure that I’d like to continue. I’d still like to write that script to count the number of readers I have but I just haven’t got around to it.

I got my linguistics test back today… I got 100 on it which was really surprising, I thought I had done pretty poorly. I felt bad because I had complained about how bad I did before I got it back then outdid everyone.. I hate it when people do that. I lost 10 points on the main part of the test but I think I was the only one in class to get the extra credit 100% and get 10 points added to my score. Compiler and Software Engineering are going to be harder to get A’s in… I have no idea what I have in either.

I’m not as tired as I’d expect to be considering I had fewer than 5 hours of sleep last night, but I’m going to sleep a bit now so that I won’t get really tired during symphonic band tonight (that tends to happen).

Sent out tons of email tonight, still going through my inbox… 200 messages left to be filed or deleted. I’ve been listening to Styx tonight, downloaded it sort of on a whim. Nicotine (python client for the soulseek music sharing network) has some neat features. You can type in examples of music you like and don’t, and it’ll suggest other things you might be interested in, and show you similar users… pretty cool. I downloaded a bunch of radiohead songs this way, but I haven’t had a chance to listen to them. I’ve enjoyed a bunch of music by Morcheeba over the last several months (Mike P recommended it a while ago). I like about half of their music, some of which is excellent for relaxation. I’m going to keep trying to sample different stuff, since I don’t really have much idea what I like, and I can’t stand listening to music on the radio.

Can’t get to sleep again..

Lehigh/Lafayette basketball game was today, we won in a very close game. It was a good one, with record-breaking crowds. I enjoyed it, but it does take the entire day away from me, which puts more pressure on the rest of the week (since I can’t get a head start on my work).

The compiler project ought to take plenty of time… the prof estimates 15-20 hours, but who knows. Lots of meetings, other homeworks, and stuff to prepare for next week’s exec meeting to keep me busy, too.

Well, I guess I’ll follow suit. Unfortunately I can never find time for reading complete books at school, but here’s what I’d be reading if I had the time. Most of these I’ve already started.

Peopleware – Tom DeMarco/Tim Lister – A book about effective, programmer-centric management of software projects. Somewhat dry but pretty useful and intelligent.

Refactoring – Martin Fowler – The software design “classic”. I’ve started it but I’d like to get farther. Not sure how much I like this book, but I’d like to give it a chance since I loved Design Patters (by Gamma et. al., aka “The Gang of Four”)

The Demon-Haunted World – Carl Sagan – Mike C gave me this book last year and I keep meaning to finish it. It describes some of the motivations for scientism and his distaste for “irrational” thought.

Open GL Programming Guide – Open GL Architecture Review Board – The authoritative book for learning how to program 3d graphics in Open GL.

I enjoy reading novels (I read ‘Prey’ by Michael Crichton last semester, really good) but I find more technical books to be more rewarding because I can continue to directly benefit from it after I’ve read it.

I’m interested in reading more books about algorithms (especially ones that aren’t math-intensive). I’m beginning to feel like there aren’t too many books left for me to buy… I’ve learned about most of the stuff I’m interested in enough to spend money.

Another exhausting week… I was up until 4:30 at least three nights in a row. Yesterday was probably the only day worth writing about, so here goes…

I had two homework assignments (both for compiler) due at midnight friday night. I took a day off from work and finished both of them by about 6:30 with reasonable success. My parents had come into town to see a basketball game/pep band. We only made the men’s game (vs. Army, we won). The game was pretty good, the turnout for band was better than I expected, so we sounded good for the most part. Since Lafayette lost (to Bucknell), we’re tied for first now, and we play Lafayette on Sunday. Huge game.

Went to perkins with the parents after the game, talked until 11 or so. Even though I was exhausted after getting home, I decided to go to 226 anyway. As usual, I didn’t regret making the trip as I got to spend time with a bunch of people who I don’t usually see (especially during the spring). The “Team Sober” beruit team (Me, Amy VB, Doug Howie) came alive, losing by only one cup to andrew, mike k, and dan l. My 6 cups were 6 times what I had hit in any other game (both of them, that is).

It was a good night, but I had to get up at 9:00 to go to breakfast with my parents (they were leaving this morning). I wish they could have stayed longer and seen something else (it’s not too short a trip), but I’ll be home in a couple of weeks anyway.

OK, dinnertime.