Posts from — February 2004

I have two new friends on Live Journal. I like that… I can just click peoples names and make them my friend. If only real life were as simple.

On second thought, maybe life should stay as-is.

Looks like I’m going to see 4am again tonight, not much excuse this time. I had a pretty good day today, but I don’t really feel like rehashing it. I’ve got a lot of stuff tomorrow (that is, “today” now), but Saturday should be pretty relaxing. By ‘relaxing’ I mean ‘productive’.

I watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon again tonight, forgot how great a movie it was. Definitely perfect for my mood.

I should really figure out a way to change this sleep schedule, it’s not very good. I guess the late night is the only time I get to myself, so I really enjoy it. No interruptions that I can’t handle, no obligations for me to schedule against, just me doing whatever I want (or have to, depending on the night).

I wrote almost all of my lexer (don’t worry about what that means if you don’t know) for compiler design tonight. I did it in python, a language I’ve never done anything with before. It’s worked pretty well so far, and python has been good, as advertised. I’d like to do a more significant project with it, but I have a lot of half finished projects already, and I need to move those forward.

I talked with Professor Spletzer today, and it seems that I’ll be working for him over the summer. It’ll be nice to be at Lehigh for the summer, but hopefully I’ll figure out a way to visit home fairly regularly, too. I wonder who else will be around this summer…

For any of you who were in elementary school with me, I got an email from Drew Hoskinson the other day. I haven’t talked to him in some large number of years and I’m going to hopefully give him a call tomorrow.

I got a new LJ picture… I think it’s another winner. Thoughts?

Can’t get to sleep again… I’ve started having breakfast before I got to bed since I often don’t have time in the morning, that way I’m not hungry when I wake up and I can make it to lunch. Waffles at 4am… awesome.

Need to get some sleep, though, linguistics test, compiler quiz, acm presentation tomorrow (er, today).

On Sunday, after sleeping until nearly 3pm (I was so exhausted from the last week), I spent a few hours cleaning the common room. I swept the floors, scrubbed the floors (in parts), vacuumed, cleaned and washed off the table, cleaned under, inside and outside all appliances, and cleaned out the stove. The end result is depicted here… you won’t see it this clean again for a while: http://lehigh.dyndns.org/~mrc8/files/clean/

I enjoy cleaning from time to time, believe it or not.

Josh, Rachel, Kym, Pete and I went to the KKY Central Precincts meeting at Clarion U from friday until saturday night. It was really a great trip and a much-needed break from work.

We left on Friday afternoon and made it there more quickly than anticipated. We hung out in a gym with a bunch of other brothers who would be staying there. Pete and I created a game called “The Losers’ Bracket” which involves ridiculous basketball shots and trying to lose (it’s complicated- ask me about it sometime). We played for a couple of hours and met a bunch of other people from other schools in the process. We retired to our 60′s era hotel and got 4 or 5 hours of sleep.

The next day we had some meetings, ice breakers, etc. As much as I usually think ice breakers and related activities are stupid, I enjoyed them this time. Met lots of people, forgot almost all the names. I should have taken pictures of everyone. I’m horrible with names.

As part of a 50/50 for cancer research, we each contributed a dollar to play a game of assassins. We were each given a name of someone, and had to quietly inform them that they were dead without anyone else noticing. I managed to get out within moments of the game’s start… awesome. After a couple of hours of the game, there were only about 4 people left in the game… two of which were Josh and Kym. Pete and I went into full secret service mode and helped them win it! Killing sure is fun.

Lots of other stuff happened that I don’t remember right now… I’m pretty tired. It was a good trip, and I’m glad I went. I hope more brothers from our chapter go in the future, it offers a whole new perspective.

Since I was sick yesterday I didn’t make it to linguistics class. Of course, this was the first time this semester she took attendance. So… I wrote her an email to tell her I was sick, and offered to fill out paperwork with the dean of students to get an official excused absence if she wanted. The response I got was:

“Sorry to hear that you were sick yesterday & I hope you’re feeling better. ”

So.. I have no idea what this means. Is she counting it as excused?

It’s probably not worth enough to pursue.

Firebird 0.8 came out yesterday… they renamed it “FireFox” because of problems with the open-source database ‘Firebird’. I don’t really like the new name, but I remember not liking firebird, either, so I guess it just needs time. Still a great browser, I can’t wait until it gets into apt.

Tons of homework this week, not a great time to be sick, plus I’m leaving for KKY precincts friday afternoon!

Well, I’m sick for the first time in a long while (I can’t even remember the last time offhand). I’m not horribly sick, but just sick enough to deserve the label. I missed band and meetings tonight in an effort to recover and get my work done for tomorrow. Since I’m taking a break now, I’ll go over the last week or so in random amounts of detail.

I guess the most interesting thing was that I went to 4 different places for dinner in 4 nights, none of which I’d been to before. So here’s the run down:

McGrady’s – Yup, Matt went to the bar. I’m not 21 yet, but I went from 6-7 in which it’s open to everyone. Someone was having their 18th birthday there, which seemed like an odd thing to do. Anyway, Pete, Karen, Steve, Amy, Rachel, and eventually Randy had to wait a long time to get a booth but the food was actually quite excellent. It was fun to visit with the “old folks”… I’m going to miss them next year. Thanks to pete for the invite (in all of its randomness).

Tulum – Mexican food from hippies has never tasted so good. This place really reminded me of Baja Cafe back home, though the food may be better (no chips like baja’s though). This was a pleasant surprise as I didn’t expect to like it at all. I can’t turn down an invite from Mike C and Tim, of course.

Chick-Fil-A – This was probably the worst excursion, and we weren’t really sure why. Sanket, Andrew, Dan and I drove out to the mall to eat some chicken. For some reason we were all tired and making non-funny jokes making for a rather stupid meal time, though we laughed about how stupid we were. The food was ok, not sure what was wrong with us though.

Taco Bell – I’d never been to Taco Bell before. I guess it’s odd, but there aren’t any near my home nor a walkable distance from school, so it’s not too surprising. Anyway, I went with Pete and Rachel on Sunday, and it was good.

First exec meeting went pretty well… there’s a lot of enthusiasm and good ideas, and we talked for a couple of hours.

Since I couldn’t get to sleep, I came across the urge to buy posters for my room. I looked through a fair amount and here’s what I came up with:

Sam Waterson – Oh man, I don’t know how I made it so far in life without this poster. I think it should go on my door.

Grand Central – I’ve always liked this picture.. has a great sense of scale and organization.

New York – I love city skylines, and this is particularly good one of new york.

Shawshank – The Shawshank Redemption is probably my favorite movie, and the poster is pretty good.

Comments? Ideas?

Just tested the week task view in IE 6… it’d sure be nice if they actually supported transparency in PNGs. If the system ever gets any IE users, I’ll change it, but I run firebird out of my home directory on public machines, too, so I don’t care.