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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
And the beat goes on.... The semester may be almost ending, but hopefully I'll manage to keep this thing going somewhat regularly. Onward to the third page!
Sunday, Nov. 28, 2004
11:29 a.m.
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The only problem with a "nice" weekend (see last post) is that you always have to go crazy with work to make up for it. My aunt and uncle were leaving to go back to Cincinnati yesterday morning, so I figured that it would be a good idea for me to pack up and head back to campus as early as possible. I mentioned last time that I thought the car might be a problem; it turned out not to be. I didn't go to sleep Friday night until after 1:00 again — I was actually reading some Beverly Cleary books I hadn't touched in about eight years — so I didn't wake up until 10:30. The car was ready before noon, which was fine with me because it took me until then to have breakfast, take a shower, and otherwise get ready. In the end, I left Twinsburg around 1:30 or so, I think. I had set up my computer to defragment the hard drive while I was gone, but when I got back and checked it around 3 p.m. yesterday — this is almost exactly three days after I left it — it was still on 0% done. I had forgotten to pause the virus scanner, so it was writing to disk and forcing the defragmenter to restart all the time. So I stopped it, turned off virus scanning (I was already off the network, so it was OK), restarted the defrag, and then ran off to the lab for some databases work. Databases occupied me from 4:00 until just after 6, at which point I decided to get some dinner at Quizzno's. After dinner, I went over to the Cinematheque at CIA to watch the movie they were showing. It was City Girl, a silent film from 1930, accompanied by a live piano player on the stage just like it used to be done. Very nice. The story line was, naturally, a bit cliché and simplistic by modern standards, but I'd say that the whole experience was worth the $8 it cost. I don't see more than two or three movies a year, anyway, plus maybe three or four more at Strosacker when they're showing something good. The movie ended before 9, so I went back to the lab and chugged out some more databases stuff until 10:15. When I got back to my computer, more than seven hours after I left it, the defragmenter had made it to a whopping 1%. I couldn't figure out what was still making it restart all the time, so I started killing off processes in the task manager one by one to see what was behind the problem. I got down to just two processes left — Explorer and something else — but it was still doing it; when I killed the next one I crashed the system and had to restart the computer. All that had taken me almost an hour, so I gave up and watched a movie on my computer instead of doing anything in the way of useful work. |
Random Stuff #3
Sunday, Nov. 28, 2004, 7:03 p.m.
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This is perhaps not as completely scatterbrained as my previous two "Random Stuff" posts, but you'll have to admit once you read it that it was quite... random. Close Encounter of the Case Kind. I was coming up the Elephant Stairs around 5:30 this evening on my way back from KSL and Olin. As I got near the last set of regular small stairs, I was looking off to the right and enjoying the panorama of Cleveland against the sky. The sky was about 70 percent clouds, dark grey or almost faded blue, but the sunset was showing through in some places in firey magenta stripes. I was just thinking that it would be a great photograph if the trees weren't in the way when I noticed there was someone coming down the steps from the top of the hill. |
Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2004
1:45 p.m.
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Productive day yesterday, which was good because I had a lot to get done. Applications for summer interships at the South Bend Tribune are due tomorrow, so over the weekend I'd made myself promise that mine would be ready to go and at a post office by yesterday morning. I spent some time Sunday fixing up my cover letter and resume and photocopying clips of some of my better articles from the past few years. It was all packaged up and ready to go Sunday night, so I set my alarm for 7:10 a.m. and went to bed. Then I got an e-mail from Karen yesterday morning saying that she really liked the article I wrote last fall about the controversy over a temporary cell phone tower. Since the application didn't actually say how many clips to include, I figured it wouldn't hurt to add the cell tower story to the four I was already submitting. So Monday morning was something like this: Wake up at 7:30 a.m., shower, quick breakfast at Fribley, to Olin to scan the cell tower article, to Nord to print it out because the Jennings printer was freaking out, to the post office on E. 101st Street to mail the application, and then to my first class of the day at 10:30. I ran to the Observer office at 12:30 and got Brian to take care of signing a contract with KRT Campus contract for a newswire service starting in January. After software engineering, Eric, Camellia, and I wandered around the quad and looked at Baker all fenced off. They're going to be demolishing the building over the next four to six weeks, and we wanted to see if they'd started yet. (They hadn't.) After an Observer staff meeting at 6:00 (because of the holiday) I wrote up a chunk of my number theory paper that's due Friday, then read through and commented on Jon's GUI design document for the software engineering project. I also got out some e-mails that I'd been putting off. A nice workday, overall, I think. Today I was on time to databases for the first time in a few weeks and had a nice lunch in Fribley with all sorts of people who managed to come or go during the hour and a half I was there. It was great — just like freshman year all over again, minus the CHEM 111 homework. That's the sort of thing I miss about this year: it seems like I don't really have connections to any of my old friends anymore. But as Sonnie says, maybe I'm just crazy. |
Thursday, Dec. 2, 2004
1:20 a.m.
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AHHH! This week is insane! Words cannot express my absolute hatred of group projects right now. |
Friday, Dec. 3, 2004
5:25 p.m.
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It's Friday afternoon — on the last day of classes, even — and that means one thing: it's time for a post! Of course, the last day of classes doesn't actually mean that all my work is finished and turned in. Even not counting finals, I still have things to do and turn in in four out of my five classes. An assignment for one class I could deal with, but four? When am I supposed to study for my tests? Or apply to grad school? Sometimes I would love to put some of my professors on a leash and make them follow me around all day so they might understand what they're putting me through on a daily basis. Today's culprit — the ace of spades in the Most Wanted card deck, if you will — is Prof. H. Andy Podgurski and his wretched software engineering project. The project is managing to take what could be a really cool and useful class and turning it into something that haunts you in your sleep. If I were a grad student, or employed by him full-time, I would love to spend my days reading through method call logs, integrating code, and proofing documents, but it's just not possible for anyone in the class to put in as much work on this thing as he expects. I was talking to some people after Wednesday's class, after we did course evaluations, and the predominate feelings were definitely not positive. But I digress. It's not really fair of me to sound off on software engineering like this without mentioning the good things in life that keep me going. This morning, I had a quick chat with Wendy (who I haven't talked to in months, if not years, by now) over IM. She had something in her away message about another fellow Twinsburg Class of 2001 graduate, and when I IMed her to ask about it she answered back and we started talking. Chris and Jason, two members of my digital logic lab group, put in something like 10 hours of debugging on our Booth multiplier circuit this week (including being in the lab for like five hours just today) and got it working during class this afternoon; Pat helped me with answering some of the lab questions and we got those done too. On the way back from class, just after 5:00, we got to see the side effects of a non-overcast Cleveland sunset: the sky turned itself a sort of Easter-egg blue and the bottoms of the clouds were highlighted with pastel pink. Like usual, it made me wish I had my camera with me, and also like usual, I didn't. I think tonight is going to be something fun and non-academic. If I even look at a line of C# or SQL code tonight, I think I might snap. |
Saturday, Dec. 4, 2004
9:48 p.m.
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A little bit of time off is a good thing. Last night I went to see the Players Theatre Group in two one-acts in the black box. The first was a specimen called Sexual Perversity in Chicago, which more than definitely (and sometimes uncomfortably) emphasized the second word in the title and featured at least one character with a Brooklyn accent. Thankfully, it calmed down a bit after the first 20 or so minutes and was a lot easier to watch. The second play was called The Duck Variations and was essentially a rambling and comedic philosophic conversation between two old men as they played a game of chess in the park. Susannah was in the first show, so I sat with her sister in the audience and talked with her a bit afterwards. I got back to my room a bit after 10:00, made some tea, and then read a (non-academic!) book for a while. All my suitemates were watching Jay Leno at 11:30, so I joined them just for fun and watched that show for the first time ever. Some interesting stuff, I must say. It makes me feel kind of good that there are current-events-based shows out there, even if they aren't all that intelligent or funny. Last night, Jay Leno kept cutting off his guests after they had said about half a sentence, so there wasn't too much of a discussion going on. Some time ago, I was listening to an NPR segment about a TV show that used to be on the '60s, I think. It was called "That Was The Week That Was," and from what I could tell it sounded like a forerunner to Saturday Night Live without the stupid parts. Let me see if I can find the link — it's the second part of this page. That's kind of random, I suppose, but the previous paragraph about TV made me think of it. Back to the facts: Today I was planning on spending all afternoon and evening on databases, but Vicki and Erin persuaded me to go ice skating with them, Camellia, and Ben. I had to take books back to KSL and mentioned that I wanted to take pictures of Baker being demolished, so on the way to the ice rink we drove up to Baker and watched the demolition a bit. The steam shovel (odd name now, by the way, since they definitely don't run on steam anymore) had picked up a steel I-beam, about 20 or 30 feet long, and was using it to poke at the bricks on the top floor of the building. Each poke caused a little shower of rubble to fall down the the ground, where a second steam shovel was picking it up and putting it in a dumpster. Eventually, the poking shovel decided to stop messing with the bricks and poke straight through the side wall, which was most enjoyable to those of us watching from across the street. I took some pictures; I'll try to post them on my site once I get them developed and scanned in. I did work on databases from about 4:15 until 8:00, but the server was somehow only partially working. I could see my project, edit it, save it, compile it, whatever from the back end (i.e. .NET), but I couldn't use it from the front end (i.e. the web browser). I couldn't get too much new development done without testing it, so I worked on writing my final report instead. I'll see if I can push myself to do some more later tonight. Quote: "Heisenbugs as originally defined ... are bugs in which clearly the behavior of the system is incorrect, and when you try to look to see why it’s incorrect, the problem goes away. Typically, when you are trying to see what’s incorrect, you turn on tracing or you add some more parameters or you change something. And the change causes the problem to go away. ... So the real definition of a Heisenbug is when you look, it goes away." —Bruce Lindsay, an expert in the design of database management systems. |
Sunday, Dec. 5, 2004
9:35 p.m.
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I've spent all day alternately sitting at my desk and sitting at my desk staring at my computer screen, and it's beginning to cause the muscles in my lower back to become obnoxious and painful. Right now, I'm sitting as far back in my chair as I can so I don't have to lean forward at all; a side effect of this is that my arms are almost completely outstretched so that I can reach the keyboard. Now that you've got that mental image of me in your mind, we can continue with a synopsis of the day. I went to bed a bit earlier last night than I had been (1:30 a.m.), but I didn't wake up today until 11:30, and that was only because the phone was ringing. I took a shower, went down to Fribley, came back up here, and then began the period of vascillating work-doing as previously referred to. The day ended up being a sort of re-enactment of Jessica's context switch dance because I couldn't work on one thing for more than about 45 minutes. I even took the extra step of writing myself out a little schedule saying what I needed to get done by the end of the day, and every time I worked on something I wrote down how long I spent on it. The results:
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Saturday, Dec. 11, 2004
1:19 p.m.
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OK... so I owe you guys about a week's worth of entries. I'll see what I can do. Actually, I can almost sum up the last seven days in just a few words: databases, plus interruptins. By interruptions, I mean those other annoying things that have to get done during finals week, like final exams and studying for them. Starting Tuesday, I put myself on a three-hours-of-sleep-a-night schedule, which was not fun, but at least forced me to be a bit more productive. Tuesday I worked on the databases project and studied for my psych exam; Wednesday I took my psych exam, worked on databases, and studied for my number theory exam; Thursday I took my number theory exam, worked on databases, and went to the presentation of our software engineering project; yesterday I worked on databases, demonstrated it to Tekin, and then went to a toga party. The result of all this is actually good. Shockingly good, even. My databases final report, which I did turn in on time, was 23 pages long and only contained about two-thirds of the material it was supposed to. It was, however, very nicely designed and looked pretty professional; by a lucky chance, I also included six or eight diagrams, figures, and screen shots. When I went in to do the demo, Tekin had my report on his desk. He flipped through it briefly and said, "I read your report; this looks really great. I have no questions at all; just show me how it works." As he flipped the pages I didn't notice any markings on it at all except for a check mark on the cover page. (I suspect that he didn't actually read it, but just glanced through it, saw the figures, liked the design, and decided that I'd put a lot of work into it. Which was definitely true!) I demonstrated the user functionality first, but even before I'd finished that, he said it looked great and I could skip the rest. He didn't even see the administrator stuff, which was probably about 60 or 70 percent of the programming work. When I was done, he opened up his electronic grade book (a previous student's class project, actually) and entered 600/600 for my project grade. Then he said he wanted us to not take the final if we were happy with our grades in the class. Mine was a 92.something percent, so I said that was fine with me. I felt so amazing walking back from the demo that I almost did a bit of a happy dance or something on the walkway next to the Veale garage. It was like there was something inside me bubbling up under my shoulders making me stand up straighter and/or float off the ground. Kind of like how Marina said she was smiling the whole way home on the bus the day that her story was published in Cleveland magazine. So, to sum up, I now only have one thing left to do before the semseter's over: rework all of the software engineering documents and get them turned in to Adam and Christian by tomorrow night. It's going to be really tedious and annoying, but now that databases is done and the final is cancelled, I don't feel that bad about it. Grades: So far, the only thing I know is that I got a 71/80 on the multiple choice part of the PSCL 101 final and that my EECS 341 grade is an A. I think, though, that the worst I could do is a 3.6 GPA for the semester — three A's and two B's. |
Monday, Dec. 13, 2004
11:37 p.m.
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Some good stuff in the past two days: I'm now officially done with my academic responsibilities for the semester and it snowed all day today. Yesterday, I went to Tower City with Jessica, Mark, and Nicole to eat an early dinner at Panera's, but it turned out to be closed. We ended up at a new place just upstairs that was sort of the same thing being ostentatiously Italian. (The sandwiches had names like "Sonny Corleone" and "The Godfather" and they played Italian music on the PA.) After dinner, the other three went off to see a movie, but I caught the next train home to finish up the documents for EECS 398M. They were supposed to be done by 10:00, but it was really more like 11:30 before I decided just to throw together what I could and send it off. Jessica said she really didn't care if the analysis documents were good or not, and by that time I was getting really sick of hacking away at them and trying to make them make sense. Mark and Nicole were fed up with work at about the same time, so we all went out to the common room and watched "Animaniacs" episodes until after 2:00. Today I managed to be out of bed by 11:30, and woke up to find it snowing. I ate "lunch" in Fribley around 12:30, then picked up my number theory exam from Dr. Singer and asked him if he could write me letters of recommendation for grad school. Everyone else I've asked so far (Mme. Lathers, Tekin, and the advisor of The Observer) has been pretty enthusiastic and happy to talk to me, but Dr. Singer looked a bit confused and said, "Um, yeah, I guess I could do that." He also asked for stamped envelopes to return the letter in — which I didn't have — so I said I would get everything together and leave it in his mailbox. Right before I left, he said, "Didn't I have you in differential equations or something way back when?" I said yes, he had actually had me for both M 3 and M 4, and that when I take his cryptology class in the spring that will be the fourth time he's had me as a student. I guess I haven't stood out enough to make an impression on him — even after appearing in his Calc III class one day dressed as part of a capacitor. I got a 157/200 on the number theory exam, which gave me a B overall in the class and was quite disappointing. I thought I'd gotten at least 90% of the final right. I guess it's a really good thing that I asked Mme. Lathers to write recommendations for all four of the schools I'm applying to; Dr. Singer only has to write me two, and now I'm pretty sure that Mme. Lathers will give me much better recommendations than he will! Anyway, after the trip to his office, I continued northward and called in at The Observer. My plan was to spend a few hours cleaning things up and/or writing my staff manual, but I ended up spending two hours looking through old Western Reserve Tribunes and old CWRU yearbooks. Fascinating stuff, really. We've got a pretty nice archive running back all the way to 1929. When I left, just after 3:15, it was snowing hard enough to slow traffic on Euclid down to about 20 mph. The university thankfully hadn't cleared most of the sidewalks yet, so I crunched my way through the snow back to my room without having to get upset about the insane amount of salt people like to put on the roads and sidewalks around here. When I got back, Mark, Jessica, and Nicole were up for some more Animaniacs, so that occupied us for about an hour and a half. Then dinner in Fribley at 6:15, and then a night of general free time. I listened to Charlie Gray's show on WKHR for a while, then read an Agatha Christie book and played some Christmas music. I won't be leaving campus earlier than Wednesday night, and probably not until Thursday, so I have at least two full days left for assorted fun things in the area. I think tomorrow I'll either go to the public library downtown, one of the museums around here, or see if Kristin wants to go to the thrift store at E. 55th Street to look for furniture for the Observer office. I probably should do some GRE studying or other grad school application work too, but maybe not. After the way things have been this semester, I'm perfectly OK with taking some time off now. Grades: Note: Grades in parentheses not yet confirmed by the registrar.
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Wednesday, Dec. 15, 2004
2:13 p.m.
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This may be the last entry for a few weeks, depending on whether or not I can connect to the home.cwru.edu FTP from home. If I can't, I'll keep writing entries like normal and then post them all when I get back. If everything goes OK, you should see more entries start to pop up within a few days. In about an hour, the semester will be absolutely and irrevocably over... and that, I say, is a pretty good thing for just about everyone I know. It seems that this fall has been either the hardest or one of the hardest semesters most of my friends have ever had — even though they've all got different majors and might be different years. It's certainly been my hardest one ever, even though the number of credit hours I'm taking (14) has been the lowest ever. As you might expect, I spent the last two and a half days doing absolutely nothing. Yesterday I didn't even make it to Tower City or a museum or anything: the farthest I ever got from my room was the Den, and that wasn't until 10:30 at night. I woke up shockingly late again — around noon this time — and hung around in my room until Mark's parents arrived around 2:30 to take him home. Jessica and I talked with them for a while while Mark finished packing and hauled his stuff out to the car. After Mark left, I drove Jessica to the UPS store up on Euclid so she could ship her sword back home for the break. Since it had snowed all day Monday and part of the day yesterday, my car had about four inches of snow piled up on it and it took us more than 10 minutes to clean it off. Right after we got back, Erin wanted to go down to Fribley, so I met her there for an early dinner. I had to collect books for the Tau Beta Pi bookswap from 6:30 until 8:00, and then I ran over to the grocery store to get some cheese and crackers to take to reading night. Bethany made a pot of tea to go with them, and we finished The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy before 10:30. Afterwards, I walked back up to the Den with Paul to get a Windows CD he had so I can overhaul my computer over break. That took until 11:35 or so because I stayed to talk to everyone for a while. Eric said their gas bill was $110 for November, so they were busy taping sheets of plastic around the windows to hold the heat in. Today I tried to get up at 10:00, but failed and got out of bed an hour later instead. Nicole left while I was in the shower, and Jessica is planning on leaving this afternoon immediately after her final ends. ("I'm coming back from my final, grabbing my suitcase, riding it down the stairs, going to the rapid station, and throwing it in front of the train so it has to stop.") Dad's coming between 3:00 and 3:30 to take my computer and bike home, and I'll be following tomorrow morning around lunchtime with whatever else I want to fit into my car to take home. Hopefully there will be something fun happening tonight to warrant the extra day I'm spending here, even though I wouldn't do much back home except call Heinen's to see if they want me to work for a few weeks. Sonnie went home already, and her away message has said "work" for two days; I'll probably end up in the exact same situation the minute I get home, so I'm not hurrying things at all. Grades: They're slowly starting to come in. Looks like another 3.8 semester for me, even though I had been holding out hope that I could get a 4.0. Note: Grades in parentheses not yet confirmed by the registrar.
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