Another really bad exam today. Oh well, I'll cram for the final. Went running, ate too much, stomach killed me throughout exam, for which I was not adequately prepared because of spending like 30 hours over the weekend on an MP...

MP due today in 398. Group MP. I thought, after I got out of the exam, "My code is already perfect, so I'm going to go home and sleep so my stomach feels better." Get home and receive a call from the group. A fix of a bug somewhere else completely hoses my stuff. (pretty good find by the group, at any rate). So I run over to the lab. Can't figure out what is going on. We hand in with stuff broken. Then I figure out just about everything else that was broken and how I would fix it were the MP due tomorrow.

Boo.

River to River coming up.

Yay.

River to River (rrr.olm.net) can make you forget all your troubles.

Two days ago I ran halves with Nick and Brent, and ran really fast.

Yesterday I took an exam and didn't do so hot.

Got another one tonight, should be better.

George W. Bush won the presidential election.

Jon Stewart makes the point that people arguing on either side of any political debate will make points they know are misleading or that they don't believe, because it will help their candidate or their point of view that they do believe in; they believe the ends justify the means.

I don't think that the ends ever justify the means. The means should determine the ends.

But then again, I'm also a bit aimless, so maybe that's not the right way of going about things.

Time to brush my teeth.

I ran a race today. Got 7th. Ran something like 17:35. Need to be about 2 notches faster, particularly in the speed department.

My ceiling is leaking water right onto my bed (noticed this at about 1am last night). I'm sleeping in the living room. The apartment people better get their asses on this one quick...

My wrists are killing me again. Well actually just the right one, like usual.

I'm trying to figure out who I am and what the hell I'm doing here.

Thst just about covers it.

Today I was involved in a three-person accident. Nobody was hurt, and all of the damage was reparable by hand. This because two people were on bike and the third on foot. People make stupid mistakes in traffic whether driving, biking or walking (in this case, the walker stepped right in front of me on the bike path, I ran into her, and then got hit from behind). When there aren't cars involved those mistakes don't have nearly the cost.

Holy shit!

Last night in Paxton I watched Rocky IV and Rocky III. True think pieces, them. For example, the fight between Rocky and the Lips d00d in Rocky III. The Rocky movies make heavy use of staged fights, and here was a staged fight, staged to look staged. And, because it was between Stallone and an actual pro wrestler that stages fights for a living, the staging was as convincing and sometimes more convincing than the staging of the other fights.

That fight leaves some uncertainty as to the nature of the fight in the movie world. However, its effect was no different than any of the other fights. It showed that Stallone had lost **THE EYE OF THE TIGER** just as his first fight against Clubber Lang did, and the second one showed how he regained it.

And Rocky IV... what a brilliant soundtrack. Particularly the song playing as Rocky's plane landed in the Soviet Union. That and the remarks from Rocky and Drago in their opposite corners, respectively: "He's a human" as Rocky gained confidence in his ability to hurt Drago, and "He's a piece of iron" as Drago gained respect for Rocky's toughness. A testament to the superiority of technology over weak fleshy humans.

So I was sick, all weekend. Saturday I was pretty bad and Sunday was awful. Jessica really took care of me, which was awesome. I'll have to do something nice for her this week :). Because our relationship is based on exchanges like that :-P. But thank you so much, you rock...

Then this morning I went over to McKinley to make sure I didn't have strep or the flu or Sudden Student Death Syndrome and I nearly passed out due to fatigue in the waiting room. But I've been getting my strength back through the day, my fever is gone and I should be able to make it through classes tomorrow.

So the gods of running somehow found out I was planning to race this weekend (bastards must be reading my e-mail), and gave me this shitty cold.

I was planning to go to a toga party last night, but that kinda didn't happen due to extreme fatigue and blowing my nose every 15 seconds. Strangely, before that, I ran speedwork, which went very nicely. Maybe that explains the fatigue.

So today will be a day of resting, and studying like a fiend, and I should buy some produce, and maybe watch some C-Span.

I have hard evidence that Al Dimond is harboring cookie programs... programs for cookies of mass destriction. And since I can't post images in here, I'll just have to link to the image:

Linky (ya 'know, for some reason, the picture just doesn't get across the kind of chaos that went on in that kitchen while these beauties were being pulled out of the oven...)

I later put them into bags to take home, and after that realized that the recipe I used (a self-modified version of a recipe that makes nice self-contained cookies) would probably work nicely for bar cookies. So maybe next time I do this recipe I'll do it in bar cookie form. Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of "Delicious Disasters from the Den of Dimond".

So clarinet is all good.

Jessica and I have been together 10 months and we celebrated that today.

I had a nice relaxing day.

GAH! The clarinet studio people won't give me a damn e-mail to tell me if I can be in that shit this semester or not. So if not I need to take another mother fucking class... so I hear about this other class I might want to take that involves building an electronic music system for children with disabilities, sounds like something I could do and good experience and stuff, and it's supposedly got open spots left, but it doesn't have open spots left. SO maybe I'll have to wait and see about clarinet and if not then start ECE 390 2 weeks late.

Outside of academics, I'm enjoying life tremendously. I think I'm going to do some Time Cube chalking on the quad tonight. Hey, it sure beats all the bullshit Greek system crap that's written there now.

And yeah, OMG the football team matched last season's win total this week at one. Next week they'll be going for their first win over a I-A team since 2002. Me, I'm hoping that we match last year's accomplishment of getting more Nobel Prizes than football wins. But next week's game is University Library Day, and we all know the whole community rallies around the football team and gets fired up for University Library day. So maybe the footballers can pull off another win.

I ran 800s this morning. Only 4. In 2:40. I'm in worse shape than I thought. Maybe I won't run under 17 next Sunday. Oh well.

OK, time for some homework.

I had an amazingly fun night last night with someone. But that's not the point of this post. I keep a reasonable separation of webjourno and romance here. Not enough separation not to mention that I baked some pretty hilarious looking cookies last night that will be pictured here in the future.

OK, so in Music History class today I was just continually reminded of how fucked-up ancient religion was and how it really is like that today too... I'm short on time, so just one example, we're in the 4th-9th centuries now (not much happened musically then because the church supressed people trying to do anything interesting), and in the Mass of that time there's a section called Credo. Which is Latin for "I believe". A section whose exact text was debated among scholars and then made immutable for the rest of time. And this is the section of the mass with the fewest different tunes to it, apparently because its text is the most immutable.

In ancient times ideas almost never survived to today on their merits, but rather on the military strength of those pushing them. Sometimes ideas conducive to military strength, and thus survival/spreading could go on. Now ideas often survive based on their commercial applicability or in politics on their ability to be made popular... which people as a whole at least have some control over. It doesn't always produce the best, most enlightened ideas, and often creates frustrating ones, but in perspective, it's a hell of a lot better than it used to be.

I woke up at 8:00 in the morning. Took a shower, ate some breakfast. Went to ECE440 (Semiconductors). Talked about valence bands, conduction bands, and the forbidding gap. Went to Econ 103 (Macro). Talked about society like the point of it was to produce goods and if it didn't do that it was failing. Went home. Ate some lunch. A crunchy soynut butter and jelly sandwich. And some spinach. Turned on C-Span. Barbara Bush was on. Turned it off. Went with Matt and Kyle to voice a few complaints to our landlady. Jumped to Music History (antiquity for now). Returned a book, bought another one (both on signal processing). Bought 3 Power Bars, ate 1. Did a bit of homework. Went to DSP class. Talked about... DSP... came home, changed, went running with Jason Razo. It was fast. Stretched, iced my ankle. Went to the fridge, grabbed my box o'spinach, and turned on C-Span. Barbara Bush was still on. Turned it off. Showered, ate some Carribean corn chowder. And the second Power Bar. Went to Engineering Career Services meeting. Learned Power Verbs for my resume. Didn't learn where to put the accent marks. Went to an improv comedy show. Left (it was over).

... So last night I got really drunk in my sleep and PARTYED HARD, and I'm so clever that to remind my future morning self of what I'd done, I took all the bottles from the 10 Corona Extras I downed and put them in my bicycle basket.

I must have been so drunk I didn't even remember to be hungover!

(That or some dipshit just used my bike basket as a garbage can. Least s/he didn't use it as a toilet.)

And then of course riding down the bike path on Wright street trying to get to class I nailed someone who walked right out in front of me without looking. It's not all *that* hard to be alert, and it's not like I'm flying around campus on my circa 1930 2-speed Schwinn.

Lots of things are happening and I don't really care to write about any of them.