Journal: Hello world.

Wow. My very first journal entry. It's a very strange feeling. I've always wanted my very own blog, but now that I've got one I find I don't really have anything to say. Who am I to lecture the world? What can I offer? What parts of myself do I want to show?

Hmmmm... Because I am a true geek, I think I'll talk about my new calculator. It's an HP 49g, and I am absolutely in love with it. Between RPN and "exact" mode, it's like some kind of math laser. If I'm working on a multi-step problem I can just shuffle things up and down the stack until I've got one big ugly (yet precise) expression. Then hit Right-Arrow -> Enter and *wham* I've got the correct answer to as many decimal places as I want. This is a big revelation to me. I'm totally used to having funky rounding errors that stack up on each other until the final answer is significantly off.

Until I got the HP I was borrowing my girlfriend's TI-83 and I could never quite get the hang of it. Algebraic notation on a calculator seems backwards somehow. It's not how I think. Give me RPN any day of the week.

I'm only in Trig right now, so I'm not sure how much of this calculator's potential I'm going to use. At least I know that I'm not going to outgrow it. It looks like this thing will take me all the way through school handily. I can't wait to start learning about matrices and higher math so I can really start using this thing. My folks bought me the Ferrari, now I need to learn to drive.

I haven't felt this giddy about a new toy since I got my Macintosh.