I've often wondered what drives me to stay up until the wee hours of the morning. Running on four hours of sleep destroys my productivity and sucks the fun out of my day. Sleep deprivation sucks. Why do I pursue it?

Maybe it's boredom. Going to school and working full time doesn't provide for a lot of variety in my days, so maybe I'm trying to stimulate myself by making simple things like holding a conversation or walking a challenge. If I start challenging myself in other ways, will I go to bed earlier?

I'd love to pursue this more, but I'm passing out from exhaustion. I'll mark this as a "to-be-continued".

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.