I think I get a cheap thrill out of skipping class. I just got back from my physics recitation. I took the quiz, then as soon as he turned around from taking it up, I got up and left! Teehee! Shut up, I'm having fun.

So now I have about two hours until my next class, during which I plan to read more of Ender's Game. Then I'll have honors, for which I actually read the entire assignment. Hopefully that all means that today will be an easy day (the rest of the week, too, God-willing).

Mmmm, root beer.

Subject pretty well sums it up. I think I have a fever, which would pretty well explain my being out of it. I also spent the last two hours or so reading Ender's Game, which is certainly more enjoyable than the honors reading I've been doing. I've also certainly been able to pull a lot more meaning out of it than crap like "The Robbers."

Earlier I wrote a poll engine for my website. It's very plain with the HTML right now, but you can list the polls, see the results, and vote as of right now. Still quite a bit of work to do. See http://sweb.uky.edu/~srwalt2/poll.cgi

Hopefully I'll go to bed pretty soon. It's late and I have a lot of classes tomorrow. I just had an interesting compulsion to get online once more before I got into bed, so here I am.

Just took an IQ test referred to me by my cousin Dan. I got a 155, which is in the range "155 - 164, Genius, Nobel Prize Winners." Looks good for me.

Pretty boring day today. I skipped my CS275 recitation and took a nap instead. I naturally had a headache when I got up. That kind of sucked. I think I have a cold, since I had a fever and my sinuses hurt and I had a stupid runny nose this morning. Bah.

For current assignments, I have a short 2 page poem to read for honors, I ought to write one of those stupid reaction papers (again), and then lab report. All the usual suspects.

I miss my girlfriend. She's coming up here this weekend. That should be fun.

So far so good for the weekend. Ate lunch at Dan's today, and had Little Caesar's pizza. Mmmm. Drove around in the SAAB for a little while. We went down to High Bridge and looked around, and also to the old US-27 bridge in Nicholasville.

As to homework, I seem to me in markedly good shape. I finished Mastering Physics today. EE380 and CS275 are in good shape. I've got a lab, but I can't really start until after our meeting tomorrow. That only leaves honors, which has scarily little reading for Tuesday. Also, I believe somebody else (since I finally did mine) has a presentation to give, so that will cut down on class time. It just occurred to me that I have a student conference with Cardiff this week, but that shouldn't be any big deal.

Basically, I get to just relax for a day or two. Yay!

Well, Operation "Schmooze with CSI" was a big success. I got this email back from the VP of Human Resources today: "Steven, it was a pleasure meeting you on Wednesday. We are very interested in you working for us as an intern. If you are in town over the Holidays please stop by and I will give you a tour of the office. Please stay in touch. I will be contacting you in the next couple of weeks." Score.

Other news, the programming contest was today. That went pretty well. I got 3 out of 5 prompts done, and my fourth one was done except that it failed one of the test cases. Blast. But it was a lot of fun, and I think I ranked relatively highly.

Of course, I saw Dr. Jaromcyzk there, since he runs the contest. Apparently the man can't look at me without offering me a job. He wants me to be the system administrater of his Apple lab. It'd probably be a pretty nice job, $10/hr, 10 hours/week, but I'm a very busy man! Especially with honors. Stupid honors. Had to get Cardiff instead of Broom. I told him I'd give it a try, though, cuz I do indeed like money.

That's it for now, hooray for the weekend!

Wow, I just slept for like 3 hours. I've been pretty exhausted all day. I ate my dinner a little while ago, got in bed, and just got up about 15 minutes ago. I feel less sleepy now, though. I hope I'm not getting sick.

The only thing I really need to do tonight is to write my honors reaction paper for Candide. If I can do that, I will consider it to have been a productive day. I need to give it to Cardiff tomorrow. Other things I need to work on: Mastering Physics, new lab report (can't do much on it yet), practice for programming contest tomorrow.

No rest for the weary.

I'm feeling very wired, which is bizarre given that it is 1:30am, and I haven't had any caffeine today. I did have a Starbuck's hot chocolate a little while earlier, which was probably loaded with sugar.

Right now I'm watching the vice-presidential debate (politics can make me uppity, too). I finished my part of this week's physics lab report earlier.

[A few minutes of watching the debate]

Teehee, Cheney burned Edwards Good. "Your hometown newspaper has taken to calling you Senator Gone Edwards. [...] As vice-president, I am President of the Senate. As such, I am there almost every Tuesday that Senate is in session. Even notwithstanding that, the first time I met you was when we walked on this stage."

Well, guess I should head on into the bed.

Mondays are usually pretty rough. I didn't do very much over the weekend, as it's against my religious beliefs to work then (or at least, it makes for a good excuse to be lazy 2 out of 7 days). I did get almost half of my Mastering Physics done last night, which helped.

Today classes were uninteresting, as usual. EE380 attempted, but did little to, entertain me with a homework assignment. Writing microcode for a simple CPU. Elapsed time: 30 minutes, maybe? I did it in the time between CS and my co-op info session, with time left over to work on more Mastering Physics.

After the info session I forgot about my lab meeting today. Apparently I also forgot to put it in Evolution or my Zaurus. One of my lab partners just walked up here to bring me down and check them in. The meeting lasted all of 15 minutes, anyway.

So now I'm shopping for new tires for my SAAB. I'm looking at some BF Goodrich Traction T/As on http://tirerack.com/. I still need to prepare study materials for CS (test tomorrow) and read an honors book (due tomorrow). Stupid honors class.

So, it's pretty late, meaning there's nobody online to talk to. I've finished my part of the lab report, which is due tomorrow. Other than that, I only have reading to do, which I'm naturally avoiding. So, I figure, post a journal entry why not?

Yesterday and today have been pretty good days. I got a lot of stuff finished on Monday (all honors stuff) so I feel very unburdened. Further, the weekly assignments in EE and CS are conspicuously absent this week. All that means that I should only have to read and do physics over the fall break.

I've been trying to recruit my friends into creating FOAF descriptions of themselves. Successful recruits so far, my girlfriend and Sarah. Hooray for the Semantic Web.

Well, I obviously don't have anything substantial to say, so I guess I'll sign off for tonight. Probably few posts over the holiday weekend.

...I guess I should go ahead and post another journal entry while I'm still in the habit. Right now I'm appallingly up to date with my school work. I have some light reading to do for honors tomorrow, but other than that I'm in pretty good shape. Nothing due tomorrow, nothing due Wednesday that I haven't already done, same for Friday. The only big remaining task for this week is the lab report.

(Postscript - wait I second, I don't even have class on Friday. Whoopie!)

In other good news, I finally managed to repair my system from the instability GARNOME inadvertantly caused. Somehow system libs got compiled against libs in my home directory, and when I deleted the ones in my home directory, stuff was happy. Now that's better and I'm installing a shining new version of OpenOffice. Yay!

So I guess I now is as good a time as any to get in the bed and do my reading. Peace.

Not my style, I know, but I'm trying to work myself back up and command a presence on the internet. As such, I've created a new centralized website http://sweb.uky.edu/~srwalt2. Check it out. Hints and suggestions about content and layout are welcome and appreciated.

Wow, it's been a long time since I've written anything here. I haven't really missed it either. I guess I either didn't have much to say or else said it enough to other people. This latter explanation would make sense, as my girlfriend has gone to New Jersey to visit her relatives.

A quick catch-up of the last few months. I finished my summer program at UK and have not found any further employment for the summer. As such, I've filled my time reading mostly useless geeky internet stuff, as well as a semi-interesting programming project: a cellular point-of-sale program (a program that would be used by businesses who sell cell phones). This later for a friend in charge of tech for such a local company, in hopes that he can convince his boss of the merits of my program.

Other interesting projects include adding a subwoofer (and amp) to my under-powered SAAB stereo. Thankfully (for me) this is no simple task for a few reasons. First, I'm extremely cash-strapped. Second, the SAAB head-unit has no traditional pre-outs. I say "traditional" because it has them, but in a strange 8-pin DIN format and in a place requiring a right angle connector. Try finding one of /those/ at your local Radioshack. Try it, really! I did. They just looked at me with confused little puppy-dog faces.

Now, to be sure, SAAB sells a cable that one can use to connect the pre-outs to an amp. But the dealer wants $85 for it. $85 for a cable! That's more than I paid for the amp! Nuts to that, I built my own. Dirt simple, too; I was almost shocked it worked. See more details of that here.

Another side effect of a small budget is that I decided to build my own subwoofer enclosure. Surprisingly, a tutorial on how to do this is available on Crutchfield's website. A couple trips to Home Depot, a selective application of power tools, and you're done. Of course, it is this last part that makes it fun--power tools. I got to use the table saw for the first time, the jig for the first time, and the drill once out of only a few times. Hooray for modern (post-Modern?) technology!

I just tonight finished painting the enclosure, and tomorrow will journey to Best Buy to obtain the hallowed component itself, the subwoofer. I ordered it online so it'll be ready to be picked up. Sure, I could have had it delivered here for free. And sure, I could have waited 12 days until the new Best Buy in town opens. But I'm a very impatient guy, so I'm driving 70 miles to the nearest open Best Buy. Hoo-rah.

Subject says it all. Nothing particularly special about today. I don't feel all that inspired, which is okay because I only have some 20 pages or so to read for honors tomorrow. I did get ass-tons of assignments in all of EE, Math, German, and CS, however. Half of those are due in Friday.

I am writing a python program that implements the Quine-McCluskey algorithm, though. An interesting task. Aside from that, all I've really done today is watch Futurama. I might help a guy down the hall install Gentoo on his computer, though.

Wow, seems like I go longer every time I write a journal entry. That's to what the subject refers; sorry if it's a bit dismal. I probably wouldn't have remembered to write a journal entry today if not for the fact that Erin wrote one earlier, and I got an email reminder to that effect.

My life has been pretty packed since over the weekend, but I think I'm finally getting back on top of things. I caught up on my sleep deficit last night (despite being awoken at 3am by the fire alarm! ahh!). I finished my calculus homework earlier (which was suspiciously easy), and folded the laundry from last night. Kinda wrinkly now, but stuff happens.

I also got some things out of the way: my honors paper (by not doing it) and my EE test yesterday. Hopefully I did well with that.

Lots of driving in the weekend. Four trips between Lexington and Bowling Green; contributed in no small part to my exhaustion. But it was well worth it. Had a great time with Erin and my family. Saw The Whole 10 Yards, which was okay. Not quite as good as I'd hoped it to be. Delicious lunch on Sunday at Aunt Linda's as well.

Looking ahead. I'm thinking about doing my German homework, which is due tomorrow, after I finish this journal entry. Erin's gone to Lab right now, but hopefully she'll be back for a little while to talk to (as I'm obviously pretty chatty right now). Whenever she goes to dinner/concert, I figure I'll eat as well. Chicken strips night! I'm also taping some Simpsons for future viewing. Good times.

As far as the coming days go, I've got to turn in a CS program tomorrow, reading for honors for Thursday, probably a new math assignment, and possibly some EE work. There's the ever looming mathclass, which I'm trying to get back into the habit of working on. I also have one final essay to write for honors before the end of the semester. And a CS test next Monday. Other than that, I should be free and clear for the summer.

Birthday in 12 days!