I have decided to attend Des Moines University's Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine program. It starts August 13th. However, there is a 3 day mandatory orientation scheduled on 8/7 - 8/9. I will work on the 10th of August, that will be my last day of work. Yep - I'm pretty excited about it. Excited both to be leaving my work and to start school. Going to DMU means that we can stay in our house (for as long as we can afford it...) and we won't have to move our kids from their school or join a different congregation of our church. My wife and I have a lot of friends in the area (mostly from church) so it will be nice, too, to stay in touch with them.

I got my grades back from o-chem last week. I got a B in lecture and a B in lab. It was more difficult than 1st semester and required a greater amount of work. The final exam was very difficult, being of the 'comprehensive for the year' variety, published each year by the ACS. The nationwide average for that test is about 50%, I think. With my 70%, I got an A on the final, which was a blessing indeed, as I don't think I could have gotten a B in the class with anything less.

Now I am taking the Kaplan MCAT course and it is pretty intense. What really frightens me is the compressed semester Physics II course I will be taking from July 10 to Aug 10. All that while taking the Kaplan course and studying for the MCAT. The good news in all of this is that I have pulled my MCAT score up by 2 points already - according to the Kaplan diagnostic I took at the beginning on the Kaplan course. So far it has been really great - I would highly recommend it.

My grades are back: A for anatomy & physiology and B for chemistry II. Ugh! Not bad for working full time while taking two science classes. Granted, they were from a community college. Still, I wanted at least an A- in chem. Oh well! I am only taking one class this summer, Biology II, I expect to get an A there. In the Fall its Organic Chemistry, and again the only class I am going to take. However, it will be at a 4 year college that also preps students for its pharmacy program, so I think the class will be significantly more difficult than any I have so far taken.

Today I am working on updating a log analyzer program that I wrote earlier this year. I commented it heavily, which is a good thing. I am happy to work on it. I haven't done any real programming for several weeks, so my work-joy level has been very low. I am thinking about hanging a sign in my cube that has my joy level on it and whenever I am not programming it will say "LOW," I would be interested to see if I could get more programming assignments that way.

I believe in decoupling as much as the next developer. But why do people believe that decoupling AND no documentation (and I mean zero) is a good idea? Because they know that they won't have to maintain it! I am given the responsibility of maintaining a large application - one of the parts of that responsibility is to get the application ready for the next version of our app server. And... Well, I suppose I could go on for days, complaining, when really, I ought to be looking at and tracing through code....

I just found one of my brothers on slashdot. How weird is that? In other news, school is finally out and I am still waiting to hear back on the results of my graduate school entrance exam. I am going to study through the summer so that I can take it again in August.

Wow! I went from 8 comments on my first journal post to none on the second. I feel obscure again, which, on the whole, is a good feeling.

I finished Spare Parts and War Trash over the past two days. The first was a rather well put together war memoir by a Marine reservist that served in the first Gulf War.

War Trash is a novel that explores the experience of a fictional Chinese intellectual in a series of different U.S. POW camps during the Korean war. It is by Ha Jin. He is one of my favorite authors.

The other day I started my blog here on /. It was a brief entry. The surprising thing about it was that it received 7 comments (8 total but one of the 'replies' was mine). That was decidedly odd. Still plugging away (slowly) at learning Dvorak. I am up to 21 wpm.

Learning to type Dvorak after 20 years of QUERTY is...mentally...painful. And makes my prose brief.