Dashboard is the ticket.

My life is insane. I code for hours, I work for hours, I sleep for hours, and I take notes in lecture for hours. I rely solely upon my calender on my iPod to make sure I'm in the right place at the right place. If I didn't have it, I'd never know what to do. I wake up at a standard time, presuming I don't sleep in from exhaustion, and reach for the iPod, hoping I have the energy to make my first engagement. It is always a class. It it almost always Data Structures. Now and then I skip, caring not because I am acing the class. Noteably, this posting comes moments after completing some 900 lines of code for said class. I turn 22 this weekend - on Saturday. I (wisely) ensured I was not scheduled to work that day. I have no intention of delivering pizza on my golden birthday. Instead, I shall sleep into the afternoon, awaken, and drink until all senses are annihilated. Such treats are good things (tm) as they help compensate for all the meaningful shit I do with my time.

I took a massive exam for my C++ class today: 23 pages. Ridiculous. I beleive I did very well on said exam, possibly between 95% and 98%, though I prefer to estimate between 90% and 98%, to compensate for stupid mistakes.

Ugh. I'm exhausted - mentally, physically, everything-else-ly.

Good Day.

I've taken a day to reflect on the happenings in St. Louis. The first few days were fairly boring, so I kept to myself. I took some time to go for a bike ride, as I found that to be an easy way to evade the little children when I desired a clove cigarette. I also spent some time online thanks to my Sprint PCS phone and USB cable. I love what I can do to my powerbook, but I will wait a bit with my lamentations. As I perused my grandparents home, it became clear that every bed would be in use at some point or another. Sneaking off to the roof would be difficult under these circumstances, but when Nate and Janelle showed up we managed to pull it off many times.
I hardly expected my cousins to be the people they were, but I learned a lot about them. I told them I wanted to come visit them in Fort Myers, but I'm not sure how to engineer that. I'll think about it more later - I have thier phone number. I got pretty intoxicated with the other cousins on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but Janelle made a complete fool of herself every night. She drank far too much, to an inappropriate extent, as it was our grandparents home. Nate is a cool guy. He is 16 years old, but he's a complete slacker in much the same way that I am. I believe that is quite unfortunate. Nonetheless, I made it clear I wanted to hang out with him again this summer and that I'd like to come visit them in Fort Myers. He didn't react much to that at the time, or at least I wasn't able to interpret his reaction easily due to my state of mind. Anyways, I have his phone number and I'll call him, but I will place the initiative in his court.
The drive back to Appleton was difficult at first due to some severe weather in Illinois. After a couple hours we got through it, but we only averaged 55 MPH during the storm. Mark provided some good driving tunes which was much appreciated. I didn't drive much myself until about 240 miles in, when I had a smoke at a rest stop. Mark didn't want to stop to get cheese, but I insisted. Unfortunately, we had to slow down abruptly to make the exit, and the mac was damaged when it fell off the seat. The LCD panel is only about 85% functional, but I can bear that for now. I'll get it repaired (thanks Apple!) but I am going to procrastinate so I can back up my data and to avoid the week I'll be without it. So I smoked again at the cheese place.
When I got home, Max hadn't called back. I spent most of the night alone, except when I acquired dinner for Mom and Camille. I worked very diligently today, probably thanks to my relaxing vacation. I built a new script to make my tasks more efficient, and I'm proud of that. Its so incredibly cool, but I'm too exhausted to think about it now. I'm gonna head off to sleep.

Yesterday, Mark (my brother) and I drove down to St. Louis from Wisconsin. The drive normally takes about eight hours, but we finished in about seven and a half. We "weren't speeding," according to mark, but the difference in arrival time is proof. My grand parents have a truly massive house, located on a private street in downtown St. Louis, right near a group of hospitals. Unfortunatly, both Mark and I are sleeping in what is effectively a closet attached to the room my parents are occupying. While I don't mind this that much, I would have prefered the nicer of the two beds, something Mark acquired by rushing up to the room instead of spending a few minutes helping me clean out the car. I'll try not to be bitter about it. I was able to use my Powerbook on the ride thanks to my Spring PCS cell phone and USB cable. I don't mind getting 12KB/s download, but the 500ms latency leaves something to be desired, particularly when trying to use SSH with a full second of latency between a keypress and its appearance on screen. My grandfather has DSL, but I'm avoiding his computer because I know I have to do some troubleshooting on it and I'm trying to let this be my break from work for the summer. I took a few days off to come down here and I'm not about to use those days to do what I do at work. I don't see any harm in procrastinating, either. I'd like to go get a bathing suit as I don't have one and the pool looks quite appetizing, but the weather.com radar maps do not appear conducive to such activities in the near future. Enough for now, maybe more later.

Today I continued working on the business-class NT web server migration. The day started fairly slow, though I'm not sure why, but I did manage to complete 7 more domains. That puts the numbers at 50 completed out of 250 total. Contacting the users has proven to be the most difficult portion of the migration task. Unfortunately, that step cannot be avoided. I'm fairly exhausted now, but I'm still hoping someone calls me for some recreational activities. I'd be inclined to go discing, but the weather is fairly unpleasant. If I'm lucky it'll be warm over the weekend. I do not work friday, but I have to get my hair cut around 1:30pm. I may also acquire a parking pass tomorrow, but I don't know if that is economical. A one-month parking pass is $25, but I don't think that is the best option. The one-day parking fee is $1. I work four days per week, implying a monthly cost of $16 (for four weeks) paying each day. This is actually more efficient than the $25 per month parking pass, so I don't see a reason not to just pay each day. Oh well, its fairly inconsequencial. Done ranting.

This journal entry marks my renewed interested in a journal. In this case, I've been stimulated by the challenging work which I've been doing assisting with a server migration. This is the first major server maintenance task I have taken on at my place of employment. I have done a few migrations on my own, but they were on a much smaller scale, and were not nearly as automated. I'm excited because I'm learning a great deal, but it is difficult work. I'm extremely good at it, or at least I think so. All those lonely nights in high school focusing on my computer instead of being social exercising. I really could have used the exercise (Reminded by spontaneous back pain.) Ah, but what can I do. If this journal thing works out for me, this will not be the last entry for months. :-)

I've been developing the beta of my screenshot viewer. Its backed by a MySQL database and its written in perl. So far the beta code is about 230 lines, but I expect the release candidate to be about 280 lines (after adding comments.) On the topic of comments, I'm not sure exactly how much detail is needed. Maybe it's just me, but $a .= "<html>"; is pretty self documenting, right? Especially in a subroutine where $a is private and the last line is return $a;. While I like obfuscation for efficiency, I'm not sure if this is optimal. The code needs to be understandable, but by who? Since I'll likely be leaveing in 2 years for school it needs to be maintainable once I'm gone. Maybe I should just get one of the sysadmins to look at it and tell me if they think it needs more code documentation. I'll think about it later. It was quite a busy day today (several Mac calls) and I'm tired. Not to mention the fact that the 'rents just left home for a bit. Peace!