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Well I managed to survive the last two weeks somehow, and now it's finally time for Spring Break! I don't think I've ever worked so hard in my life with school work, but at least it's (almost) all done, at least for a few days. I had a huge midterm on Thursday, one today, and then a huge programming project that was due today, but got its due date extended to after spring break. Of course they only tell us this on the day before it's due, and this would have been very nice to know earlier in the week so I didn't lose sleep and stress over it, but well what can you do. The best news of the week was I have my robot moving and obstacle avoiding as of this past weekend, so now it's all about working on the camera to detect color.
Last weekend was pretty fun though, even if I did end up staying up till 6 am on Friday doing homework. Earlier in the evening I went to this horrible play very loosely based off War of the Worlds, but it was with a bunch of friends so that made it at least tolerable. I usually like the The Hippodrome's stuff, but this one was really bad. Then Saturday was one of my best friend's 21st birthday (Happy belated website Birthday Sarah!), so you can't expect me to do homework then now can you? And Monday I went to go see Giselle which is an absolutly incredible ballet. And then Wednesday was the last home basketball game of the season, which I had to miss most of it thanks to all the homework I had. I don't think I've ever looked forward to spring break so much in my life.
As for my spring break plans, in a few hours I'm going with a friend to Daytona to stay with another friend of ours who has a condo for the week. We'll only be staying for the weekend though, and then it's back to Tampa for the first time all semester. I've got a million projects I need to work on, so it won't be a total relaxation, but at least I don't have to juggle classes and other stuff along with all my homework. This semester has been by far the busiest and most time consuming I've ever had, but so far I've somehow managed to keep my head above water.
And just so this doesn't become one big long rant update, here's a cool page with old TV into's of 80's cartoon shows. They even have Dino The Dinosaur!
This update brought to you courtesy of Spring Break 2004, and the letter "Q". I started it off by going to Daytona for the weekend, to stay with a friend of mine who has a condo up there for the week. It was really cool, a lot of fun, and right on the beach. It was also the tail end of Bike Week so I saw more motorcycles in the last two days then I've seen in my entire life combined. I don't have much planned for the rest of
the week (other than homework, blah) but I'm going to really enjoy not having to worry about classes and just veg out a little bit. As well as getting around to doing some things I keep putting off since I don't have time during college, like watching some DVD's I've bought, getting wireless to work on my laptop in Linux, and just playing videogames. Anyways, here's a few pictures of the place we stayed at:
Moon-rise
The view outside our balcony
A snowman made out of sand I made
And if I want some reading material, there's this handy reference of the top Sci-Fi and Fantasy books of 2003 that I can use. It's sorta sad how little I read now (bookwise, the Internet has replaced my reading time pretty much), considering I read all the time when I was younger. Mrs Piggle Wiggle, Nancy Drew, Wayside Stories from Wayside School and many others were just so good.
The checks from the Music CD Pricing antitrust lawsuit was sent in the mail, and so I got my $13.86. Of course CD's are still too high, but at least I get a little bit of money out of it. It just amuses me that the multimillion dollar movie costs less to buy than the soundtrack which cost probably no more than a million.
Happy St. Patricks Day! Or as a friend of mine had in her profile, one of the few holidays that doesn't involve candy, thus relegating it to second-class holiday status.
My internet's down as I type this (thanks DHNet!) so there's nothing left to type except about the story of my lif^H^H^Hday. Which considering I've been typing quite a bit today, it works in pretty well. I got up way freaking early (7:00 am, who would have thought I'd ever consider 7 am way freaking early back during high school when I had to get up at 6 am) to help set up for the annual UF High School Programming Competition. I also stayed around to judge, which was interesting as last semester I was on the collegiate programming team, so I knew exactly how it felt when they tried to submit a problem thinking there is no way it could not work, and then having to tell them "Nope, wrong output, try again". We overorderd on food, so I ended up taking home 31 apples in my backpack. I then wrote a very lengthy email to a listserv I'm on, rebutting an article in our student newspaper about gay marriage. Then it was off to see a pretty good French movie about butterflies (Le Papillon, which as the French "expert" in our group said is not the combination of the French words for butter and fly.) and dinner at a restuarant called "The TOP". Then it was more email reading and writing.
Notice the distinct lack of the words homework, school, or study in the previous paragraph. Luckily I had already done everything due tomorrow (a 8 page report on the camera for my robot and a 2 minute presentation on it), but still it would have been preferable to at least have done something. All well. This weekend isn't good either since it's the opening weekend of March Madness, THE best four days in the sports year. Like the ubernerd I am I created a huge posterboard sized bracket for I think the 8th year in a row now, to fill out as the teams play. I also have no lab on Thursday for the only week ever (dumbest scheduling idea I've ever had) so I'm finally checking out Museum Nights at the art and natural history museums on campus.
And I'm still rambling on and I have no idea why. Or well it's the crazy over-tired drunk-like-induced rantings of someone who's brain stopped logically functioning about an hour ago, but just keeps going. Which some people are very fun to call and wake up (well it's mean to wake them up, but the results are funny. You know who you are reading this) because they ramble on like I'm doing, but since it's in person it's that much more amusing.
Crap, those apples are still on my bed.
I'm actually almost ahead of "schedule" for once (and hence the update). Actually I'm probably not even close to not being behind, but I just like to believe that I'm on track, and selectively forget all the million on-going projects I have to juggle. But things take a while when you have to spend 2 hours wondering why my robot code isn't working, only to relieze that the "25" I read on the data sheet is in decimal and not hex like I had assumed. Sometimes I really do hate computers...
Once again the Internet comes through, and thus you can now have the Picture of Everything. I don't even want to think about how long it took him to draw all of that and put the code together on the web, but it's muy cool. From Transformers to Bjork and of course Waldo. And it's still growing. Absolutly amazing.
I went to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind over the weekend, which is written by one of the best screenplay writers in Hollywood, Charlie Kaufman. He did Being John Malcovich and Adapation as well, but ETotSM is my favorite I think. Me and my friend (My friend and I?) both really liked it a lot.
So there is not only good proof that there was water on Mars, there is now good reason to believe there were even seas. Very very cool. I'm still hoping that we'll put a man on Mars before 2050. I want to see it.
Want to know what Chernobyl looks like 18 years after the disaster? A woman on a motorcycle riode through the desolate areas and took pictures of the abandonded towns and countryside.
There is no love for yellow starburst. I just like the red and pink one's, and my friend likes the orange ones. But yellow is the neglected child of the Starburst family. Poor Yellow.
Does anyone know the average number of splits per insert in a B* tree that statisfies p<=1+(N-1)/(x-1) with x=ceil((2m-1/3) and p=number of nodes in the tree? No? Since when did college get hard?
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