Apr
14
2006
–Warning: I felt it’s my duty to inform my daily-communication friends that this is a really boring post. It’s basically what’s been going on in my life. I’d say it’s more for those who haven’t seen/heard from me in awhile. That being said…
Whew! A break!
This is part-one of a back-to-back post. I just figured I owe an explanation for my lack of updating.
This semester has been going alright, thank goodness it’s almost over. I’m in six classes. That’s 20 credits, 2 more than the maximum allowed by PSU without special permission. I thought I could handle the extra work while juggling my clubs and job. I thought wrong.
My days essentially start at 9 and end around the same time, then I start homework. Eh, it’s really not that bad. I felt a lot worse about myself last semester when I didn’t have anything to do.
I landed a job this semester in the IST Building. There’s some research labs on the third, I work on the “Computer-Supported Collaboration and Learning Laboratory”, which is essentially the front of a lot of HCI (human-computer-interaction) research. Right now I’m basically doing graphical things, fixing smaller issues, and coding a little (minimally). I like being the graphic-minded guy on the team. I almost want to be able to put “color harmony” on my resume.
Said job’s site is here and my part of the site (it’s actually more of a sandbox, nothing ever stays there and it’s really just incomplete) can be found here.
While on the subject of webcode, I’ve been learning a lot lately. My IST210 course (databases) has taught me how to use PHP (to a point where I’m actually not too shabby for what I need it for) and SQL (which I hadVERY minimal experience with before). Our teacher in that class is amazing. His name is James Wang and he went to Stanford with Sergei and Larry (the guys who made google). He’s also programmed a really really neat image-based search engine that you can fiddle around with here (it’s really impressive).
Because of said learning I’ll be hopefully undergoing (among others) a big summer project to finally get the other 3/4th’s (that’s right, another’s on the way) of my webpage done. It’ll be nice to have time to work on this all.
My other commitments are sort of boring. I’m taking calculus, macroeconomics, and german. There are 2 really exciting classes though: astronomy and my english-30 class. Astro is great because I have a pretty deep fascination with it. English is great because my teacher is… well I don’t know how to describe him, but trust me when I say that he’s awesome.
Along with class and work I have a few clubs, namely VISTA (me volunteering for whatever IST needs me to do), SOMA (arts group that I sometimes go to when I’ve got the time that put on some really kickass music/art shows), and The FutureForum. I’m a committee member for it, basically it’s a big expo that IST has for companies to come and demonstrate their corporate culture, products, and employee requirements.
So yeah, gradewise, I don’t know. I think I sort of finally experienced what it’s like to “burn out” as some people call it. I guess it was just too much for me to handle, but there was no way I’d drop any of them (I liked 3 of my classes enough not to drop them, and I hated the other 3 enough that I refused to take them any more than I had to.) Hopefully I’ll get an A or two, a B or two, and a C or two. Not really happy with it, but I’ve learned my lesson. Anyways, this year’s almost over and I’m really freaking apathetic about the whole thing. I need a summer to enjoy (I’ve been schoolin’ since the fall of 2003, about time for a break).
I went with Maxwell to New York City in February, almost on a whim (about a week and a half notice). It was absolutely amazing and I have to return as soon as I can. We got caught in that massive blizzard that was on the news, had to dig out a truck from under a few feet of snow, rode the subways, saw a few of the sights. I had some cheesecake, and it was excuisite.
Beth and I celebrated our one-year anniversary on the 4th of February. I managed to arrange it so I could visit her. At the end of my spring break, I visited her again. It’s nice to have a relationship that works even over long distances<3.
I recently saw Ben Folds, and then I saw him again 6 days later (with Beth, no less!). I have to say, he puts on a great performance.
It’s finally warm out. Spring is arguably my favorite season (aside from the wonders of school-less summertime) and I have to say that the extra daylight and warm weather have really done a good thing for my morale.
There’s that new game out called Oblivion. I swore I’d never like games like that, and here I am totally addicted to it.
I turned 19 on the 3rd of this month.
I come home on the 5th of next month, and can’t wait.
I finish this post in a few lines, and you finish reading it in a few lines, hooray!
So yeah. Crew, that’s been this semester in a nutshell, filled in between by a lot of mindless work, very little sleep, and a lot of missing people. I can’t wait for summer to start.
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