New Year, time for a new summer job

So I am back at school again, so I suppose its time to let everyone know how I have been. I spent most of Christmas break lounging at home, hanging out with relatives, and spending time with my friends back home. My friend gave me a computer game, Left 4 Dead, for Christmas, and I have spent a lot of time playing that. Its fun shooting zombies for pretend. Now that I am back at school, its the same old drill, except with new classes.

This semester, I am taking Embedded Control, Physics II, Computer Science II, and Intro to Engineering Analysis. I worked out the schedule pretty well, so I do not have any classes before noon. I think it a pretty sweet arrangement. My Embedded Control class is challenging, but interesting. Our final project will consist of creating an autonomous blimp.

I have spent a good bit of effort to try to get a nice internship this summer. I think I now have three good options available to me. I just had an interview today with Lockheed Martin, so I am holding out hope with that one. I also have a contact in Boeing, and they say that they are watching for me, so that is promising. The final option is a research position at a local college, and that would pay quite well. Whatever I do, I think that I will be enjoying my work this summer.

So I think this whole sleeping till noon thing is a pretty good deal for everybody, because, according to my room mates, I a somewhat loud in my usual morning routine. For the past 2 mornings however, I had to wake up at the crack of 9 in order to set up and go to this interview with Lockheed. Once I got back from my interview this morning however, my one room mate had the gall to ask me if I would not wake up so early any more. He said that I am too noisy to be waking up before them. I argued that I had to go to an interview, so I really had no option but to wake up that early. His clever response was, "Well, work around that." I also told him that 9 is not an unreasonable time for me to wake up. He countered that by saying it was for him, because he only had 4 hours of sleep last night, on account of his weekly frat party. I apologized for not accommodating his drinking schedule. I don't think that I am doing anything unreasonable, and I am now tempted to wake him up at 5am everyday for a jogging routine I will take up, just to piss him off.

It will be nice to have a new room mate next year.

Finals and Christmas Break

I am down to my last final, Calculus II. I did quite well in the rest of the course, so I think that this shouldn't prove to be a problem. I am slowly getting my grades in for the courses I have already completed, and things are looking good. I got an A in Logic, and Engineering Communications. I also got a 98 on the Computer Science final, in addition to the 5 point curve, giving me a perfect score, and an A for the class. I don't have my grade in for Discrete Structures yet, but as long as I got a 75 on the final, I think I should get an A in that course as well. So I am well on my way to getting a 4.0 this semester, WooHoo!
I have gotten my first taste of real winter weather up here. Last Thursday, we had an ice storm, followed by 2-3 inches of snow the next morning. I don't think I will ever grow out of the excitement of waking up, looking out the window, and being blinded by the white snow. I shouted and woke up everyone in my suite just to show them the snow. They may have been a little mad, but hey, it was almost noon, they can't sleep forever. On that note, my one room mate has a very odd sleeping schedule. He sleeps about 4-5 hours a night all week, and then he sleeps until 2 on Saturday and Sunday. But, when we have oddly scheduled days, like during finals, he gets even more off. I saw him come in at 8am on Friday, and when I asked him where he was, he told me that he was getting breakfast. I asked him why he went so early, and he corrected me and said, "you mean late." It appears that he stayed up all night playing age of empires with a friend. Thats some good quality time there. I wish I could control my stamina like that.
So now the ice is finally starting to melt, and it looks kinda pretty I suppose. I mainly enjoy prying huge chunks of ice off of tables and handrails, and heaving them at sidewalks. Its a lot like breaking glass, but it not dangerous, and I dont have to clean it up. Unless of course, I failed to look at the sidewalk before chucking the ice and accidentally hit someone. Then it would be dangerous, and, depending on their injuries, I might have to clean something up. I will be much happier once I can get home, and not worry about getting frostbite every time I step out of my door. Just have to get past one last final. I am mad at it, because it is the one thing that has kept me here all weekend, otherwise I would be home by now.

A better day after

So thankfully, I have recovered quite quickly from the illness I was suffering from two days ago. I was even able to enjoy a Thanksgiving breakfast this morning. I also was able to get a lot of sleep last night, so that was nice too. Although I feel better now, I look worse than I did yesterday. All of the retching I did put a lot of pressure into my head, bursting some capillaries, so now I have a bunch of red dots all over my face, and two large splotches on the whites of my eyes. My voice is also still very hoarse, but that is bound to get better soon. I just hope that I can sound better tomorrow for my Eagle Scout Board of Review.

A Sad Thanksgiving

So I was very glad to get home on Tuesday. I have not had a chance to come home since last August. I have really enjoyed spending time with my friends and family. Unfortunately though, I came down with a stomach virus last night. It was a very miserable night. I just couldn't fall asleep, or keep anything down. Thankfully, I am feeling a good deal better today, but now that I finally have my appetite back, my well-meaning mother will not let me eat anything, for fear that my nausea will return. I am sure that she knows best, but man am I hungry now. I just hope that I feel better soon, so that I can enjoy some of that turkey. All things considered though, I guess it is better to be sick here at home than at school, with work to do. Well, I hope ya'll are having a nice Thanksgiving.

Quick sort is Quick

So my Computer Science professor is British. VERY British. He has the closest thing to a cockney accent that I have ever heard in real life. He even has little British words that he likes to say, like "rubbish" instead of "garbage", "scripts" instead of "quizzes", and "bogus" instead of like, "BS" or something like that. It certainly makes for an entertaining lecture, when you can't understand half of what he is saying, and the other half sounds like something the girl from "My Fair Lady" would say. However, he is not as bad as my friend who has a first generation Indian TA with a lisp. I think that one takes the cake.
Thankfully, he does have a Powerpoint running over his shoulder the whole time, and he doesn't put silly, made-up words in there. So that is helpful. Today in lecture, he was going over the different methods of sorting a list of data. He eventually got to a type called "Quick Sort". The first bullet point on this slide informed us that "Quick Sort is quick". No only did I find the reduncancy rather funny but my nerdy friends and I quickly thought of this picture. This is "Longcat", an internet joke that has been around for several years. It often carries the caption "Longcat is long." People have made similar comments about other things, with the general formula, "XY is X". So I would like to thank my Computer Science professor, for unwittingly bringing on the lols for my friends and me.

Thanksgiving Plans

So I only have a little more than a week before I finally get to go home for Thanksgiving break. I haven't been able to go home since I got here in August, mostly because it is a 6-7 hour drive, not terribly practical to make twice in one weekend. It will be very nice to sleep in my own room again, if only for 5 days. On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, I will be having my Eagle Scout Board of Review. This is the last step before I am officially awarded the rank of Eagle Scout. This was a long and arduous task, and I started putting things in motion for it, well really since 6th grade, but the hardest part I started last November. For my Eagle Scout project, I organized the construction of 43 cedar artificial wood duck nesting boxes, that were then placed in various wetland areas around the Chesapeake Bay. As I was working on these things last summer, I was racing the clock to get it all done before I had to ship of to school, and thankfully, I got my paperwork submitted just in time. These past several months, that paperwork has been shuffled around God knows how many old guys' desks and reviewed many times. I give credit to my Eagle adviser for making sure I had all the right stuff in it, cause it was accepted about a month ago, and I just need to get home and have my Board of Review. It's quite exciting. Eventually, possibly during Spring Break, I will get to have an official ceremony for it, but that can wait, although, I can not wait for the novelty cake with the custom icing job with the eagle on it. Thats a once in a lifetime thing you know.

My Classes

This semester, I am taking Calculus II, Intro to Discrete Structures, Intro to Logic, Computer Science I, and Engineering Communications. I have several international teachers. My Discrete Structures, and Computer Science Professors are British, and my Logic teacher is Dutch. His full name is Bram van Heuveln, but no one can pronounce "Heuveln" to his satisfaction, so he just goes by Bram. In Discrete Structures, we have been learning about probability and mathematics involving sets and graphs. In Logic, we have been learning about how to manipulate Boolean logic sentences, and in Engineering Communications we spend the first several weeks learning how to do Computer Aided Design(CAD) and now we have moved onto Project Management. I am doing very well in all of my classes, and have at least a B in all of them, and I enjoy them all very much. Now that I can take classes that are all in my field of interest, I think school will be much more fun for me.