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.

First Post

Well I told you guys that I would start a blog so that you can know what I am up to. Now I am no English major (in fact, far from it, I am a Computer and Systems Engineer), but I will do my best to keep you all up to date with my life. This is mostly an expirement to see if my life would be at all interesting to an outside observer.