Yay Fat Tuesday

Woo! Last post before my Lenten hiatus.

My 8:00 Algorithms class was eased somewhat today, as my professor brought us all jelly doughnuts. She grew up in a Polish neighborhood where they celebrated Paczki day the day before Ash Wednesday, which is somewhat of the “poor man’s Mardi Gras.” Having no paczki available, Americanized jelly doughnuts had to do, and we had a mini Paczki Day celebration before class started.

A note about auctions: Even though I don’t do the “Sundays doesn’t count” thing, I’ll be posting auctions and links to them on Sundays, so I’ll feel somewhat less intrusive onto my hiatus. Keep your eyes peeled, I need money for that glass color x_x.

Expect these and other updates when I return at Easter:
-SETC
-Spring Break
-Survival of March Crunch

Extraneous Internet Hiatus begins at midnight tonight, so I’ll still be around if you need to reach me up until then.

Now I’m off to fatten myself up. If I’m celebrating Lent this year I may as well be fair and celebrate Mardi Gras as well. Hope the spring starts out wonderfully for everyone, I’ll see you guys at Easter!

Lent

I always forget about Lent since I’ve been in college. It was easy to remember going to a Catholic gradeschool and highschool, because you’d be like “oh, it’s Lent!” But not having reminders in college I’d go through half of March thinking “Why are they always serving fish on Fridays? That’s unusu……ohhhhhh.”

Anyway, entirely regardless of religion, I think any period of making a material sacrifice can be an enriching experience if you have the right mindset.

So this year for Lent (since I remembered it), I’m going to give up extraneous internet, which will be a huge challenge, but I think I can pull it off. The terms defining “extraneous” are as follows.

1. I’ll still use it for research, because I can’t get around that, but no leisurely browsings of forums, art sites, chats, Homestarrunner, etc. I’ll probably accomplish this by doing most of my internet research in labs, which provides an environment in which I feel like I have to be doing real work.

2. I’ll keep instant messenger open to people at school and family who may need to contact me for school or family-related business, but otherwise no IM

3. No LJ, neither friends list readings nor updates. The exception is I’ll probably be auctioning off glass to get money to pay for that color, so I’ll likely post a link to the auction as an update.

I think that mostly covers things. This process will have an additional benefit, in that hopefully it will force me to focus more on school and post-graduation planning, which is always very heavy in March. So, if anyone has a drastically important need to contact me, do it by Mardi Gras (that’s Tuesday). I’ll probably do an update Tuesday night.

Mysteries Solved

So, remember when my parents’ computer had that problem with cryptic messages typing themselves out in text boxes? We discovered that it was the speech recognition function. See, I swapped monitors with them at the beginning of the school year, and my old monitor has a built-in microphone. So all those ghostly messages were just it trying to interpret various sounds: sneezes, coughs, mumblings, etc. Doh!

Today I was compiling a list of color that I need to buy to use for pieces for my senior show, and Holy Crap for Crap! Glass color is EXPENSIVE! x_x Even when I calculated the price for just half a kilo of each color bar I need, it was still quite a hefty sum.

Maybe I should sell/auction old glass pieces to raise money to buy color to use in new glass pieces. There must be some other things I can sell besides glass to raise money… *rummage rummage* …anybody want an upside-down running hourglass?

Strike!

Yellow Boat is finally officially over!

Strike was delayed a bit due to an impromptu private concert from Colin’s dad (note: Colin is Colin McCann, son of Peter McCann, who wrote “Do You Wanna Make Love (Or Do You Just Wanna Fool Around)?”, which the cast and crew was in love with). So after the pleasant sing-along, the disassembly started.

After putting props away, I spent most of it de-tangling the fiber optics used for the stardrop. What a paaaaaaaain.

In spite of my heavy workload, I’m dropping everything to go home tomorrow to see Les Triplettes de Belville, which I’ve been anxiously waiting to see since Brendan showed me the trailer a year or so ago. I’m very excited!

Time for an Update!

The Yellow Boat opened really nicely, and I was happy to see that we had reduced the audience to tears much earlier in the play than I expected would happen. Muahahahahaha! The Quilt ceremony was also really touching. Strother, you have a very haunting and powerful voice, I will capture you and put you in a jar and make you sing for me, and then I’ll give you cookies as a reward.

In other news, classes are rough, but interesting. The Beowulf Clusters class is going to be an ordeal, as the only available place for us to build our little cluster is apparently a closet. Granted, it’s a spacious closet, it’s just mostly filled with biology lab equipment. I have been partnered up with Ryan the Younger, and as we discovered, neither of us knows squat about linux administration, networking, or any real hardware stuff. It’s going to be a fun term (we’ve already decided to paint flames on the side of our node…you know…to make it go faster). To make things easier, I made sure our node was set up next to Jared and Zaid’s, so we can pester them relentlessly for help.

Algorithms is going to be tough, because it’s one of those “thinking” classes, and it’s at 8:00. I’m trying desperately to convince Dr. Shannon of my poor arithmetic abilities. When we had our quiz this morning, we asked if we needed a calculator, and she said no. And I said “Are you SURE, you know I can’t do math.” and she’s like “Nooo, you’ll be fine, it’s just a little arithmetic.” Sure enough, I butchered Euclid’s algorithm because I can’t divide or subtract.

Why is that? Why is it that I can do derivatives in my head, or even standing on my head, but I can’t do math. Like, at all. I’m a horrible banker in monopoly, because I can’t subtract to give change (also, because I steal from the bank ¬_¬).

Anyway, moving on, glass seems like it will be good. I have some good ideas to get my rolling with my senior show. Databases should involve some fun and useful projects.

I wanted to go home this weekend and visit friends, but I think this week’s workload will be too great. Guess I’ll be spending Valentine’s Day* getting ahead in my work…or catching up.

*Notice how I didn’t say V-day

Smells like Spring

First day of spring term and all is well. I got quite a few errands run today, so I feel pretty accomplished.
I also finished American Gods yesterday while lounging about at the airport and on the planes. It is an excellent book and I recommend it to anyone.

In other news, I put up one of my glass armadillos for auction. It’s a fundraiser to help Byzil out with his webservers.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3702370383

and on that note, I did manage a small webpage update.

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