My final on Monday morning went alright, all things considered. We were allowed to bring a sheet of formulas, and wouldn’t you know it, there’s always one problem that requires a formula that you forgot to write down. So you’re stuck banging your head on the desk and trying to piece it together out of memory, which of course never works. At that point, the crazy idea occurs to you “Hey, maybe I can derive the formula starting from scratch!” That lasts about 5 seconds. Following that, you muddle through the problem the best you can and go through the rest of the test being gnawed at by the knowledge that you could have easily gotten it right if only you had remembered to simply write down the formula. Really, is that so hard to do? Anyway, other than that annoyance, it went just fine.

Skipping class. You know, it seems like a perfectly good idea until you realize that you have a final in 9 hours that covers at least 4 chapters of MSE that you’ve never even glanced at before today. Not that I’m talking about me here. I mean, I’m sure some people would do something like that, but never me. Whatever. Bring me the Mountain Dew! (That’s right, I’m doing product placement now and loving it. I sleep on piles of filthy filthy money. Truth be told though, this is where I’d rather be getting my caffiene.)

I had completely forgotten about the Flotation Walls, until they played some of their stuff on CD101’s local music thing the other day. Now I really want to try to track down some of their stuff, since I thought they sounded promising the first time I heard them and then again on the radio. Last I heard, I didn’t think they had a full cd out, but hopefully that’s changed.

Aw yeah, two classes down, two to go. Finished up everything today for my software engineering class and my electrical engineering lab. Feeling pretty good about both of those, at least grade-wise. There were things in both of them that I would have like to have gotten done but didn’t, but they won’t really affect my grade. Now all that’s left is a final for materials science (which isn’t even comprehensive apparently), and a take home final and final project for my graphics class.

Thanksgiving in Chicago was excellent, well worth the massive amount of driving in a short period of time. Got to see my dear sweet grandmother in good health and good spirits, which was great since I haven’t seen her in the longest time. Also, there’s really nothing better than driving around Chicago at night. It was a pretty accelerated visit though, since we left Thursday morning and got back Friday night. So yeah, I’ve been back since Friday but I couldn’t be arsed to update the blog for these 3 reasons.

Off to Chicago for Thanksgiving. Road trip! …sorta.

Ooh! Nice redesign for Obscurestore!

Time to get started on my final graphics project, which means I have to learn a lot about BSP trees in a little time. I’m going to be doing real time shadows using BSP trees, or at least thats the plan.

BSP tree FAQ

Hey look, its fun to play with BSP trees. (java applet)

I’m not quite sure why I think Dead Man’s Switch is such a cool idea. It’s actually pretty morbid. The deal is, its a program with a timer that you have to reset periodically. If you fail to reset the timer because, oh I don’t know let’s say you’re DEAD, then the program can post messages to websites, send out email messages, and encrypt files on your computer. My only problem is that in the event of my untimely demise, I doubt my computer would remain on long enough for the trigger to activate, especially if it was set for weeks or months. If only there were some way to host this remotely on a machine that wouldn’t ever go down. At any rate, let this serve as a warning that should I suddenly cease to be, I still have the means to release your most damaging secrets to the world. Yes, even that one. So don’t try anything funny.