This week in life

Here I am again, with no motivation to think of a real title, due to peer pressure of a certain jerkasaurus rex (jerkasaura regina?). Thus, I present an update on recent happenings in a disjoint, sloppily written fashion.

Last Monday, Purdue sent me an offer of support and admission to the Ph.D program in Computer Science. Exciting, but this is only the beginning of responses. Hopefully Purdue isn't the last university that responds positively. They gave me a fairly short notice of a fellowship that I should apply to, which is due on the 31st, so I guess I have to work on that. Recent weather, apparently reaching double digit negatives, is not positively influencing my opinion of Purdue. Not it's weather, anyway.

One of old friends (makes me feel old just saying that) is coming up to Purdue to visit, since he applied to Purdue for grad school, as well. It could be interesting if we both ended up here, since we used to be best friends before I moved across the States.

I had a meeting two Mondays ago to discuss the course I'm helping design. It was interesting, but will probably be quite a bit of work. I'm still in vacation mode, since I just turned in my first homework on Friday, which will be a problem if it continues for much longer.

I also met with Professor Vitek, who's supervising my honors research project, to talk about what I would be doing. I agreed to read some relating to RTSJ, which will probably end up being my research project (sorry, Luke). This will probably be a challenging topic, since James and I didn't really do so well on the RTSJ project we had in our programming languages class.

I'm also juggling way too many games for my own good, at this point. In addition to playing Materia Magica again, James has convinced me to start playing Freestyle Basketball again. Archspace also re-opened as Magellan Wars, which I used to play a lot. Hopefully I won't play too much this time, since the playerbase has dwindled dramatically. I also started a Travian account today, a game that Phil ahd been telling me back. I think it looks like a graphical Utopia, which makes it better than Utopia already. The cherry on top is that Mabinogi, my favorite Korean MMO, is opening at the end of this month for closed beta in English. James and I played the game in Korean, which, as you could imagine, was somewhat limiting, but it could be more fun this time around. Hopefully we get in. It's also kind of sad that my biggest paragraph is about computer games.

Realistically speaking, unless I stop playing games (with your heart, playing games with your heart~), I probably won't have much spare time for recreational programming. I have no ideas that would involve Django programming, but I have been tossing around ideas for a C# IRC library again for shaim. Pun intended. I've looked into other libraries, particularly SmartIrc4Net, but I don't know if I really like it.

I think that accurately summarizes how I haven't been doing much.

P.S. Dear Google, please re-evaluate your Blogger shortcuts. Ctrl-shift-arrow is commonly used to select words, but I can't do it anymore because ctrl-shift changes to preview mode.

The beginning of the end

Assuming I don't royally screw up this semester, this is my last semester at Purdue, at least as an undergraduate. No idea what I'll be doing after graduation yet. Grad school applications have been sent in, and I guess I should resume job searching this semester. Unfortunately, I have no idea where I want to work, which is a big issue.

How did my winter break plans go?

1. Sleep. As per usual, I lost sleep over break rather than gained it. Gotta take maximum advantage of recreational time.
2. Study for the Western Civilization I CLEP exam. I half-heartedly did this. I took the exam today at 2 and passed with a bare minimum. Fortune smiles upon me, for I no longer have the threat of taking 18 credits looming over me.
3. Read The Little Book of Semaphores. I read through a good portion of it. It turned out to be different from what I expected, being a very example/problem-driven book, but I still read through it like a normal book, rather than trying to figure out most things. Probably wasn't a good idea, but I think it helped.
4. Look into more web programming. The Django book did come out, and I read/skimmed most of it. Most of it that had already been written was still the same, but the new sections were good to read about. I started a project in Django before I got lazy and started MUDding a lot again.

This semester, I'm only taking two classes--Numerical Methods and Parallel Computing. Numerical Methods will kill me, since I don't remember any calculus anymore, but Parallel Computing should be interesting. I'm not teaching a lab section this semester, so hopefully I'll have free time to do other things.

And there's my update, now leave me alone. You know who you are.