Colony

Date: 2002-03-01 16:10:25

I have been colonized.

Sometime this week, an invasion force of tiny viruses identified my nasal cavity as an excellent spot to set up a colony. I first noticed them Thursday afternoon, and by Thursday night, they were well entrenched, and my defense forces had identified and engaged the enemy. Intelligence is still ongoing to determine a weakness to exploit.

In other news, winter quarter is now 89% done; I have one week of classes left, then finals, and then I head home. I'd like to have my TCP/IP stack running before I leave, and it'd be very cool to get it to run on a different architecture with a different byte order (say, one of the Suns in the local Sun lab) to double-check that all of my htons() and ntohs() calls are in the right place. (Since I'm primarily developing on a little-endian box, which runs counter to network byte order, I think I should have caught everything already, but it never hurts to double-check.) Then I have to get it running on the DSP chip, so it wouldn't hurt to make sure it's bulletproof. Before the end of the quarter, I have to deliver the final draft of two papers in my two English classes, which may or may not be terribly fun. Fortunately, I can put this off until the middle of next week.

Today I took my third thermodynamics test of the quarter. I got 113% on the first one (since I got extra credit and Dr. Sih added 16 points to everyone's score because the class average was too low) but 70% on the second one (because I didn't quite get the difference between internal energy and enthalpy -- now I figured out that one uses internal energy (u) for stationary substances and enthalpy (h) for moving ones; they're both in units kJ/kg, which was a little confusing), so it wouldn't hurt to do fairly well on this one. It took me thirty-five minutes to do the test, and I wasn't the first one to leave. I made sure to punch the answers I got into my calculator's stack so I could check them against the answer on the key Dr. Sih handed me when I left the room. All of my numbers match, so I have this little feeling that I got 100%. Which means I can get 80% or lower on the final and still get an A. (There's an off chance that I might get one A for each of my classes this quarter; I got a grade report in romantic American literature that said I had a (low) A, but it remains to be seen how my work in the second half of the quarter will affect it. I have no real idea what my grade is in writing for engineers or electronics, but I could probably punch it if I got ambitious. I do know that I got 100% on the only test so far in electronics, so I shouldn't be too badly off in the class.)

I finally finished reading Moby Dick. That was epic. And long. I turned in my book to Dr. Aamodt (so she can check my annotations and give me some sort of grade for it) and called it good. Right now we're reading poetry by Emily Dickinson, including the ever-popular #249.

I got an e-mail from the University of California at Berkeley today titled "Berkeley Decision" and opened it before I realized what it was. They declined to offer me admission to graduate study, placing me in the category of the 3,000 declined applications instead of the 100 accepted applications. I haven't heard much recently from the other four graduate schools I've applied to; everything I do know I threw up on my grad school scorecard.

I know I've mentioned this before, but the second-season Andromeda intro is cheesy. As in, break out the nachos, this is cheesy! (I'll blame Scott for introducing me to that line. It's all his fault. I swear. Remember, everything is Scott's fault, unto the sixth and seventh generation.)