Almost Graduated

Started: 2002-06-14 17:54:18

Submitted: 2002-06-14 18:58:59.559702

Visibility: World-readable

I'm so close to being a college graduate that I can almost taste it. (Probably has something to do with this whole "job search" thing. I called Jeff (my boss from the previous two summers) at Spatial on Thursday (which, I guess, would be yesterday) and told him that I'm looking for permanent employment. He'll see what he can do for me but did say that they are interviewing, so it looks at least a little good.) First, though, I have to finish my senior project, which could be a whole lot of trouble. The upside is that I did finish all of my classes (and ended up with an A in both of my Aaby classes and rock climbing and an A- in VLSI), so now I can devote my full attention to this whole "senior project" thing.

My entourage for graduation last week was thirteen people, all of whom showed up in College Place to watch me march. The four other people in my immediate family, Grandma and Grandpa Logan, Aunt Sherrie, and Uncle Brent, Aunt Suzie, and their four children. It was overcast last Saturday and finally got around to raining by nightfall. Sunday morning, as I tried to get some sleep, it was raining. I showed up on the lawn in front of Kretschmar Hall in my cap and gown at 0740, just in time to see my class photo taken, without me in it. I found Gem and we waited in line for another hour, through a little rain, until we finally started walking towards Centennial Green, which was outside; I heard someone assert that they hadn't been rained out in nine years. (I don't know if that meant that they were rained out ten years ago, or that graduation has been outside for only nine years.) It started raining harder until finally the powers that be declared that graduation would be delayed half an hour (from 0830 to 0900) and moved to the church.

Those waiting to watch scurried around to relocate themselves while we graduates stuck around in line and eventually moved to stand in front of the church. (At least, I assume the front of the line was around the church; I was next to Sittner.) The rain subsided for the most part as we finally managed to march into the church at 0920. As an engineer, I was almost at the end of the group; being a Bachelor of Arts, Gem was almost at the front, far away from the Bachelor of Science Computer Science people, roughly in the middle of the group. After an eternity of names I hadn't heard before and will never hear again, punctuated by an occasional name I recognized, Dr. Brunt called "Theodore Douglas Tramblie Logan, cum laude", and I walked across the platform to get my empty diploma cover from Dr. Sorenson and get a couple of pictures taken.

After a few more names, we marched out and I attempted to locate the rest of my entourage. More pictures ensued. Dad found some people he knew. I took Brent on a tour of the outside of Kretschmar Hall while we searched for an open door; all of them were locked until we got to the south door. I wielded my magic key codes to gain access to various labs.

When we attempted to stuff all of Bethany's stuff in the Odyssey for the return trip to Boulder, it was sunny. The rest of my family departed, unfortunately without any room for any of the boxes of books I had officially allocated for long-term storage. I took the helm of the Honda provisionally known as Yoda and dropped Aunt Sherrie off at the tiny little Walla Walla airport. Gem and I returned to campus and tossed all of my stuff in boxes and moved it across campus to the boy's dorm. The rain started again as we carried boxes up the north stairs of Sittner Hall to room 223. After depositing my boxes, and everything that didn't actually make it into a box, Tristan met us in Meske Hall room 101. We cleaned it and convinced an appropriate compliment of RAs to check us out.

On Monday, I set Ziyal up in my new quarters (once I remembered that it was festing.org's primary mailserver) and headed to the wedding of Ted Swinyar and Heather Jarnes. Victor Brown, who I didn't know had the appropriate credentials, officiated. Ceri Myers, who I know from Union, was the maid of honor. Halfway through the homily, Victor Brown produced his Palm V, instructed Swinyar to do the same, and signaled Walter Cox (best man) to hand Heather her Clié. Victor Brown beamed Swinyar and Heather a memo containing everything that he was going to mention in the homily but thought would be better targeted at just the two of them.

I watched carefully during the vows and noticed that Swinyar and Heather transparently swapped rings; if I hadn't been watching (although I don't think anyone wasn't watching), I wouldn't have noticed. I realized that I liked the symbolism; it's a public symbol of their commitment. Gem and I plan on wearing rings, but not including them in the ceremony was one of Gem's grandfather's three requirements when he agreed to officiate. (The other two were that Gem's dress wouldn't embarrass him and that we go to pre-martial counseling.)

This, obviously, presented a problem. Gem and I spent most of the five-hour drive from College Place to Longview discussing wedding rings in our ceremony and concluded that I was going to loose, horribly, so we weren't even sure if we should bother. Tuesday morning we met with Gem's main pastor at her home church, Pastor Dave, and her grandfather, who Gem wanted to share the officiating responsibilities. After discussing exactly who would do what in the great and epic Order of Ceremonies, Gem and I tried to figure out whether to address the ring issue at all. We exchanged several knowing glances while the two pastors present tried to figure out what, exactly, we were thinking about. I wondered aloud if I should open Pandora's Box and was fairly confident I should give up, but Gem launched in, starting with the background so everyone knew everything relevant and finally requesting that they not punish me for her oversight about the ring issue back when Gramps presented his conditions and I muttered my assent without really thinking about it.

Then something amazing happened.

They agreed.

I was shocked.

(Gem suspected later that perhaps they were simply quite relieved that it wasn't something more horrible, like Gem's being pregnant (which, by the way, she's not) or some other hideous Pandora's Box. Since it was "just" the incendiary issue of wedding rings during a Seventh-day Adventist wedding, they were more than happy to accommodate us.)

(For those of you just joining us, wedding rings are an incendiary issue for Seventh-day Adventists. Almost every married couple under the age of sixty wears them, but the over-sixty crowd carries a power over everyone else disproportionate to their actual numbers, although likely proportionate to the amount of money they toss in the direction of the church.)

With that resolved, it meant that Gem and I needed to actually have wedding rings in time for the ceremony. We headed down to Portland to wander around jewelry stores to see what we could do. First, though, we stopped by REI, where I redeemed the gift certificate Gem's parents gave me for graduation. I got cobalt blue (ok, purple) climbing shoes and a couple carabiners and a figure 8.

After wandering around the nearby mall and their jewelry stores and those available in downtown Portland, Gem and I decided to head back to Tiffany & Co., which was a little more expensive than some of our options, but defiantly gave us a better vibe.

Wednesday Gem and I got our marriage license (good for sixty days, which covers six days after our scheduled wedding) and wandered around hunting down tuxedos. We picked some and I have a handful of tuxedo measurement cards I need to distribute to my groomsmen.

The final action item for Longview was figuring out what we wanted to do for the wedding cake. Gem is opposed to the idea of an ordinary cake, so we opted for an ice cream cake. (This proves that I'm obviously copying my parents, letter-for-letter.)

Gem and I drove back to College Place, where I will exist until I finish my senior project. Gem will wander back and forth between Longview and College Place; I'm unconvinced that having her in Longview will be better for my productivity, since I'll be in withdrawal. (Those of you whose significant others are more than five hours away may ignore the last sentence.)

Thursday I unpacked and checked in with Stirling, who hasn't yet gotten the tiny Ethernet card he ordered last week. I successfully backported the bugfixes and flow control enhancements I made to my stack for introduction to networking, which I created as a branch from my original stack. I started thinking about writing an Ethernet driver and realized that I really wanted my copy of Linux Device Drivers, which I foolishly decided I wouldn't want to see for a while. I dug around the boxes in my closet until I found the book and consulted it for its wisdom in figuring out exactly what the kernel NE2000 driver was doing.

Today I went on a raid in Kretschmar Hall and successfully located an ISA NE2000-compatible network card, which I plugged into Ziyal, verified that it worked, and proceeded to write userspace code to interface with. My current plan is to write a userspace driver on this nearly-identical card to the one I'm going to use for my embedded system and then port the driver to the DSP once I'm confident that it works. (I think that will be much easier than attempting to write the driver natively for the DSP, since I have access to far superior development tools on my Linux box. gdb beats anything, any day.) Unfortunately, mucking around with ISA hardware is liable to screw up one's system, especially when one doesn't remember to change the code before trying to run it again.

I've defiantly got my work cut out for me. At least now I have a clear plan for what I'm going to do.