Late night musings
A drunken choir seems to have assembled itself outside my window. On some days I might be somewhat annoyed, but right now I'm just envious.
My biggest fear about EE: That somewhere there is a point where those with less raw talent simply can't continue, because the amount of time it takes them to do the work exceeds the time available.
I'm nowhere near hitting that point yet, I know. But it's only my freshman year, and it still seems I have a metric shitload to do all the time and it never lets up. Not to mention that I have to keep my GPA above a 3.5 to keep my scholarship. That's always a worry. I suppose I could do it if I had no social life whatsoever, but I really don't want to spend my time being some kind of antisocial nerd, I had enough of that in middle / early high school. :( I also feel difficulty with trying to maintain a relationship when it's so hard for me to make time. I know Josh understands, I just feel bad about it sometimes, basically the fact that I can only spend significant time with him on the weekends, and after that I'll be going back to Bend. When I'm working I feel bad for neglecting social life (and other things like exercise - as predicted, I'm working out less and less as the term goes by), but when I'm socializing I'm always thinking about the work I "should" be doing. :P I have a bunch of books in my room I haven't read yet, or have just started, and I keep wishing for a time when I can just sit down and read them for hours. My dad keeps asking me why I haven't read The World Is Flat (which I borrowed over spring break) yet... I've gotten maybe... 80 pages in, but I just haven't had the time, which is unfortunate since it's a pretty interesting book.
I keep having to spend so much time in the ECE 272 lab (it turns out we did our initial logic diagrams completely wrong, so I was in Anna's lab for around 2 1/2 hours today trying to get everything fixed), but it's all so painfully boring. It seems like every lab is the same thing, just with more and more tedium (goddamn am I sick of staring at a giant chart of 0's and 1's trying to figure out where I wrote one down wrong). The only thing that keeps me going is thinking of fun electrical engineering projects I want to make someday, and knowing that I have to get through all the stuff I'm doing now in order to make them. I got a weird idea the other day to try and make an mp3 player inside a tamagotchi case (I collected tamagotchis in middle school and have about 40 of them). From looking at the homebrew mp3 player pages, I don't know how possible that is, as even the smallest ones (which have a screen) seem to be significantly bigger than a tamagotchi... Oh well, maybe by the time I actually have the skillz to make things like that, components will have gotten even smaller. Hm... I have a CS midterm tomorrow too which I haven't studied for at all. :P Hopefully it goes alright, I seem to have a fairly natural aptitude for picking up the concepts thus far. The only thing I'm worried about is questions on weird things out of the book which I just haven't looked at. It's very annoying how there's so many questions on syntax and whatnot. Because, you know, in real life if I was coding and couldn't remember the exact parameters a method took or whatever, I couldn't just look it up. :P
Anyway. Time to give the CS stuff one quick lookover, and then I'm hitting the sack. Blah.
My biggest fear about EE: That somewhere there is a point where those with less raw talent simply can't continue, because the amount of time it takes them to do the work exceeds the time available.
I'm nowhere near hitting that point yet, I know. But it's only my freshman year, and it still seems I have a metric shitload to do all the time and it never lets up. Not to mention that I have to keep my GPA above a 3.5 to keep my scholarship. That's always a worry. I suppose I could do it if I had no social life whatsoever, but I really don't want to spend my time being some kind of antisocial nerd, I had enough of that in middle / early high school. :( I also feel difficulty with trying to maintain a relationship when it's so hard for me to make time. I know Josh understands, I just feel bad about it sometimes, basically the fact that I can only spend significant time with him on the weekends, and after that I'll be going back to Bend. When I'm working I feel bad for neglecting social life (and other things like exercise - as predicted, I'm working out less and less as the term goes by), but when I'm socializing I'm always thinking about the work I "should" be doing. :P I have a bunch of books in my room I haven't read yet, or have just started, and I keep wishing for a time when I can just sit down and read them for hours. My dad keeps asking me why I haven't read The World Is Flat (which I borrowed over spring break) yet... I've gotten maybe... 80 pages in, but I just haven't had the time, which is unfortunate since it's a pretty interesting book.
I keep having to spend so much time in the ECE 272 lab (it turns out we did our initial logic diagrams completely wrong, so I was in Anna's lab for around 2 1/2 hours today trying to get everything fixed), but it's all so painfully boring. It seems like every lab is the same thing, just with more and more tedium (goddamn am I sick of staring at a giant chart of 0's and 1's trying to figure out where I wrote one down wrong). The only thing that keeps me going is thinking of fun electrical engineering projects I want to make someday, and knowing that I have to get through all the stuff I'm doing now in order to make them. I got a weird idea the other day to try and make an mp3 player inside a tamagotchi case (I collected tamagotchis in middle school and have about 40 of them). From looking at the homebrew mp3 player pages, I don't know how possible that is, as even the smallest ones (which have a screen) seem to be significantly bigger than a tamagotchi... Oh well, maybe by the time I actually have the skillz to make things like that, components will have gotten even smaller. Hm... I have a CS midterm tomorrow too which I haven't studied for at all. :P Hopefully it goes alright, I seem to have a fairly natural aptitude for picking up the concepts thus far. The only thing I'm worried about is questions on weird things out of the book which I just haven't looked at. It's very annoying how there's so many questions on syntax and whatnot. Because, you know, in real life if I was coding and couldn't remember the exact parameters a method took or whatever, I couldn't just look it up. :P
Anyway. Time to give the CS stuff one quick lookover, and then I'm hitting the sack. Blah.