Damn...
What a day/night/week...my semester project for System Analysis is due at 16:44:59 on Friday, but I don't have a clue how much longer it is going to take to get done. I guess we really should have started working on it before last week. *shrug* Tonight, I finished (i think) the DFD (data flow diagram, don't worry about the technical stuff, takes about a semester to fully explain) which was my main responsibility in this whole cluster-fuck. We'll just ignore the fact that I should have had it done over a month ago. Tomorrow (today?) my group is meeting in the lab at Adams and not leaving until we get it done or 16:44:55 comes arround and we have to rush what we do have down to the professor's office.
This wouldn't be such a big issue and I would have done my work well in advance if I had been able to get motivated...unfortunately my group consists of an old high school friend (Jared Bryngleson) who is more lazy than me and a 40-something retired Air Force enlisted man who doesn't intuitively grasp any of the concepts. Therefore, with no one to push/drag me along and feeling like I had to teach every concept to one of my teammates, I had absolutely zero motivation.
Add on top of all of that the fact that I have had other big projects to worry about. The biggest one was the play we put on in my Japanese class on Wednesday. Sorry that I didn't tell anyone about it beforehand, but we did perform in Japanese, so it would have been pretty hard (or impossible) for you all to follow. I was only really worried about it because it counted as the verbal section of my Japanese final and that is always very difficult. I had about 30-45 lines to memorize (in Japanese) and then had to follow a conversation between two other characters and interject my lines at the right points...pretty damn hard when you barely grasp what your character is saying and next to impossible if anyone else forgets/transposes their lines...guess what happened. But it was all okay...Fukushima-sensei said this was the best performance of this play she has had to date, and she does it every year in this class.
I also got credits as the set designer and technical lead for the play, so that made me happy. During rehearsals, Fukushima-sensei would stop and look at me to suggest blocking and changes to the set as well as many style decisions that really should have been hers (since she was the director). Now I just have to get through tomorrow and I'll be into the easiest part of the semester...finals. Just as an aside, is it odd that I prefer final exams to class? I guess it stems from my confidence in my ability to bull-shit my way through a multiple-guess test. *shrug* It's also probably related to the fact that I always have metric ass tonnes of projects due the week before...so much for "dead week."
What I'm really looking forward to, however, is the Saturday after finals when Ken and I will be trying to install Fedora Core 3 on my PC and then getting me set up to dual-boot Windows and Linux. Should be fun. Then Ken has to suffer through teaching me the ins and outs of Linux's command line interface and I have to suffer through the frustration of trying to use DOS commands instead. After that experience, however, comes the real fun when Ken and I try a whole lot of the tricks in my hacking books on my computer and hope we don't break it for good.
On a similar and related note, I am going to be ordering my laptop from IBM soon. I'm getting a T42 with a 60 gig HDD and 512 Kb RAM, etc. It's not as small and light as the one I wanted at first, but it's more solidly built and had more power at the same cost as the smaller one. I also think the 12.1" monitor on the X31 I was looking at would drive me batty. Instead, I'll get a 15.4" monitor and run at either 1600x1200 or 2048x1536...I've missed having so much desktop space since my ViewSonic died (though I don't miss it, the heavy bitch). The T42 also has an ultrabay, so I can buy a second HDD or battery latter (or both, but only use one at a time). And the best part is, if I order it soon, I'll have it by Christmas. *drools*
Anywho...that's probably about it.
This wouldn't be such a big issue and I would have done my work well in advance if I had been able to get motivated...unfortunately my group consists of an old high school friend (Jared Bryngleson) who is more lazy than me and a 40-something retired Air Force enlisted man who doesn't intuitively grasp any of the concepts. Therefore, with no one to push/drag me along and feeling like I had to teach every concept to one of my teammates, I had absolutely zero motivation.
Add on top of all of that the fact that I have had other big projects to worry about. The biggest one was the play we put on in my Japanese class on Wednesday. Sorry that I didn't tell anyone about it beforehand, but we did perform in Japanese, so it would have been pretty hard (or impossible) for you all to follow. I was only really worried about it because it counted as the verbal section of my Japanese final and that is always very difficult. I had about 30-45 lines to memorize (in Japanese) and then had to follow a conversation between two other characters and interject my lines at the right points...pretty damn hard when you barely grasp what your character is saying and next to impossible if anyone else forgets/transposes their lines...guess what happened. But it was all okay...Fukushima-sensei said this was the best performance of this play she has had to date, and she does it every year in this class.
I also got credits as the set designer and technical lead for the play, so that made me happy. During rehearsals, Fukushima-sensei would stop and look at me to suggest blocking and changes to the set as well as many style decisions that really should have been hers (since she was the director). Now I just have to get through tomorrow and I'll be into the easiest part of the semester...finals. Just as an aside, is it odd that I prefer final exams to class? I guess it stems from my confidence in my ability to bull-shit my way through a multiple-guess test. *shrug* It's also probably related to the fact that I always have metric ass tonnes of projects due the week before...so much for "dead week."
What I'm really looking forward to, however, is the Saturday after finals when Ken and I will be trying to install Fedora Core 3 on my PC and then getting me set up to dual-boot Windows and Linux. Should be fun. Then Ken has to suffer through teaching me the ins and outs of Linux's command line interface and I have to suffer through the frustration of trying to use DOS commands instead. After that experience, however, comes the real fun when Ken and I try a whole lot of the tricks in my hacking books on my computer and hope we don't break it for good.
On a similar and related note, I am going to be ordering my laptop from IBM soon. I'm getting a T42 with a 60 gig HDD and 512 Kb RAM, etc. It's not as small and light as the one I wanted at first, but it's more solidly built and had more power at the same cost as the smaller one. I also think the 12.1" monitor on the X31 I was looking at would drive me batty. Instead, I'll get a 15.4" monitor and run at either 1600x1200 or 2048x1536...I've missed having so much desktop space since my ViewSonic died (though I don't miss it, the heavy bitch). The T42 also has an ultrabay, so I can buy a second HDD or battery latter (or both, but only use one at a time). And the best part is, if I order it soon, I'll have it by Christmas. *drools*
Anywho...that's probably about it.