Brettia

So although I really don’t have time for it, I’m writing today in the interest of preventing this blog from becoming too stale. It’s amazingly sunny and warm outside this afternoon - 34 degrees. T-shirt weather, I think. Of course, as always, it will be short-lived; tomorrow and Tuesday we’re set to get five inches of snow. Wonderful.

It’s been two weeks now since my two-part “bandwidth saga,” and I’ve really been enjoying my new freedom. My seven-day usage total peaked around 30 GB and has now backed down to around 20 GB. It really is nice to not have to check the bandwidth meter every other minute to make sure I’m not in danger of getting dialupped.

The main reason for my silence recently is that I’m in the middle of midterm season, which looks like it will extend through the whole semester since the exams are so spread out that it takes nearly three weeks to get through them all. My classes this semester are definitely harder than they were last semester, though I guess that isn’t saying much since last semester’s were so easy. The hardest (and least interesting) by far is Math 240, a required course for CS that talks about logic and the math behind sets and trees and such. Though I understand that it could be beneficial to have a mathematical understanding of various CS concepts, I really can’t see myself applying that knowledge very often.

For example, last week we talked about algorithms and big-O notation, both of which I had plenty of experience with in my data structures class last semester. The professor went over some common searching and sorting algorithms, writing them in some crazy Pascalish pseudocode. (Pascal, seriously, in 2008?) Then, in talking about big-O notation, which is used to express the complexity of an algorithm, he proceeded to talk about the exact definition of big-O notation, and how you can prove that a polynomial is O(whatever), and so on. I guess this would be cool if I had any liking for math whatsoever, but mostly it just seemed confusing. Big-O notation is a simple concept. If you had the following code:

<?php

function loop($message, $times) {

    for($i = 0; $i < $times; $i++) {

        echo $message;

    }

}

?>

You would say that the function loop is O(N). N represents the problem size, which in simple cases is dependent on one variable but can sometimes be dependent on two or more. The function contains two major statements, the for loop and the echo statement, which prints the contents of a variable to the browser. The echo statement occurs in what is called “constant time”, or O(1), meaning that no matter what the value of $message is, the statement will take the same time to execute. The for loop, however, is not constant because the number of loops varies depending on what $times is set to. So the problem size N of the function is controlled by $times ($message doesn’t matter), and the function is O(N) because the for loop only contains constant-time statements. O(N * 1) is still O(N). If the for loop had contained another loop of some kind, also dependent on $times, the function would be O(N²). If the inner loop were dependent on something other than $times, the function would be O(N*M).

Going back to the Math 240 lecture, if you have a polynomial time function g = 2N² + 8N + 1, representing it with big-O notation is easy. You drop all terms except the highest-degree one (2N²), and then drop that term’s coefficient. So the function g is O(N²). In Math 240 though, we take it further and prove exactly why that function is O(N²) using the definition of big-O notation. It’s rather abstract and confusing, and I really have no idea when I’ll need to know it in the real world. So far, this has been one of my problems with the CS program here in general. It feels very traditional, very by-the-book. You take classes like Math 240 because that’s just what CS majors do, not necessarily because there is much reason for it. It isn’t completely bad; it just feels like the curriculum is a little out of sync with what is really going on in the software world. You learn Java and C++, there is only one web programming course to take, software engineering concepts don’t seem to be taught much at all (or at least not officially). And yet people wonder why CS grads are often so woefully inadequate when they become software engineers….

The problem is that computer science is a massive and ever-expanding field. There really is no other field that is experiencing the kind of growth that CS has had for the past thirty years or so. And because of all this growth, it really doesn’t make much sense to have one giant umbrella CS major anymore. Instead, universities should have a separate school for computer science, where you could major in software engineering or computer graphics or assembly-language programming or whatever. At the very least, CS majors should be allowed to concentrate in one area. Trying to teach everyone everything just doesn’t make sense anymore.

Some would respond that the point of a college education isn’t to train you for a job - college is supposed to be more about abstract, foundational things that prepare you to be better in the long run. This may work for business or history, but in computer science even the basic things change pretty rapidly. In the past five years, we’ve seen a shift to multi-core processors able to run many instructions at once and superpowerful GPUs capable of doing far more than just generating 3D graphics. Programming either of these requires a very different manner of thinking that isn’t being taught today, and understanding them in an abstract, low-level way won’t be enough.

Hopefully I will be proven wrong and I will graduate with a great understanding of computers and software engineering, well prepared for the advancements to come. But, just as with the University of Wisconsin in general, I feel uncertain.

It’s been an unbelievably long time since I last wrote anything substantial, and there’s so much to talk about. I’m not really sure where to begin. I wrote my last entry in which I covered what was going on in my life way back in January, and it would be an understatement to say that things are very different now from the way they were back then. I could try to remember things, go back and summarize it all, but truthfully, most of it doesn’t really matter all that much. However, I guess there are some more important events or changes that I should mention.

The most important one, of course, is the end of high school, and of the IB “experience.” I could feel things starting to draw to a close as early as the beginning of May, when the IB exams started. I had an exam every school day for two weeks, and all homework and assignments pretty much ceased. I skipped class many times in that period, sometimes so that I could do some last minute cramming, other times just so that I could lay around and not have to think about school for a few hours. I suppose I wasn’t really “skipping” anything, since I always had a parent call me out of school and usually the classes I missed were IB ones that were all but over anyway. My senior year was not nearly as glorious and enjoyable as everyone says it is supposed to be, so I guess maybe I was entitled to some laziness toward the end.

There is no question that my last school year was a difficult one. Taking IB Math HL was a huge mistake. The two other IB students in that class (it was combined with AP Calculus BC) had both had a semester of high-level math before that class. I had been denied that semester because of my tight course schedule, and originally I was going to take calculus at Stanford to make up for it. But my advisor at Stanford told me that it would be a waste to take math there just to prepare for a high school math course, as the credit I would earn at Stanford would be the same as the credit I would get for IB Math HL. In other words, I would be earning the credit twice. Not wanting to waste money, and wishing even less to pollute my wonderful pre-college experience at Stanford with the ugliness of calculus, I took a Greek and Latin word roots class instead. Compared to CS 106A, that class wasn’t really very exciting, but it did appeal to my love for languages. Unfortunately, when I started IB Math HL at the beginning of last year, I found myself woefully unprepared. Though I usually did all right on quizzes, I rarely scored higher than a B on a test, and sometimes I was lucky to get a C. I’m still not entirely sure what my problem was. Before that class, I had always done well in math, though I never really liked it. I guess the combination of ill-preparedness, increased workload in other classes, and apathy on my part was enough to doom me to failure. There were times when I really did want to learn the material, and I berated myself for my laziness. I spent a weekend or two doing nothing but math in an attempt to catch up. But nothing ever seemed to work, and I always felt like I was a half-step behind. Eventually the class was reminding me too much of IB Physics, in which my labs never seemed to be exactly right and my grade was always right on the edge of being a B+. It was frustrating, to say the least.

If the class was unpleasant, the IB Math HL exam was torturous. It was not just difficult because the problems were hard, but because in many cases I had never even seen the types of questions they were asking before. The class was three terms long, and the whole time we basically followed the AP Calculus BC curriculum. We did two IB math projects on the side, and we were supposed to be doing problems from the IB Math textbook every week or so (though we only got about halfway through the book). In the last term of the class, the teacher gave us some practice tests he’d found online, and it was then that we knew we were doomed. I say “we” because the other two IB Math students felt the same way I did. The main problem was that we simply hadn’t covered most of the IB Math curriculum. Unlike AP Calculus BC, IB Math is only about 30% calculus. The rest is a jumble of geometry and trigonometry (which would seem easy since I had already taken geometry and trigonometry classes, except that IB Math takes it to a whole other level), logic and reasoning, and a huge chunk of statistics and probability. So the exam was a completely horrendous experience. I left more than half of it blank, answered many questions with bullshit answers, and once I even gave an answer that had nothing to do with math, something like, “The probability of Sally sending text messages to her friends from 5:30 to 6:30 is zero, because her family eats dinner during that time period.” Even worse, the IB diploma criteria doesn’t allow for failing a higher-level class, even if taking that class as a higher-level one was an option (I could have done Math SL, but I was told it would be really easy). As far as I know, my grade is calculated using both my exam score and my scores on the math projects, so there is at least a tiny bit of hope that I will get the three out of seven necessary to still get my IB diploma. The scores aren’t released until July 6th, so I get to wait until then to see if my bullshitting was good enough or not.

The other exams really weren’t too terrible. Biology was perhaps the hardest, mainly because the second-semester teacher was disorganized and didn’t really make it through all of the material. I learned a lot from cramming the night before the test, though…so maybe that helped. In some ways the exam period was fun - I felt like I was in college: skipping class, going to late-night study groups, trying desperately to find and organize notes from years ago, etc. When I finally came back to school for the last two weeks after the exams were over, I was struck by how dumb high school seemed after that little ordeal. All the idiotic rules and immature drama…so pointless, so stupid. The final days were somewhat enjoyable, but somehow I still had a lot left to do. The last issue of the newspaper was scheduled to come out on the seniors’ last day, May 31, and I had to work on it almost non-stop for a week in order to get it finished. The toil was worthwhile, though - it was easily our most polished issue in the past two years, an achievement crowned by two distinguishing features: full-color printing and a two-page “Senior Destinations” spread where we put all the seniors’ names on a series of maps to illustrate where they planned on going to college. I got compliments on it from dozens of people, from classmates to friends’ parents to random kids in the hallway.

Though May 31 was the last day of classes, I still had to go to school the next day for a senior awards assembly, after which we had a barbecue and played ultimate frisbee. Finally, the four long years of high school had come to an end, and I couldn’t have been happier. Graduation came on the following Sunday, and my grandparents from Missouri as well as my grandma from Colorado visited and watched me receive my diploma. Since then, life has been pretty laid back (maybe a little too laid back) - I’ve worked on websites, watched a lot more TV than usual, gone to a few graduation parties, slept for nine hours almost every night, showered twice a day for no particular reason, and played an occasional video game, though I find them to be less and less entertaining lately.

I finally feel as if I have overcome the terrible lack of motivation or confidence that I suffered from after the move from Arizona. Since December, I’ve been to numerous small gatherings with some friends I met through the IB program, usually involving the game Guitar Hero, which I’m abnormally skilled at playing. While I’m still no social butterfly, I at least feel as if I have some semblance of a life outside of school again. I even find myself craving social interaction on days when my friends are busy and my IM buddy list gray and empty. While I still have a long way to go before I could call myself socially skilled, I’m not totally inept anymore, and it feels good. Something that hasn’t changed, though, is that I don’t require all that much to be happy with people. Some kids seem to only want to go to a party if it’s massive and alcohol is somehow involved, or they only want to hang out with people if there’s some fun activity planned (Six Flags, water-skiing, shopping, etc.). But I find myself not caring all the much about what I do with my friends…the important thing is just being together and enjoying each other’s company. Some nights we’ll just sit at someone’s house not really doing anything at all - talking or watching a movie or whatever. But sometimes those moments are better and more substantial than any wild party could ever be.

I don’t think there’s too much more left to talk about now…I guess I should mention that, for all my efforts to go elsewhere, I’m still going to college at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Don’t get me wrong, Madison’s a great school, perhaps one of the best public universities in the country. It’s just not exactly my dream school. I applied to a lot of places, many of them probably out of my reach academically, and some of them surprised me by putting me on their waitlists or even offering me admission. Two schools that I didn’t even apply to sent me letters offering admission and a full-ride scholarship for being a National Merit Scholar. In the end, I had three options: Pomona College, UW-Madison, and the University of Texas at Dallas. I was surprised to be admitted to Pomona because less selective colleges had rejected me; Pomona only admits around 15% of applicants and, though few people have heard of it, it’s one of the top colleges in the country. UT-Dallas was one of the schools that offered me a full-ride, and their offer was tempting. I visited the campus over spring break, and I was pretty impressed by the experience. They have a large and growing computer science program and strong ties to local industry (North Texas, I guess, is sort of like a Silicon Valley for the Midwest), and they offered me enough money to cover basically all of my college-related expenses. However, I was worried about the strength of their non-computer-related programs, and I wasn’t really sure I wanted to live in Texas all that much. Also, though certain aspects of the campus were really nice, such as the student apartments (four students to a suite, only two students per bathroom, kitchenette, laundry room, swimming pools, etc.), it just didn’t seem like a traditional college campus to me. Many students commuted to campus, and it was located in the middle of a suburb where there were mostly houses and few shops or restaurants. I eventually decided that UT-Dallas just wasn’t right for me, though not without much deliberation. The more difficult decision was choosing between Pomona and UW-Madison. Really, there wasn’t really much of a choice - it was obvious that Pomona was better in almost every possible way. However, when I started looking at the financial aid package I had been offered, I found that accepting the admission offer was almost impossible. Even in the best case scenario, I would leave Pomona with about $50,000 in debt. So I basically chose Madison for lack of any other viable option.

Although things didn’t work out as I imagined they would, I’m still excited for college. Finally I will be completely on my own and free to do what I want. Madison is a really neat town, almost like a San Francisco or Denver but plopped in the middle of the Upper Midwest, and the UW campus is right next to the downtown area. I’ll also have the prospect of going home to Arizona over breaks to look forward to, as my family is in the process of moving back this summer. Though a year ago I was almost certain I wanted to study computer science and eventually become a software engineer, now I’m not so sure. While I love programming and building websites, I am somewhat different from the average programmer in that I enjoy writing code because of the language aspect of it, not the mathematical or logical aspects. I like reading and writing in English and Spanish about as much as I enjoy reading and writing PHP or Java or Ruby. And I’ve always loved history, too, probably because it is so closely tied to language and the interpretation and analysis of language from many different sources. And there is the more recent addition to my list of favorite subjects: philosophy. (Perhaps you see now why I was so enthralled by the prospect of going to a liberal arts college like Pomona even though I want to study computer science.) I think the best possible academic scenario for me would be some sort of double major in computer science and one of those other subjects. Hopefully I’ll also get a chance to work on few research projects of some kind, and maybe study abroad. Assuming that I get my IB diploma, I’ll have about 25-30 credits before I even start college, so I should have some extra time for such things. It does seem as if IB will at least count for something at Madison - most of the private colleges only take IB credits if your scores are near-perfect, so the diploma just helps you get admitted, but Madison seems to want to reward IB students pretty handsomely.

Before I post this I have one final, wonderful announcement to make: after many years of frustration and suffering on the Windows platform, I have made the switch and am now a proud owner of a MacBook Pro. I needed a laptop for college and Macs are finally not so horribly expensive as they once were, so I took the plunge. So far I’ve been pretty impressed, but I’ll save my experiences for another entry. Until next time…adios.

Ugh. Today I feel…well, I dunno. I’m in one of those moods where there are lots of things that I could be doing, but none that really interest or excite me. I just kinda want to sit back, put iTunes in Party Shuffle mode, close my eyes, and think about nothing. Nothing. It seems like such an easy concept to frame in one’s mind, yet I can’t ever focus on it. For every second of restful blankness there are five more of wonderings and worries. Rather than respond to my frantic pressings of the “mute” button, my mind just wants to remain stuck in perpetual fast-forward.

It’s not so much that I wish that I had more time to just relax, but rather that I look at all the things that I do in my life and wonder why none of them have a whole lot of meaning to me anymore. And I’m baffled by the idea that so many things can be so full of purpose yet lacking in meaning. School, for example, has almost completely lost my interest. English classes feel mechanical and uninspiring and are a far cry from the Pawlowski English classes of last year. History lectures are sometimes interesting but rarely fun. Citizenship classes cover interesting material but teach it with easy, boring assignments. And calculus has taken its place at the top of my list of banes of my existence. Spanish classes are a lone standout, but I still feel hindered by having to take a less advanced class than I could handle (because of IB requirements).

Last year, though I didn’t like some classes, I usually cared enough about them to try and do well. Now…I just feel apathetic. And it shows: I get more sleep than I did last year (though still not very much), mainly because if it gets late and I haven’t finished my homework yet, I just don’t do it. I used to get up early and finish things or do homework during class so that it would still be done eventually. But lately I don’t even do that. Even worse, I find myself spending a lot more time doing useless stuff like doodling in class when I should be taking notes or reading websites when I should be doing homework. My way of gauging how much I like a class is to look through my notes and see how many pages are covered in random scribblings. My biology notebook from freshman year had such drawings on more than half of its pages (I abhorred that class). My English notes from last year didn’t have a single one. My calculus notes this year have dozens. I don’t even like to draw.

Whenever I start to drift away from my studies to read an article online or play a video game or whatever, I always wonder why I do useless things like that when I could be doing something that I truly enjoy or that has real meaning for me (like, say, blogging). I think it’s because neutral things like doodling and reading websites feel like empty, excusable distractions. Blogging or writing code or reading a book would be much better, but they represent a conscious change in activity. Instead of being distracted from my work, I’m doing something else entirely. I dunno why my mind still seems to consider a two-hour game of Civilization 4 as a “distraction,” but things like that still fall into that category.

One of the few things that’s both meaningful and purposeful is my work on my school newspaper, but I’m becoming disillusioned with that as well. When I signed up as a member of the design editing team last year, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. When I put together an entire issue in a weekend (during which I also went to Six Flags and a Chiefs game) because no one else had done any work on it, I thought I was just doing what anyone in my situation would have done. When I continued to put ten to fifteen hours of work, and sometimes more, into each and every issue after that, I kept convincing myself that I didn’t have a choice, that I had committed myself to this effort and I had to see it through. Each time I wondered a little bit more why I was the only one who seemed to feel that way, but the writing and photography and editing improved ever-so-slightly in each issue, so I just pushed those thoughts aside. This year has been different, however. There are less writers and therefore less decent articles to publish. Our best photographer graduated, and though the replacement is nearly as good, he has a tendency to randomly not submit any pictures for an issue. There doesn’t seem to be any concentrated editing effort, and articles get sent to me for placement and formatting with simple typos and grammar errors. I know I shouldn’t expect perfection, but these problems are still maddening. I have the sense that my heart simply isn’t in it anymore, and it shows just like my apathy about my classes: the first two issues missed their original publication dates by an average of nine days, and the current issue looks like it might be late too. Last year, we didn’t miss a single date.

When I look at various parts of my life individually, I wonder why I’m stalling out on them. I think, “Well, I’ve had to deal with worse circumstances - I need to just plow onward like I’ve always done.” And truthfully, none of my problems alone seem bad enough to warrant my reactions to them: not doing homework, slacking off on newspaper work, etc. But altogether, they contribute to the overall feeling of being slowly worn down, eroded away like a mountain that was once full of fire and rumbling and shot upward toward the limitless sky but is now cool, quiet, and eaten away by wind and water, the tectonic plates motionless underneath. My first thought upon recognizing my slow decline into meaninglessness is that I just need to redouble my efforts. Just keep redoubling, I think, and I’ll pull through. Just keep going; it doesn’t matter where I end up - at least I’ll be finished.

For the end of all things is indeed nigh, but I wonder whether the outcome I’m hoping for is worth the effort. So I’ll get an extra piece of paper when I graduate for doing IB, but what will that paper mean? It won’t mean success. In my usual arrogance I’ve never once thought that I might not get my IB diploma, so it won’t be a reward for two years of impossible effort. I will have simply done what I always expected that I would do. So I guess it won’t really mean much of anything. Sure, it will be a useful thing to have, but not meaningful.

Now, all I do is look forward. I’m lucky in that I know I’ll be going to college somewhere, although I still don’t know where I’ll specfically be yet. Life will be better then, or so I am told. My experiences over the summer should be proof that college will be far better than high school, but I am ever the skeptic. I hope so…it would be nice to have something to live for again.

The robot-to-human-transformation obviously never happened.

I’m pretty sure I’ve already talked before about how I’m not exactly excited about having to eventually leave Stanford, so in my usual fashion, I’ll write about it some more. I was in the lounge a few weeks ago talking with some people, and at one point or another the subject of going home came up. We all agreed that high school was going to suck after having had a taste of freedom this summer. Things like having to get a pass to walk between classes or being told we can’t wear coats when the heaters are turned off in the middle of winter because of a “safety risk” are going to feel incredibly stupid and unnecessary (not that they aren’t that way already…but it’ll feel worse, I guess). I’ve always kind of felt that high school was far too restricted because safety policies are geared toward keeping the most immature kids in check with barely any regard to the more mature ones, but until now I’ve never had a chance to experience what life might be like in the semi-real world. I’m kind of amazed that only a month ago I was actually afraid of coming here…now it seems that that fear was just a side-effect of being over-protected by a combination of an overbearing school administration (not just at OHS, but at every school I’ve been to) and my own instincts.

What amazes me most about college life, at Stanford at least, is that people seem generally okay with being intelligent. In high school, popularity often seems to be tied directly to just how stupid one can act. Not so, here. Here, people group together in the lounge to study. They read books for fun. They have discussions about politics, business, current events, and so on. Music is rampant, yet mindless rap or pop songs are somewhat rare. People randomly play guitars, pianos, trumpets, and all sorts of instruments that I’ve never heard of at all hours of the day. It’s kind of difficult to describe the feeling of being here in one word, but terms like “eclectic” and “bohemian” come to mind. It makes me wonder if this is an aura that’s unique to Stanford or if all colleges feel this way.

It amazes me how quickly things can change here. When I wrote my last entry, I had made a lot of acquaintances but few real friends. People knew my name, but not me. It wasn’t really a bad thing; it was just earlier on in the summer and most people weren’t yet comfortable about being completely open and normal with each other. I wasn’t exactly helping my situation. After days of working on my Java version of Breakout for computer science, I lost several hours of work due to Eclipse’s lack of any undo function when deleting files, and somehow the act of redoing that work ballooned into two more days of grueling coding sessions in which I barely left the cluster. I wasn’t happy about having to do it, yet at the same time I told myself that if I truly wanted to be a programmer, I’d have to be passionate enough about it to want to code for hours on end, and somehow that kept me going. I knew in the back of my mind that I was relying on circular reasoning - not a very strong foundation - but I didn’t care all that much.

I finally turned my code in two days late (we get three extra days for situations like the one I was in), and then there was more homework to do for my other class, Greek and Latin word roots. It sucked. I got finished at around three in the morning, which ended up being slightly convenient because my mom responded almost immediately when I emailed her about some new headphones I wanted to buy. I happily collected her credit card information (over the phone) so I could order them off Amazon.com, thinking about what wonderful service I enjoyed from my parental units. I mean, a response from a qualified technician not based in India in under five minutes? Incredible! (I kid, I kid.) While on the phone, I reassured her that 3 AM was a fine time to go to bed and that I would never dream of “accidentally” sleeping through my alarm the next morning in order to get a few more hours of much-needed rest. Yet, seven hours later, that’s exactly what I did, except it really was an accident. It was one of those things where you bat dazedly at the alarm immediately after you wake up and somehow manage to turn it off completely, thinking that you’d get up after just a few more minutes, that there’s no way you’d fall back asleep again, and continuing to think these things until your eyelids finally droop closed and your breathing becomes regular and you awaken once more two hours later with your roommate snoring away above you. It was the first time I’d ever skipped class. Ever. Initially, I felt bad. I told a few people, wondering what the reaction would be. Would they recoil in horror at the lack of respect for my instructor and his class that I displayed by skipping it? Nope. Instead, they told me about X class that they had skipped and how it was “hella cool” that no one cared about whether they came or not. I love college.

Last Thursday was the day I missed class, so the only thing I had left that day was CS. It was some kind of highly boring lecture about string functions, covering material that I had mostly figured out on my own days before. The kid sitting next to me, a fellow gamer/geek named John who has recently achieved Friend status (50 relationship points, like in The Sims…hwada sofada!), fell asleep, and another recent Friend, Chris, (we noodle together), laughed with me at John’s expense until he woke up. The rest of the day was pretty boring…I don’t really remember now, but I think I slept some more, still trying to make up for lost sleep over the past week. Oh yeah, Thursday night was the night of the dreaded compsci midterm, which seemed like it would be incredibly difficult after taking the practice midterm but actually turned out (for me) to not be so bad. However, everyone else said it was horrible and they didn’t have nearly enough time, so now I’m thinking that I somehow zoned out and didn’t realize that I was failing as I took it. I’ll know by tomorrow whether or not I am worthy of continued existence.

Friday was a good day, but it was also hot. Like, way hotter than it should ever be in the Bay Area. I think the temperature broke 100 degrees every day over the weekend, and possibly on Monday too. There were blackouts in some areas because of overtaxed electrical systems (luckily, Stanford has its own power plant). I began to regret the fact that I hadn’t brought a fan since the dorm isn’t air-conditioned. Generally speaking, it wasn’t a pleasant experience. But it was made better by a neat little idea that my roommate and I had: the mattress party.

Mattress parties are very simple; anyone with a lot of mattresses can have one. Basically, we moved all of our furniture out of one of our rooms (remember, I was supposed to have a third roommate who never showed, so we have a two-room suite-thing) and into the other, and we pulled our three mattresses off the beds and put them on the floor in the cleared room. They only took up about two-thirds of the space, so we invited a few more people to donate their mattresses to our goal of covering the room with mattresses from wall to wall. It worked, and the three extra mattresses fit perfectly. Then, random people who had watched mattresses pass through the halls for about ten minutes came in and flopped down with their pillows, and it became a sleepover. A co-ed sleepover. *cue dramatic music*

We didn’t do anything too bad, though. At one point or another, a game of truth or dare was started, and poor Chris had to endure a rather embarrassing question from another Friend, Tim, who had gotten Chris to tell me and a few other people the answer in private a few days before. I laughed at him anyway, especially when he gave Tim that “I’m going to pull you apart with my bare hands” look that people get when they’re put in that sort of situation and they know exactly who has put them there.

The truth-or-daring got pretty loud at about three in the morning, so loud, supposedly, that a mentor opened the door and started yelling at us that he could hear us from out in the courtyard (a few hundred feet away through several walls). What made his tirade hilarious to all present was the fact that another mentor, Cole, the coolest of them all, was sitting the whole time in a corner of the room where the other mentor couldn’t see him. I could see Cole easily, and we looked at each other and the look on his face was enough to almost put me over the edge (pretend that wasn’t a run-on sentence, I’m in the middle of a story here). When the mentor was done and had shut the door, everyone immediately burst into fits of laughter. Unfortunately, we let go a little bit too early, and the door opened again seconds later with the furious mentor telling us that the party was over; everyone had to leave. That time, however, Cole showed himself and smoothed things over, so the party was allowed to last a little while longer before everyone fell asleep.

The next was another long, lazy, hot day, and most of us just kind of laid around, trying to stay cool. The computer cluster, usually deserted and considered a place where only the computerless people would go, became a cool place to be in more ways than one (ha ha, bad pun). It’s the only air-conditioned room in the Eucalipto part of the dorm complex, so at one point there was probably close to thirty people in there. It was kind of inconvenient for people like me who actually depend upon the cluster in order to work, and I was extremely annoyed when people with laptops started taking the network cables from the university desktops and using them for their own Internet connections, but it was also kind of nice to have people in there for once. At the same time, though, there’s such a thing as being in there too long…one kid slept there in a mess of food trash on the floor, and a few others have been in there for days, as far as I know, leaving only to sleep a few hours in their own rooms. I kept having to find reasons to abandon my homework in order to get away from them - I think I took a few more trips to the Jamba Juice at the student union than were necessary.

Saturday night was a Mix-n-Match dance party hosted by my house, and I went with a half-assed costume made out of my bed quilt. I ended up only staying there for about half an hour; I got sidetracked by another Friend, Garrett, who I was with in Monterey. Garrett happens to be interested in Linux and programming like I am, and he had the idea that we should try to create our own programmer’s Linux distro. I suggested that we base it off Gentoo, and at the moment that’s about as far as our plans have gotten. I started the bootstrapping process on his Core Duo laptop (which should make compiling extremely fast, I hope) that night, and we’re going to work on it again this weekend. We want it to be fast, light, small and runnable off of a USB drive on any computer, similar to SLAX or Knoppix. I dunno if the project will come to anything, but the fact that there’s another person who even knows what Linux is living right down the hall from me is awesome. Like I said, I love college.

Once the party had ended, at about one in the morning, Kyle (my roommate) and I decided to have a Mattress Party Redux, but with less people so it wouldn’t be quite as hot in our room. We all flopped down on the mattresses and were unsure of what we were going to do when who else but Tim staggers into the room, pretending (we hope) to be drunk. I thought he would do some quick drunken antics to be funny and then we’d resume whatever we were originally going to do at our little party, but instead he kept us rolling on the floor with laughter for a good two hours. Some videos of it ended up on YouTube…I’d recommend that you watch them, but not when anyone with sensitive ears is listening. If you don’t think it’s funny…well, maybe you just had to be there. I dunno how he kept it up for two full hours…it was a truly amazing comedic feat.

The next day, Sunday, was perhaps the hottest day of the weekend, and I ended up journeying to Jamba Juice to get about a gallon of pure smoothie goodness for my roommate and his girlfriend. They had already begun to melt during the ten minute walk from the student union to the dorm, but they were still somewhat cold…and so…good…peenya colada es mi amor. The reason I was at the student union in the first place was to receive my second round of homework grades for CS, and I found I’d done well on the second (very simple) assignment: check-pluses in both categories again. I’ve recently learned that a check-plus is closer to an A than an A-, which makes me happier, though I still want to get one of those elusive plus grades sometime this summer. Breakout might get it for functionality…I added everything I could think of, from a scoring system based on events to a powerup system to a brick counter to improved ball physics. The code wasn’t as clean as usual, though, and I employed some less-than-acceptable techniques in order to use global variables, but maybe I’ll get by with at least a plus/check-plus anyway. My section leader (who grades my homework assignments) works at Google, therefore he must be a good guy. As it turns out, it was a good idea to go to section on those nights when I doubted its usefulness.

The rest of Sunday was sort of subdued because people were thinking about and preparing for the week ahead, which for some hasn’t been a nice one. Midterms are falling all over the place for many of us, though some of the tests have been worse than others. Benne and Josh, two nearly-identical brothers from Chicago known as “the twins,” probably had the worst lot of all; their statistics test had questions on it that were so difficult and so cutting-edge that the answers could only be found in graduate-level term papers published within the last two or three years. Somehow, though, they got the second- and sixth- highest grades in their class (in which they are the only high school students) which to me is unbelievable. I wish my work/study ethic was as good as theirs…though it’s not as bad as it was last year now that I’m studying subjects that I’m truly interested in.

That basically brings us to Monday and today, which were basically just regular school days devoid of anything particularly interesting. I did manage to noodle with Chris twice in that period - I learned how to use chopsticks to eat my Ramen instead of slurping it up with a spoon and getting it everywhere. Meanwhile, I’ve begun reading a book by Stephen King called The Gunslinger, part of a sci-fi/fantasy series that was recommended to me by John. So far I’d recommend it, but it’s kind of on the weird side.

The rest of this week won’t be too exciting, but this weekend two or three more mattress parties are planned. I have no idea what we’ll do, but maybe we can get Tim drunk for real just to see if he really acts the way he did this past weekend when he’s wasted. (Or not, because none of us would ever dream of breaking the behavior code…probably.) There’s also a trip planned to go sailing on the bay that I’m signed up for. Also, I’m continuing my work on planning and writing low-level code for Gabo (the newspaper organization project), work that could pay off literally because of a new project I’ve been given from my Arizona-based web development employer which will probably use the same libraries I’m working on for Gabo. Gabo and the new project will both be a lot of work, but as both could be equally lucrative (one in terms of connections / reputation / recogition and the other in terms of monetary compensation), I’m hoping I can reuse as much code as possible and get both done sometime early this fall. I’m bursting to write about all the cool APIs I’ve been working on integrating into Sangre, but I’m sure you’ll hear all about it eventually. Anyway, it’s midnight and I still need to do some word roots unhappiness. I still love college, and Friends are nice too. I miss Wisconsin…and yet at the same time I never want to go back.