Techies click here and scroll down to #8. That's right, New Mexico Tech is one of the top 10 schools with the saddest students. Amusing quotes: Hometown Socorro offers "absolutely nothing to do" and When you walk by people in the cafeteria, they're talking about algorithms. That's not a joke....
In the giant stack of pictures my mom mailed me (you know, the stack that included shots of my talon) was a picture back from my days at NMT. Some of you may recognize this as the Shrine to Recycling that the westsiders in 113 put in the laundry room...
I haven't (really) talked about being a student for a long time. With the exception of a few odds and ends (like this post and one about our recruiting trip to NMT, the last post in the category is one dated May 17th. That's quite a while ago. There's one...
The title of my upcoming Tech Talk at Tech is Web Services: zero-hassle network programming. I work very closely with Web Services and it is, in my opinion, a really cool technology once you get past the business-speke. I'm still in the process of actually, you know, writing the talk,...
I spent all day walking around campus today. Paperwalk, really. Twas bad. It turns out that my key debacle had not actually been cleared—I had originally guessed that the business office had declared leniency considering my state of tenuous key-depositing, but it turns out that they had actually just screwed...
Traditionally, my grades have sucked. Terribly. I got out of highschool with a 3.15—and I don't think there are any high schools in the US that are terribly difficult, so a 3.15 isn't anything special at all. I was (and, I maintain, still am) a giant giant slacker. My work...
Honestly, I'm not really sure what to say right now. I get this feeling that this wasn't my weekend. In the last four days I've been sunburnt on three different occasions—the last of which got me pretty badly. I'm feeling like crap, accordingly. I had also mentioned previously that there...
Unless I get a bug up my [deleted] to talk about something else in the next hour or so, this is going to be my last post as an undergraduate student. And the next post is going to be a really ranty one. Eegah, what a weekend....
So...I've only got a few days until graduation (3, specifically), and I still don't have any final grades. Teachers (and staff—but they don't really count) all have instructions to grade any remaining work submitted by graduating seniors before Tuesday and to have grades calculated by late in that day. The...
It took 31 minutes for me to finish my last final. It was for a technical class and spanned 7 pages. Bam. So, that's it, really. I presume this is the last time I will have sat in a classroom as an undergraduate—although I'm not dumb enough to actually say...
My third final is done. Three more to go, and unfortunately two of them are take-home finals due tomorrow at 3pm and 5pm. Motherfucker. The one I just finished was French. Our teacher assured us that this was, "at least a two or two-and-a-half hour final." Of the eight people...
I really do. I absolutely hate this damned book. It's got nothing to do with the content (which I haven't really read at all). It has to do entirely with the fact that I'm a giant cheapskate. I'll explain. This is a required text for a CS class I'm taking....
In honor of just passing 256 posts, here's a recap of posts whose index is a power of 2. This post is largely copied from Power of 2 roll call (10). The entire static version of this journal is now 28MB. 100000000 (256): d00m3d 010000000 (128): Weird night. 001000000 (64):...
I will have been a student at New Mexico Tech for 2067 days. 20 of those are left. That means that I'm 99.03% done. Weird....
My very first real post to this journal was in reference to the nuttiness that ensues in my speech class. Since then, I've made at least three other posts discussing the course. One of these is, in my opinion, quite good. Today, I gave my last speech for English 242....
Today is the date of the last speech I have to give in my speech class. I am the first one presenting, and will start at 2pm. This speech is worth 25% of my grade. I have not yet started writing it. In fact, I plan to open the speech...
Earlier today we held the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Underclassmen Programming Competition. Generally, ACM competitions are held between teams of 1–3 mostly undergraduate students of varying skillset. The event itself lasts around 3 or 4 hours and the assignment conists of around a half-dozen problems of varying difficulty. Because...
I get the impression that my involvement with a "[deleted] day" event would be frowned upon by my soon-to-be superiors. In order to stay out of trouble, I'm going to call it BSD Day, because everyone knows BSD is dead. In reality, I and another soon-to-be Microserf headed over to...
Today marks the 30-day point to graduation. And, I'm still not excited. I suspect I will be, at some point—but not yet. In other news, my relocation work has begun. I'm having a very difficult time organizing my schedule between graduation and my first day of work (which was agreed...
Due to a critical miscalculation on my part, I ended up being thoroughly screwed last night when it came to getting things done. As of noon yesterday (Sunday), I realized that I needed to A) finish (OK, start) my political science midterm, B) finish (OK, start) my English speech, and...
See Regurgitation (pt. 3). Another midterm. I'm just doing this for posterity's sake. Due to a catastrophic professorial summation failure, this test was out of 90 points instead of 100. I managed an 82, which is a 91.1%—significantly lower than the 96% I managed on the last test. Additionally, there...
One of my computer science professors made a comment directly before returning our midterms a few weeks ago. To paraphrase, When I was grading your midterms, I realized that for the first time in the last ten or fifteen years, I don't know some of you by your face. Usually...
My earlier post touched on the local flu epidemic here in Socorro. Last night I thought I was coming down with flulike symptoms, so I emailed my EE prof and mentioned that I may have to miss today's midterm. As it turns out, I'm just really dehydrated and stuffed up....
I'm taking a political science course right now. We watch a lot of films in this class. The current topic is the history of power in the middle east, and the unwitting struggles that major world powers get into over ridiculous local squabbles. Lebanon in 1983 is a fantastic example....
I'm having trouble with vowels this morning. When I typed the word, "other" in the title above, it first came out as, "athor." And then, the word, "when" came out as, "whon." Anyway. One of my CS professors was ill yesterday. He sent an email to one of his classes,...
In response to Monday's bromine spill, the SFS class was moved to Denny's. Thankfully, the EDC was on hand to cover the action....
...is the name of that goofy evacuation hood thing for sale in the duty-free catalogs on airliners. Hours of entertainment, right there. Anyway. Last night, at around 6:50pm, I went to campus for my political science class. Much to my surprise, they were evacuating at least five buildings. Apparantely, a...
I'm taking a speech class. We've covered this before. The upcoming assignment is to give a 10–12 minute informative speech with visual aids. Since I gave a seminar on how to buy a car last semester for the car club, I figured it would be easy to rewrite it into...
Only 60 days left until graduation. I could have any number of things, such as having a rebate processed, in that amount of time....
Spring break. Woo. Everyone seems to have split town, which means I'll have a ton of time to catch up on work. And probably spend a ton of time at the Wikies, but whatever. Excitement!...
Remember my comment about graphs without axes? My CS prof was so pissed that he spent a good five minutes discussing why graduate students (this was in a graduate course, by the way) needed to know that graphs need axes. You really should know how to do this by the...
I just sat through the best CS lecture of all time. It involved recovery of database systems, and thus, there was a good deal of discussion about dumps and logs. Dumps, especially large dumps, can often be very involved. This is especially true when there are alot of transactions during...
I had commented that there seemed to be entirely too much review in my classes. I want to quote that post:Wednesday, EE: 25 minutes going over a test, which I finished in 25 minutes. Well, we just got the test back. For our viewing pleasure (and to segue into alternative...
I've finally finished my intent to graduate paperwork. What a mess. In the end, I had to submit something like 8 pages of forms. I've been told that this is usually a 1-page process. "My word," you're surely saying, "7 extra pages?? The nerve!" And I know. That's ridiculous inflation...
It's happened again! Another 75 minutes of my life, gone forever. And it happened again in my undergraduate CS course. This is twice just this week. Plus, all these self-pitying whiners petitioned the professor to have the midterm exam moved from Tuesday to Thursday of next week. Dear god, why?...
The other day I visited the little computer scientists' room in Speare before a class to freshen up a bit. Behold, someone was in there talking to themselves! Well, to someone else—but on the phone. This, of course, made me giggle to no end. I talked with Rob and Satan...
Last semester I went through a shitton of supplies. At last count, I was up to 14 or 15 pens and three full notebooks. Already this semester, I'm nearing the end of my third pen and have filled around 1.25 notebooks. I don't suspect I'll crack last semester's total ......
I'm getting really frustrated with professors who spend class time going over homework and test problems. Unless there are some obvious classwide comprehension issues*, there's no reason to cover these things. I did, after all, pay the money for a textbook, and know how to crack it open. I've gotten...
Something happened earlier on the ACM list which reminded me of the troubles of Reply-To addresses. The upshot of this is that I've gotten about a million emails and AIMs today about cats (KITTIES!!! wooOOOo) but that's about it. The incident that it reminded me of, however, caused one hell...
The story of the Martin Speare building on the NMT campus is an interesting one...although I have no idea how true it is. The basic story goes: the school built the Speare building in the late 1960s/1970s/1980s (and light rock from the 1990s) to fulfill the need for a new...
The EE department has printed departmental shirts. Unfortunately, it seems that these have become Yet Another Example of Decision by Committee. The shirts are black (which is, in my opinion, a horrendous color to actually wear around*) with a saying across the back: There are 10 types of people in...
If all goes well, I'm graduating in 83 days. Thinking about that number makes me pretty excited. I'm a bit surprised, actually, because I don't think I've ever been excited about graduating before. It's always been hiding behind another semester, the sort of thing that I wouldn't really have to...
More speech class fun. I got my peer reviews back from the speech I gave in class last week. Here are some selected comments to the question Was the chosen selection appropriate for the audience and the speaker?scary !!! Absolutly [sic] important and vital for all Americans to be aware...
Ach. Here's a quick breakdown of the work that Midterm #1 (20% of my grade, first of three midterms and one final) required of me over the past few days: * 2 hours reading Friedman (7 pages, very dense) * 4 hours reading Johnson (20 pages) * 2 hours reading...
I'm still working on political science essays. I just ran across a quote by Walter Russell Mead in his book Special Providence, published in 2002. SADDAM HUSSEIN STILL HAS HIS JOB; DO YOU? said a bumper sticker during the 1992 [US presidential] campaign. Funny for many different reasons—I'm sure the...
Tonight will be an allnighter as I crank out my first test for my political science class. The test consists of five double-spaced 2–3 page essays on preselected topics. Expect updates as the night goes on and as I switch gears between essays. Also note that I'm very excited that...
Some of you may remember the unpleasantness that occured during a CS course I took last semester. Well, as it turns out, the joker in question is in another one of my classes, this semester. And he just sent me an email asking if he could borrow the text* from...
I'm taking EE334, the second semester of our E&M curriculum. For those of you who are technically inclined, that stands for Electricity and Magnetism. For those of you who are getting a liberal arts degree (in psychology, for example), it stands for Ear and Mouth. Photos of the text follow....
Whereas my first post (below) dealt primarily with the execution of the class, this one deals more with the material itself. This is good, because the material is written by published authors, not the armchair remote-control jockeys in the class....
I'm taking a political science course this semester. A good deal of the history is absolutely fascinating stuff and there's so much to choose from that there's never a drought of good topics to bitch about. I've got two things to say about political science. I wrote the first one,...
During the Fall 2004 semester I was involved with a project for my Digital Forensics class that entailed performing static and running analyses on both production and synthetic file systems. The goal of the project was to assemble some conclusions on file-overwrite characteristics in common usage scenarios and develop a...
I'm taking a speech class. There's really no reason that I'm doing it besides 1) it's an easy A, and 2) there is almost no homework. For a three-hour class, this isn't a terrible deal. I guess the only downside to the course is that a few of the other...