Three till Seven

Fever blisters suck.

It’s a very gray day outside but the temperature is nice. I’ve been very surprised at how warm it is here in comparison with the recent chilliness of Lexington. When I got here on Thursday, for example, my mom asked why I was wearing a thick winter sweater. Because it’s freakin’ cold where I live, that’s why!

I’ve finished the majority of my homework that I had this weekend. When I get back to UK tomorrow, I have to do one Spanish assignment that involves downloading an MP3 of someone talking, listening to it, and answering questions about the talk. I don’t want to do that here because the connection (28.8K usually) is so slow and those MP3’s tend to be large. There’s one problem left in my calculus homework (due Tuesday) that I have to finish. I tried it several times and kept getting 2 when I know good and well, based on the graph and the back of the book, the answer is 1/2. I emailed Steve about that one. If I don’t get a response from him in time, I can always go to Jessica or my T.A. I’m currently taking a break from reading in my C++ book in preparation for the exam on Monday night.

I discovered something in my textbook that makes me wonder if I did a part of program 2 the way my professor intended. I used two strings to display the scale of a graph since the scale does not change but I’m thinking now she wants us to use a combination of setw and setfill. I emailed my T.A. about this a minute ago.

Visiting my high school yesterday was okay. When I first pulled into the now-finished parking lot, I saw that the band was marching on the football field and my band director was, as per his norm, having a fit in the stands for various and sundry reasons. Shouts of “Left, right, left, right!” and “Rrrroll those feet!” could be heard even from within my Volvo. After I talked with him for about half an hour, both outside and inside in his office, I went to visit my old Spanish II and senior English teacher. She was in the middle of Food Day in her Spanish I class so I, luckily, didn’t interrupt any teaching.

It felt weird being back at the place, especially walking through the halls during a break between classes and not recognizing the majority of the faces. All throughout my time at that school, I felt as though I knew most everyone. That’s definitely not the case now. It seemed as though school shouldn’t be continuing after I graduated, however egotistical that sounds. Now that I’ve been in college a little while, the amount and the difficulty of work that I did in high school seems very trivial.

My brother is at U.K. today while I’m at home; a role reversal! He’s going to the football game tonight against I-don’t-know-who. If I don’t find out the final score from him when he gets home, I’m sure I’ll see it in one of the many newspapers that U.K. puts out.

I watched Unforgiven and Gangs of New York yesterday. I had only seen them both once before so it was nice getting to view them again. There are so many movies that I love that I forget about, which I hate doing. I also watched the majority of Kill Bill and Anger Management, both of which were pretty dumb. I kept changing channels between the two of them; when one would get especially stupid, I’d go to the other.

I’m aching to do some work on 3till7.net. I haven’t updated anything in forever except for this blog and I keep seeing updates on friends’ pages and wanting to implement some new ideas I have. Things I must remember to try: a new layout! I know, Trinity, you really like this one and all, but it’s old. It is passé. It is downright archaic!

I also want to get rid of a lot of the content and simplify things. Things always look cleaner and more organized when they’re simpler and this site really needs an uncluttering. I go through these about once a year to once every two years and it’s that time again, my friends.

I want a new system for my photos and, possibly, for If It Blooms. Yet again going with a simpler theme. I’m thinking an all-black background with a thick white border around each individual photo and merely links for the next and previous photos. Something very plain like that. Coppermine is nice and all, but it’s just so bulky and I don’t need that. I wish I had more time to work on all of this stuff.

I also want to try a new windowmanager in place of Blackbox. I’ve been using that for a couple of years now and I’m tired of it. Now that I have such a fast connection (the current moment excepted, of course, since I’m at home) I can easily download tons of MB’s quickly and give these new things a try.

I’m thinking I should not have slept in so late this… yesterday morning. I tried going to bed at 11p earlier but couldn’t sleep, so I’m back up and online. At least Steve’s on AIM and I’m not stuck muttering to myself. I was going to eat a Hawaiian roll but, alas, the remainder of the package is mouldy. I did find some decent Fritos, though, and helped myself to those.

Jessica and I are going to study together tomorrow… today for our CS exam. I hope we do well. I’m thinking we will because I think I know my stuff okay, at least the programming bit. There will be multiple choice, short answer, fill in the blank, and various other types of questions, my professor said.

By gum, there’s to be a root beer (rootbeer?) party on Tuesday evening in my dorm’s lobby. The fun!

apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade rock my socks. I’m using Firefox 0.9.3 and the GIMP 2.0 now.

I think I did well on that CS exam earlier tonight. Jessica, poor thing, was freaking out over it beforehand but, afterward, she thought she did well. The dork, I tried to tell her she would do fine.

Tomorrow is Frappuccino Day, hooray! I also should be able to catch up on some homework which will be great. I’m such a procrastinator.

On Wednesday, I have to get up at the butt-crack of dawn to help out at a career fair with S.W.E. Why oh why do I volunteer for such torture? I’m going to try and get in bed by midnight tonight just because I need to get more sleep. Thing is, when I go to bed early, I usually can’t fall asleep which really screws me over for my honors class where discussion is boring and I’m in need of a nap. Sigh.

On Thursday, Jessica and I will be going shopping and then out for our once-a-month dinner out at a nicer restaurant. I’m thinking the Olive Garden or Joe Bologna’s this time. I need to do some Yule shopping and general grocery shopping, too. I have a list made out of everyone I’m buying for and a general idea of what I intend to get them. My dad, as usual, will be the hardest to shop for. I never know what to get that man so he usually ends up with ungodly amounts of chocolate and other goodies that rot your teeth. He doesn’t complain.

On Friday, I need to do my laundry. I’m staying on campus this weekend for the football game on Saturday and because I have wanted to stay on campus for a weekend since the beginning of the semester but haven’t made time for it until now. (Man, run-on sentences are fun.)

I’m working on the next layout for 3till7.net and I really like what I’ve come up with. I’m revamping a ton of the content, though, so I can’t just slap the new version up. Hopefully, the content updates will be worth the wait.

(17:29:25) Jessica: Hey Sarah, go to the internet and look to see if we can get fake ID’s ….my mom said that if we can, she would take us to the all male review….she says that she is almost positive that we can get them

That’s the message I just received on AIM from Jess. Good lord, she’s going to get us sent to jail. However, I can’t help but think that if we did end up in the Big House, what a way to go! I must go talk her out of this craziness.

We got our 5-7 page papers back in honors today. I made a 95% on mine, to my delight. She had the comments, “You write with great facility, Sarah. This paper is lively, well-discussed, clear.” Yay!

Now I have to pick up my room. I’m kind of depressed about having to empty my trash can, though. Not because I’m that lazy but because the mountain of trash piled over the rim is an architectural wonder. I’ll miss it when it goes.

…Does anyone have a need for ten empty Ale8 bottles that are sitting next to my fridge?

According to this study guide, would you consider “it is a procedure for solving a problem” to be a property of an algorithm? I did and lost two points for it on my CS 115 test, according to Michael, a T.A. for that class and a friend. I’m going to protest this to the professor when I get my scored test back. I can accept that “procedure for solving a problem” isn’t really a property of an algorithm, but if I can’t go by the study guide given by the professor for a test given by said professor, what can I trust?

While hanging out with Steve earlier, I checked out the novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I’ve never heard of it before but Steve assures me it’s worth my time. It seems like it will be a depressing political novel with the same feel as 1984.

My dorm room is clean! This is definitely a first for me. Steve, the poor fool, told me he was horribly bored so I invited him to help me clean my room. He organized my shelf, made my bed, and somewhat arranged my garbage in a more manageable way (i.e. - not in the architectural wonder form that it was in earlier) while I put away clothes, disposed of boxes and other trash, and arranged shoes. Sadly, there are still two bags of garbage sitting behind me, next to two filled containers of Ale8 bottles.

This is awesome.

I just returned from an evening out with Jess. We went shopping first for the holidays; I still have Jess, my dad, and my brother left to shop for. It’s nice to get everyone else’s gifts out of the way, though. I think I got good deals on what I bought, too. I know my mom’s going to love her gift; I can’t wait to give it to her.

We had dinner at the Olive Garden; I had the chicken giargino (something like that) which was good.

Tonight, I have to study for a Spanish test that I’ll have tomorrow morning. I could work on my Spanish composition but it’s not due until Monday and it’s only supposed to be five-hundred words. I may put that off until this weekend or at least tomorrow evening. I also have calculus homework that was assigned today but it’s not due until Tuesday. I can read more in Atlas Shrugged and study my C++ tonight, definitely.

I’m in love with Home Computer by Kraftwerk, Casino [Solid State Remix] by Tommi Eckhardt, Running Three by Reinhold Heil, Wish [Komm Zu Mir] by Franka Potente, and Somebody Has to Pay by Susie Van Der Meer. Awesome stuff.

Also, there’s one song that I keep seeing the video to and I love it. I have no idea who the artist is or the title of the song, but the lyrics that keep getting repeated are, “I’m sorry, so sorry,” and, in the video, there’s a black-haired lady walking around. Any ideas?

I don’t like it when I see “splash” pages on personal sites because they’re rarely necessary, but I really hate it when I see little messages like “iframes required,” “IE only,” or “required: open mind.” The open mind one particularly gets to me when I enter the site to find the same boring crap that I see everywhere else. I think it’s funny when the person warns you that, ooh, you’d better have an open mind because I say such wild shit that I’m probably going to, like, offend you, and then they don’t have anything controversial or unique at all.

I wish Trinity’s internet connection wasn’t so slow. She’s at college and gets something crazy-bad like a rate of 3k/s. She’s trying to upload a bit of her new layout idea for me to peruse but, as she put it, “it might take a half hour to upload at this rate.”

(00:16:48) Trinity: oh my god.. Lord of the G-Strings is on.
(00:17:00) Noir: WTF?!
(00:17:15) Trinity: its some porn parody of lord of the rings! its so dumb that its funny!
(00:17:24) Noir: what channel are you watching?
(00:17:38) Noir: they don’t have the likes of Viggo or Orlando in g-strings, do they? :D
(00:17:38) Trinity: cinemax.
(00:17:41) Noir: jeez.
(00:17:44) Trinity: no!
(00:17:48) Noir: nuts to that, then!
(00:17:49) Trinity: but they have dildo saggins!
(00:17:54) Noir: oh my god.
(00:18:06) Trinity: lol.
(00:18:06) Noir: why are you watching this crap?!
(00:18:13) Noir: and why am i not?! :D
(00:18:15) Trinity: because its funny!

I just returned from the Guignol Theatre where I saw The Trojan Women. It wasn’t terrible but I wouldn’t want to sit through it again. I had to see it for my honors class, otherwise, I really doubt I would’ve gone. Eh, at least it’s over with now.

Before that, I went to the programming competition to help out. I had to run a couple of errands for Dr. Jaromczyk and then assist the competitors by getting pencils, answering questions about submitting their programs, etc. Steve was the only person I knew that was competing but I did get to meet some friendly folks who were also helping. The other three helpers were seniors so I felt pretty young. It was interesting when I had to show one helper how to compile a C++ program. He was a CS major so I suppose he had just forgotten how to work with gcc. Whatever.

Dr. Keen, my CS 115 professor, was there for some reason; the only thing she did was grade papers, but maybe she was one of the judges. Anyway, I stood around beside her and Suzanne, another helper, when nobody needed me. I watched Dr. Keen grading the most recent quizzes we had taken and saw her grade mine; I got a 10/10.

She talked to Suzanne and I about some of the quizzes and the test my CS 115 class had, about the answers people had put. She mentioned one particular true/false question: If you add one to an integer in C++, is the result always a larger number? No, because of overflow. She described some very weird answers and how people tried to justify their answers in crazy ways. I said that I had used the word “ungodly” in mine to describe how large the number would be before it overflowed and became “an ungodly small number.” She remembered that one, to my great amusement. “Yeah, we got to your answer and someone read it out loud.” Oh, gee. She did tell me that I did really well on the test; yay. Not that I won’t fight those two points that I lost for a stupid reason, though.

Note: This was a dream of mine. I have this warning here because some visitors have thought my life had just gone to pot, when really they were only reading one of my crazy dreams. :)

I was visiting my house for a weekend away from college. I needed a comforter for my bed so I started to make one. It was on the computer and in a paint program. I laid out all kinds of weird patterns on a thick, cushy quilt on the computer and then worried if I had enough ink in the printer to print it out as a quilt. It was like I was actually crawling around on the quilt, though, while making it.

I was then eating lunch with Trinity, Jessica, and some other girl named Katie. Trin was drinking a cherry juice and Jessica was eating a chicken sandwich. We checked the time and it was 11:39a. “We have to go,” Jess said, and I replied, “Yeah, we do.” So we gathered our trash and got ready to leave.