Pfhew, so let’s see what’s going on in my life, since it’s been some time since I last updated with a real entry. I’m moving this weekend to my new apartment, and it’s going to suck like all moves suck, but this one I’m hoping will be better, at least in some ways, than previous moves because I tried to take a lot of crap that I don’t need home to my parents’ house. They kind of laughed about me basically using my old room as a storage shed. In other ways, this move will suck more because I have more large furniture, including a couch, a 25″ TV, a dresser, and a nightstand that I didn’t have before. I’ve rented a truck and am getting Jon, Tony, Mark, Kathy, and Thom involved because they’re dear sweet people that can lift things. I’m going to take them out for dinner or pie or something afterward as thanks.

I applied for and got accepted at a position at Hewlett Packard, otherwise known as Exstream Software, here in Lexington, so I’ll be working there this summer. I’ll either be continuing there this fall part-time or working as a research assistant at UK; it depends on what one of my professors has in the way of R.A. positions.

I can’t remember having mentioned it before, but my graduate classes this fall will be algorithms, programming languages (Smalltalk, Lisp, and Ada, here I come!), and another class that sounded interesting about applying the scientific method to software development.

I’m currently rereading the Hatrack River series by Orson Scott Card and am on, in particular, Heartfire in the Alvin Wandering collection. Yay for Verily Cooper, if anyone else reads/has read the series.

Thanks for commenting on the new theme, Melissa, Howard, and Lorina. I just checked it in IE 7 myself and it seems all right–hooray! I think I also may have fixed the wonky navigation stuff that I messed up last time, so hopefully all is well now. I think I’ll modify this layout such that I can use it on my portfolio, which is sadly neglected as far as nice layouts are concerned. The cobbler’s children having no shoes and all that.

Looks like there’ll be some graduation celebration among my friends, come May. Kathy’s having a party-type thing to which me, Jon, and Mark are invited, plus I’ll be getting together with Jon’s family to celebrate. It’s kind of funny, Jon doesn’t want to walk for graduation at all, but his parents definitely want him to, whereas my parents don’t care for all the pomp and circumstance and aren’t coming, but I want to walk. Kathy was just flabbergasted to hear my parents weren’t going to attend, but she doesn’t get how absolutely hermit-like they are. My mom never went to any of her graduations, nor did either of them attend my brother’s college graduations.

This summer, if I don’t get absolutely sick of programming stuff at work, I’d like to bang around with some Rails stuff on my own for fun. I’ve rediscovered my love of Mahjong, which I used to play all the time as a kid on our old PC, and now play on my iPod since EA made a very pretty version of it. I was thinking it’d be an interesting challenge to implement a Rails version of the game. It would have to handle different layers of tiles in order to know which tiles were movable and which weren’t, plus the design of the tiles would be fun. Instead of the traditional Chinese symbols, there could be Firefox tiles and Tux tiles and Google tiles and Ruby tiles. I asked Jon if he would be interested in working together on it, because he wants more Rails experience and I discovered this semester, through completing a Set game implementation with Tony and Mark, that working together on a Rails project, when everyone involved is enthusiastic and talented, is really fun. He’s game, and I’m thinking we should try a Git repository instead of Subversion because my Git experience is very limited but so many people seem to enjoy it and even prefer it to Subversion, so there’s got to be some merit. I remember liking the idea of being able to make local commits to save your progress and then only making full, remote commits when you have a working change.