Today was the first day of classes at UK, so let me tell you about how it went:

artificial intelligence

I figure this is going to be a hard class, but the lecture was pretty interesting today. I can’t say I had any interest in the subject going into it, but throughout the lecture I kept thinking of I, Robot with Will Smith, so who knows, maybe it’ll be fun. The professor seems like a good lecturer, at least, and the programming project we’ll have this semester can be written in our choice of language. No more arguing with type conversion and pointers in C++!

Asian philosophy

I found myself biting my tongue to keep from laughing a couple times in today’s lecture because I think I’m in there with a few dolts, but this may be an okay class. We talked about what the self was today, as in what we mean when we use the words “I” or “myself.” One guy rambled on about he is himself and “you are YOURself”, blah blah, which the professor seemed to appreciate. Someone else pretty much stated my view of it, which is that “self” is defined by its boundaries, that is, the thoughts swirling around in your head and the separation of sensation, like I see you get punched and I don’t feel physical pain, whereas you do. Then the professor asked “well what about God in Christianity, with His three selves?” and that same kid from earlier went off on some tangent about how all we know about God is what the Bible says, and then he started spouting off irrelevant Biblical quotations. I feel like I’m going to do a lot of sighing and surfing the Internet in this class.

astronomy

This professor is “off the hook,” to quote one of his slides that made that comment about the subject of astronomy. He’s this sixty-year-old white guy that kept saying “bullshit” and then started rapping. He was asking us what we did over the summer and some guy said he went on a choral trip. The professor asked what the guy sings, and if he sings Lil Wayne. This got a few chuckles, I guess because we were all thinking “He knows who Lil Wayne is?!” Then, the professor started singing “Shorty want a thug, bottles in the club”; I didn’t even know Lil Wayne sings that, though of course I’ve heard it umpteen times on the radio. He started out the lecture with a big slide saying “FBI Warning”, with a photo of what looked like a shot from Dragnet: two detectives pointing guns out at you. He went on about how “any unauthorized recordings or distributions of this lecture would be punished to the full extent of the law,” something like that, then said “That’s bullshit.” (There’s his favorite word again.)

honors

I think I’ll like this professor, too, just because of his attitude. Definitely not because of the reading material, because we’re reading “classics” from the 1500-1900’s, and they’ll probably bore the pants off me. They include stuff by Nietzsche, “The Prince” by Machiavelli, Thomas More’s “Utopia”, some philosophy, and some Kierkegaard. Our classroom is way off the beaten trail; me and some other students kept wandering the halls on the top floor of an old building, finding the restrooms and myriad other hallways instead of our classroom, which is shoved in a corner. Other students kept straggling into the classroom throughout the class, muttering about being unable to find the place. We’re thinking about moving to an unoccupied and larger classroom across the hall, though, which would be nice because there wasn’t enough room at the table for us all and so several of us sat in chairs against the wall.

operating systems

This is taught by a tiny Indian man who speaks very softly and has that peaceful sort of voice that makes surfing the Internet or taking a nap very tempting for me. I hope I can pay attention long enough to glean some information from him about the subject. I’m going to try and borrow Kathy’s old edition of the textbook, since I’m sure a new or used copy would be well over $60 at the bookstore.

Wow, talk about a surprise: I just found out that my online friend Melissa (a.k.a. Trinity, since I can’t kick the habit of using her old alias) is preggers. I was just shuffling through sites in Perfection and decided to check hers out, since I hadn’t been there in a while because she hasn’t updated in a while. Turns out she posted at the beginning of this month about being pregnant, and she was already seven weeks along (she guesses) at the time. I just got off the phone with her, checking on how she’s doing; she said she’s fine, just waiting to get married so that she can get on her currently-boyfriend’s health insurance and get checked out at the doctor. I’m trying to think of the next big weekend when I’d be free and she would potentially be free so that I can go visit her.

It’s so surprising to find out a friend of yours is going to be a mommy, because that’s such a defining moment in your life. Before, she was on the same plane as me, now she’s going to be a mom. That’s like, “goodbye college days of youth, hello crying baby with lots of expenses.” Frankly, the idea of being pregnant scares the bejeezus out of me. I don’t want to be pregnant for seeeeeveral more years, and I want to be doing very well financially and relationship-wise when I decide to have a kid. That’s another thing: this whole pregnancy thing was not planned for her, it just happened. I would be freaking out if that happened to me, but she seems remarkably calm. She’s told her family and, of course, her boyfriend who got her pregnant, and she seems to have some plans, which is good.

Heck, I’m still freaking out in a mild sort of way about the imminent end of college. I’ll be graduating in the spring and, uh, what then? Lexmark seems like it would be an option, but I want to look around at all the places around town before I settle on anywhere. I will not do Windows–I want a place open to Linux and OS X, so that I’m not the odd-kid-out when I choose to use one of those instead of the latest crap from Microsoft. I would ideally do web design (where the appearance actually matters, not just internal things where the developers could care less about my madd CSS skylz) with a hand in the programming on the backend, too, and a little database action thrown in for good measure. I just want a job that I can be happy with for several years, and being cramped into a Windows-only place doing programming on Windows for Windows with a bunch of Microsofties will make me bitter and curmudgeonly–more so than I am currently, I mean.

In other news, the semester starts Wednesday, and I’ve got to get organized. I’m hanging out with Todders (I wonder how he really feels about that nickname…) tonight, but tomorrow I’m going to go through all my old folders and notebooks from past semesters and see what I can junk. It pains me to throw out all that old work, but I never use the stuff and it takes up so much space. I hate being a packrat. :P

Right, so I went half a year with no new layout, and in the span of two days, I put up as many. Feast your eyes on the theme I created today (it uses the Basic Neuroscience palette from COLOURlovers), or stick with yesterday’s theme. I’m going to make them both available, via a link in the sidebar or footer. I’ve tested this new one in Opera, Safari, and Firefox in OS X; please let me know if you have any problems (especially with the navigation–there should be menus that appear when you hover on ‘About’, ‘Creative’, and ‘Downloads’) in your browser.

I personally prefer Round Black to Pink Flower, but hey, choose whichever you like best. I don’t know how the colors look on a CRT monitor or in something other than OS X. I always have color issues, especially in dark layouts like Round Black, because colors on my Macbook are different than on other LCD’s and especially CRT’s in other operating systems.

After half a year, I’ve finally put up a new layout. It’s one I tinkered around with today and, while I’m not ecstatic about it, I do like it well enough to release it. It helps that I’ve gotten sick of looking at the old theme. I’ve only got access to my Macbook currently, so I was only able to test it in Firefox 3, Safari, and Opera on OS X. Let me know if you have any problems in other browsers (I’m expecting some for sure in IE, at least in IE 6, because I used “fixed” background images) via a comment, please.

So with Wordpress 2.6.1, I’m noticing that there’s the option to use Google Gears–any feedback on that? I’m new to Gears and have been reading about it; has it really been effective in making a page work faster?

I spent my morning picking grapes; I’ve come home for a visit with my family, and my dad’s grapevine is in full swing. I picked over a bushel this morning and feel as though I barely made a dent in what’s on the vine. Mom has an absolutely gigantic red, plastic bucket into which I’m going to dump all the bushels I pick. Usually, my parents split the grapes: Mom turns her part into grape jelly, and Dad makes wine. This year, however, Mom’s giving all of hers to my dad because there was so much other fruit for her to turn into delicious preserve-y things (namely blackberries–they picked like fourteen gallons on our neighbor’s farm).

Check out this female eastern dobsonfly that my dad found; aren’t those pincers vicious-looking? He was sanding when he noticed her sitting there; he didn’t recognize what it was but apparently folks online pointed him to the University of Kentucky’s Critter Files, which I think is pretty cool. Who knows what all is on UK’s web site, hidden in back pages.