anti-stereotype.info

well, i made it through school. on saturday, december 12, 2009 i graduated college with my b.s. in electrical engineering. whoo!

now i need to get my grad school apps together, study for the gre, and find a job. i did recently find a new apartment so i need to start packing too. i am also still working on my senior design project. i want it to be up and running. i also have a few projects in mind that i would like to work on. those can come at a later date though.

when this is all said and done, or maybe at some point in the meantime i will catch up on my comic books, video games, and tv shows/movies. honestly, i don’t think there will be a point where i will become too bored. i am SO BEHIND on everything. i visited my local comic shop last week and picked up the stack of comics that had been in my pull list for the last 6 weeks. yikes. i missed a lot of good stuff. i’m kind of bummed that straczynski wont be doing thor anymore.

i also decided it was time to finally sit down and watch all of boogiepop phantom. i have had the box set for about 6 years now and have never watched all 12 episodes. it’s time. also, a lot of my books will be going into storage shortly so i thought it necessary to pull out a few and have lying around so i can actually get around to reading them. yeah!

on the videogame front. i recently purchased a wii. so basically i have to catch up on all the good games that came out for it since launch. i have yet ot beat any of the ps3 games i own…and i just bought a few more. i started dragon age: origins on the xbox 360 but had to stop when school started getting intense again, so i do wan to finish that up…and i got an early copy of bayonetta. whoo! and then the slew of psp and ds games that keep coming out. man, oh man.

i should be polishing up my resume but i feel kind of sick and out of it. i should probably go to bed. i think i’ll just read a few comics first. i almost forgot they were sitting in a pile.

cant tell if it’s the allergies, stress, or lack of sleep but i’ve been feeling generally unwell. i wake up every morning exhausted, with super dry eyes and stuffy sinuses. feh.

my first midterm was yesterday. it was nothing short of horrifying. i feel that if i had an extra 45 minutes or so, i might have stood a chance of passing. :\ afterwards i went to my senior design class and waited for an hour so i could speak to my professor for 5 minutes. and to top it all off, my senior design partner flew off to mexico for a vacation.

to make myself feel better i played a little batman: arkham asylum which i have to admit is pretty freaking cool. i’m not really a fan of the detective mode business. i feel like when i am not in detective mode i’m missing out on all kinds of secret stuff, and at the same time when i am in detective mode i feel like i’m missing out on some visuals i should be enjoying from the game. *shrug* i didn’t actually play batman for very long. in fact, i spent most of my night (until the wee hours of the morning) binging on peanut butter filled pretzels and watching 30 rock. i’m closing in on the end of the 3rd season, finally, and i have to admit i really really love tina fey.

today, work until 5. class until 9. home and sleep.

over the course of the weekend i started to feel much better. no more coughing really…the ability to think again…but i was really not into catching up on schoolwork. instead, i continued to play resident evil 5 and slum around. well, a couple of days ago i had my first school related nightmare. first ever, school related nightmare. i have never been so stressed about school that i had a dream about it. i was so upset when i woke up at god knows what hour that i brewed a pot of coffee and began working on my senior design project. my dad’s gf came in and asked me if i would be ok to go to school without having slept all night. :\ i said yeah…big mistake. should have gone to back to bed…

i think i stressed myself out so bad (and i really didn’t need to) that i started feeling a bit ill again. it might also be a reaction to the severe weather change, but i have started a bit of a cough again. oops.

so back to the old grind. back to lots of schoolwork and no fun.

the more i sleep the worse i feel. i don’t understand. i took the entire weekend off of school and did nothing but sleep, eat, and play resident evil 5. come monday, i felt AWFUL. so i took monday off too. (i finished RE5 btw) i couldn’t take tuesday off because i had a quiz. then the rest of the week was spent catching up on assignments i should have done over the weekend. eep!

well, now it is friday and while i feel much better than i did on monday, i’m still not 100%. stupid friday evening class. ugh. 6-9 pm. UGH.

i should probably go shower and eat and do some homework.

i don’t know what is going on but everyone and their mom seems to be having a rough semester, and it’s only the beginning of the third week. my classes are still not quite in order and i have a bunch of kinks to work out as far as the administrative stuff is concerned.

i have to drop one of my classes. one class that i was really really REALLY looking forward to, because of a professor. a professor who cannot seem to mesh with the class and provide a way to learn all the magical stuff in his head. actually, he makes a lot of mistakes, then argues with the class when he makes mistakes and then tries to oversimplify the most basic of basics because he thinks we (obviously) don’t understand the simple concepts needed to proceed. of course, this all arises from the fact he made the mistakes to begin with and feels the need to defend all of his answers, even though they are (obviously) incorrect. blergh.

also, when most of the class couldn’t figure out how to work 1 problem in matlab, his answer was we should have googled it and taken someone else’s code and pasted it into the homework. wtf? who does that? i mean, honestly, how many professors prefer that you find someone else’s work on the internet and present it as your own work, rather than asking the professor the correct way to approach the problem and then continue to solve on your own?

that being said, i am going to try and squeeze into a class (on the third week of school) that i don’t have all the prerequisites for, in an attempt to possibly save myself from the fourth level of hell and learn something in the process.

and now, back to the show!

for the last couple of days i’ve been messing around with wiki software. i tried out wakkawiki as well as pmwiki because they were the easiest to set up. (they were part of my simplescripts list for the hosting company i use). unfortunately, i wanted a wiki where i could section off parts of it and give different users (preferably part of different groups)  access to read/write. i did not want site wide read/write access, nor did i think having a different markup language was the way to go.

mediawiki appears to be the holy grail of wiki software. unfortunately, it seems to also have a bazillion options i really don’t need. after doing a bunch of research i came across dokuwiki, which i think will satisfy all the needs i have. i’ll give updates on how it’s working out.

well, it’s 1 am and i am up again. super tired, but cant sleep. booo. tomorrow is a day full of errands, hospital,  homework, and a class. class from 6-9! should be interesting.

i learned that we have a new computer lab policy. students are only allowed to print 10 pages a day. wtf? some of the articles and documents and notes we need to print out are 40 pages long, easy. i had lab write-ups that were longer than 10 pages. it makes me a little bitter and angry about my exponentially increasing lab fees. like 300 – 800 in a span of a couple of years increasing. fucking lame.

gearing up and looking forward to a D&D 4.0 campaign with a bunch of mo’s. which should also be pretty interesting.

i guess i’ll listen to a robot podcast or two and hopefully pass out.

is it really already time for the final semester of my undergraduate career to start? indeed it is. well, it started on monday but i was recovering from vacation/lack of internet at home and getting all my crap together.

up this semester:

• digital signal processing
• communication theory
• device electronics
• control systems
• senior design

so far it promises to be A LOT of work.

“med school is hard to get into, but once you get in it’s not hard to finish. engineering school, on the other hand is easy to get into…it’s finishing that is the problem.” this from a girl who just got into med school…hrm.

in other news, i have decided to sell my laptop and buy a netbook instead. i’ve settled on a white eee pc. it’s adorable and tiny.

on sunday i went to the denver public library to do some research on autonomous robots. i rolled up around 11 or so and then discovered it didn’t actually open until 1 p.m. boo. so then i listened to the seventh (and last) harry potter audiobook and waited for a bit.

once the library opened i rushed to the online catalog and began perusing the robot building/programming shelves and plucked six or seven (large) books and waddled back to a desk by the window. it was a gorgeous day out and i wanted to pretend i could enjoy it like everyone else on the other side of the glass. once i had settled in with my laptop out to take notes and started flipping through the books, a voice came over the intercom system in the library letting all the dpl patrons know the denver gay men’s chorus would be doing their annual singing-dealie. i thought, how fun! little did i know they would be singing in the space RIGHT BELOW where i sat. and since i had so much crap everywhere already, i didn’t really want to move. and i didn’t think the concert would be long anyway…it was about an hour, but it was really hard to concentrate during that hour. :\

today i went to the jefferson county library out in lakewood. i used to live over in the area, which is how i found it, and it is one of my favorites. i figured since i would be in golden a little earlier in the day i could stop off at the library to finish up one of my electronics projects and be on my merry way. i found a nice little cube in the back (which, btw, was really big and wide with it’s own set of electrical outlets) and i settled in. once again, little did i know that on the other side of my cube (and sharing one of three walls) was a woman using a typewriter. yeah, a god damn fucking typewriter. so as i tried to run the calculations for my current source project, all i could hear was…clack, clack, click, clak, whhzzzzzzt, ding! i was at the library for a couple of hours and the typewriter did not stop the entire time. i wonder if the woman was working out chapter 5-12 of her god damn memoir. >:\ so irritating. finally, after debating with myself for twenty minutes i decided to give up and as i was packing the woman got all of her things and walked away. *facepalm*grumble*grumble*

what the eff, eh? so my goal is to finish reading stranger in a strange land tonight, and i’m getting close…if not tonight then definitely by tomorrow. i also finished the last harry potter book today *sob* so i figured i should pick up another book. even though i have a dozen or so that i’ve been ‘meaning to read’ but since i was at the library already, what they hell.

for the better part of this decade, people keep asking me if i have read houes of leaves and when i tell them no, they sound shocked and amazed and tell me to go read it at once. i’ve resisted up to this point, but i checked to see if they had it, because most times when i check the library its always checked out, and to my surprise…there it was. i went to go check the damn book out and i am no longer in the jeffco system. i lied to the 90 year old librarian and gave him a fake address and he let me check out the book. i’ll definitely return it…but it was a bit of a pain to get it. oops. i totally felt my face flush too as i told him i lived nearby but i couldn’t remember my zip code. HAH!

the book seems really long, so i may end up buying a copy to finish at my leisure. as for audiobooks, i think i may start on american gods by neil gaiman next. i also want to see what all the fuss around twilight series is all about, but i’ll get around to that later. i have to admit, i did start watching the movie and would have probably watched the entire thing if it hadn’t been for the fact that i had to leave.

and now, back to reading!

as a bit of a hermit, one of my favorite places to hide in school is the library. i could hang out in the food court, or the engineering lab…but…that means i have to socialize with my fellow classmates. boo.

of all the places in the library, my favorite is in between the bookshelves. unfortunately, as busy as the auraria library is, sitting in between the tall shelves is not an option. second choice of sitting places is by the upstairs bathroom in a set of small cubicles. because these cubicles are so isolated with 2 foot high walls, it’s a nice way to hide from everyone else.

i’ve been coming to this section of the library for the last couple of semesters and it seems no matter how often i come during the week or what time of the day/evening there is one guy that always sits in the same place. i suppose i started noticing him because he used to smell really really terrible. thankfully, today…there is no serious bo wafting over the cubicles since i am sitting directly across from him.

since he seems to sit here all day every day i wonder what he does on his laptop all day. perhaps he plays poker and that’s how he makes his money? i should mention he does look a bit like a derelict. i cant imagine he takes classes here since he never seems to leave.

i wonder, i wonder….

i should be working on my presentation for senior design project.