Tuesday
Long day. Mostly spent in classes. English from
9:30-11:35, then go to work for about 3-4 hours, then
come back for a 6 hour block of Astronomy. Astronomy
is going to be a fun course, I've always been interested
in space stuff. We got out of lab early since the lab
was a review of simple math like scientific notation.
Since it is a 100 level course we have a lot of freshmen
in the class.
Wednesday
English in the morning. Had a rough draft of a paper
due, summarizing a biology article on bacteria in the
stomach. It's English for the natural sciences (required
for my BS degree) but 90% of the book gives examples of
Biology and the other 10% of astronomy and physics. Hello,
I'm a CS major, none of that possibly applies to me :)
Finished hooking up the netbench array at work. Installed distributed-net on all of them, boosting my keyrate by about 4MKey/s :)
Wednesday night my fiancee and I went to Verizon (formerly Bell Atlantic Mobile) and got some new cellphones and service contracts. Before I was using Splint, but I hated the service I got (both customer and signal-wise). Crystal clear, indeed. Piece of junk, that's what it was. Verizon didn't have many phones that I was interested in, though...ended up paying for the (very expensive) digital StarTAC 7868, but after a few days of using it I really like it. The battery life is good, despite the horror stories I've heard. It's also a lot more comfortable and clearer reception than my old phone (Qualcomm QCP-2760). So I'm happy. The service plan is good as well, 200 minutes for $29.99/mo (with Splint it was 300 for the same amount), and free nights and weekends, which is when I will be using it the most anyways.
Thursday
Very long day. Nothing exciting happened.
Friday
We had a huge meeting, out at this really swank hotel
(Westfield Marriott). Decent continental breakfast, then
sat and listened (read: played with Palm V, like everyone
else in our group) to management for a bit. We've been
running into some real problems with the Palms lately. It's
the exact same problem for everyone, too. You'll turn it
on, and get a Fatal exception error, with a restart
button...which doesn't react to when you tap. So you soft
reset the Palm, which then sends it into this infinite loop
of flicking the Palm logo and a black horizontal bar. The
only way to fix it is to hard reset the Palm. It happened
to me on Thursday, then Frank's did it again later that day,
then Geoff's did it all day Friday during the meeting (poor
fellow. :) So I think I'm going to try to track down more
information on this problem... I'm backing my palm up every
day now (full backups, not just a hotsync). At lunch most
of us left for home, since all that was left was about 20-30
minutes of 'Final words' and after that work was closed.
Went home and cleaned my room, feel much better now. Also
defrosted the fridge and the 3" block of ice my freezer had
become. Whee.
Went out to a local bar and grill with some friends around 9pm, turns out there were bands playing there. It was cool seeing all our friends from high school, first time we've all been together in about 4 years. I was DD, so didn't drink any, but man, everyone else got smashed in celebration of my fiancee's graduation a few weeks ago. I'm glad I wasn't the one holding the tab. One thing I didn't really enjoy was all the smoke, you could see it hanging in the air anyways, good thing I was wearing my glasses, would have had a rough time with contacts. I was sitting at a bar table with my fiancee and our friends when this girl who had been dancing on the floor came over, laid her head down on the railing (it was about her height) and asked me if I wanted to dance. Ha! I politely (I hope) declined, so she went and asked the other guy at our table, with similar results. At first glance she appeared young, but I took a closer look and she was easily mid 30's-40's (I'm 21). She could have been my mother! Anyways, maybe you just had to be there, but I found that highly amusing. First time in a long while (at least 5 years) that I've been hit on. Perhaps the funniest thing is that my fiancee was right there next to me getting a real kick out of the whole scene.
Today
Slept in until about 10:40, which was nice. Went back to
the Verizon store to exchange my fiancee's cigarette charger
for her phone. Then swung over to Best Buy to get some
stuff for her parents. We were going to go to a movie, but
I guess not, since she's now sleeping on my futon (thus
giving me time to write this very long diary entry, I've
been slacking). Finally, I can just relax for a day or
two...I love holiday weekends.