School
Whee. Round 1 of nastiness is done -- on to Round 2. I need to start thinking about an Honors Thesis(yes, the caps are appropriate.) I'm currently thinking about trying to combine my enjoyment of functional languages with my enjoyment of compilers and see if I can't do some sort of thesis on the advantages of compiler implementation in functional programming languages. Of course, I sincerely doubt there's any original research there, so I'll have to come up with an angle which would make it worthwhile. I don't want to just do another "this is my toy language" thing: it seems like cheating, and I'm not good enough to be designing my own language yet anyways.
Hacking
Learning about the joys of the Perl module system. The authenticator module is making steady progress, mainly because I'm actually writing unit tests for the thing as I go so that there will be honest-to-god proof that the damned thing works when I leave a year from now. The IMAP module is mostly working, and I need to bump some stuff that I implemented there into the superclass, but all goes well otherwise. LDAP will be next on the list, followed by who knows what. NDS, maybe?
Diet
I've been making purposeful attempts to avoid thinking about this stuff so that I could let exercise do some good. Three weeks in, I'm feeling ok. Step Aerobics is definitely good for me, even though I feel like a complete twit sometimes. However, I don't hyperventilate anymore, and the shade of purple I turn isn't quite as alarming. Probably means that I need to cut back my eating habits some more.
Life
Life goes up and down, but mostly it just goes. I have no idea whatsoever where I stand with Lilly. Saturday night was very interesting -- the Ks threw a big party, which I attended. Rest of story whited out, so those who don't want to read don't have to
The party was great -- everybody was seeking entertainment, and was quite cheerful. There was a good mix of people there, and everyone seemed to be having a blast. So was I, for quite a while. Then, something just switched on. For some reason, "happy" married couples, or engaged couples in this case, seem to encourage excess drinking on my part. I got really piss drunk(thankfully didn't say anything too horrible), and then worshipped the porcelain god for an hour or two. Not something I'm particularly proud of, but it happened.
The worst thing about the whole experience, I think, was the fact that I know perfectly well that I'm happier and luckier than I ever deserved to be in life, and I give thanks daily that I ended up at Mac for undergraduate. While these places will be incredible once I'm a grad student, they wouldn't have been at all good for me as an undergrad because I had some serious maturity and self-discovery issues which needed to be worked out. Yeah, I would have been fairly intelligent wherever I went, but I wouldn't be as diverse a person as I am. Being able to socialize is fun, even if I'm only mediocre at it.
Anyways, that aside, things have been going fairly well. I had a complete and utter "Far North" moment at my grandmother's birthday. We celebrated at a restaurant, and a bunch of steel/manufacturing workers all spiffed up for a retirement party for one of their crew came in and sat down at the big table across the aisle. My grandmother, upon seeing this, said "Ah... Look at all the men." I suspect you have to have seen the movie to see it, but I just had to look over my shoulder for warpainted ladies attacking.
Listening
Radiohead - The Bends - Black Star