www.BrettDaniel.com

I have been seriously remiss in posting, but I can assure you it hasn't been for lack of subject matter.

For one thing, work as progressed merrily in the two-plus weeks I've clocked so far. This summer I am doing a lot more project planning and a lot less programming. I have spent most of my time gathering functional requirements from other employees, learning about the business process, trying to see the big picture, etc. That may change as the projects progress, but so far it has been very different than my previous two summers. I have enjoyed it for the most part, and I'm learning all sorts of new things about project management that I'm sure will be useful down the road.

After work I've been going to the YMCA. Unlike last summer when I went in the evenings, this summer I have been going directly there from work. I have found that planning my day around that extra hour has been a huge motivator. I have already seen and felt a change from just two weeks ago. I haven't checked, but I'm sure I've achieved the 200-pound bench max I had hoped for. Update: I checked and I'm not quite there yet.

While lifting a week and a half ago, I ran into an old high school friend. We got talking and somehow got on the subject of Poker. I mentioned I played often at school, and he invited me to join a game that very night with a bunch of other high school friends. It was my first real-money game (don't worry, parents, it was cheap), and though I lost after a hard-fought battle, I thoroughly enjoyed playing with a new group of people.

I also got a dose of culture last weekend. The week before, I invited Michael, Eric, and Mel to go a local art fair. We drove about thirty minutes only to find a completely empty park. "This can't be right," I, master of the obvious said, "There's no one here." Then Mel noticed the sign announcing the actual dates of the fair: one week later. That was a prime Brett moment that I'm sure I will hear about every time I invite any of them to go anywhere. We agreed to try again, but by the next weekend (last weekend), Michael was in Spain for his study abroad summer and Mel had paint her house or mop a floor or something similarly mundane. Not to be deterred, Eric and I decided to go anyway. We managed to see an hour and a half's worth of absolutely amazing stuff before an Indiana spring rain set in. We were both reminded of the rainstorm at the end of last summer's camping trip.

The most recent event took place last Thursday when I came downstairs to find my father playing a new PS2. I was spellbound. Never would I have expected to find a Playstation in my house, much less one bought by my dad. Unsurprisingly, thanks to my admitted love of video games, I have fallen in love with that black box. Dad and I have been racing each other in Need for Speed, and I've already bought my first PS2 game. This has led me to the conclusion that I will definitely need to buy my own system before heading back to school in the fall.

The final count is $73 and change gained from my back-from-college garage sale. I made a big dent in the clutter and finally get rid of a lot of the junk that has accumulated in my room these past ten years or so. My parents ended up throwing some of their salable items on the table and ended up getting... oh... right around five dollars. Of course we weren't able to sell everything, so we loaded up the SUV with the remaining small items to take to Goodwill. Those "big ticket" items that didn't sell— my amp cabinet, the motorcycle helmet I used to wear when riding my grandfather's old minicycle, the beautiful rollerblades I haven't been able to use in years, my 25-book Garfield collection, the ten sheets of uncut 1992 baseball cards— will go on Ebay sometime soon.

I don't write much about politics, but this story on the abuses in Iraq— true or not— has some choice quotes:

• "The issue is that, since 9/11, we've changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism, and created conditions where the ends justify the means."
• "...with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end."
• "You have to demonstrate that there are checks and balances in the system... When you live in a world of gray zones, you have to have very clear red lines."
• "We're giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar."

As promised, here is my sophomore year year-end wrapup. As you'll see, this post is a bit more optimistic than last year's.

Credit Hours != Actual Hours

I took 15 hours first semester and had homework nearly every night. This was clearly due to my Physics and Linear Algebra classes. Physics was crazy; I had at least four assignments per week, two of which regularly took at least two hours to finish. Linear algebra had three assignments per week, though they only took about an hour each.

This semester I took 17 hours and had all sorts of free time. My statistics class had one assignment per week; Digital Circuit Analysis had six over the course of the semester; Computer Architecture had two assignments and two projects; and the rest of the classes were just lectures. The only downside was the schedule, but it wasn't too bad because it allowed me to take my time between classes.

Environment is Everything

Last year I roomed with a guy named Tony who was a race car driver and punk rock drummer. We got along okay, but had absolutely nothing in common. On top of that, the room we lived in was small, dark, and tended to get messy. This year, on the other hand, I roomed with Michael whom I have known since high school. We lived in a large, bright room that managed to stay clean most of the year. Having a bathroom that wasn't halfway down the hall and suitemates that I also knew from high school wasn't bad either. All this summed across the entire year made living much more enjoyable.

One-Fifth of a Percent!

I came within a hair's width of a 4.0 GPA this semester. For a while I was worried how my computer architecture class would swing, but it was statistics that ended up bringing me down. I got a B despite an getting an A on the first exam, getting As on all the homework, and feeling like I had owned the final. I knew I had a B on the second exam and a few low quiz scores, but I didn't feel those could have hurt me too much. After all, I understood the material and learned a lot from the class.

I emailed the professor to ask what might have happened. He replied that I hadn't owned the final as much as I had hoped and that I had the highest B in the class, a mere .8% away from the lowest A. If the cutoff was a whole number, that means I was just .2% away from an A and a 4.0 GPA for the semester.

I don't swear, but that .2% makes it tempting to start.

A Third Internship

I've come to realize I have it pretty good this summer. I have evenings and weekends completely free of homework and projects; I get to live at home where rent is exceedingly cheap and the meal fairy appears magically every night; and I work just 15 minutes away at an enjoyable software development job where I can look out the window and laugh at those poor souls who actually have to deal with traffic during their commute. I can't ask for a better summer than that.

The past few days have been a whirlwind of packing, moving, unpacking, and reorganizing. After my last final Saturday afternoon, I began loading the car with as much stuff from the dorm as I could. In went my computer, desk stuff, chair, TV, game systems, and a load of other random stuff. You have not seen comedy until you have witnessed me wrestling my 21-inch TV into the trunk of my tiny, tiny, Celica. I came so very close to getting everything packed, but as the car got more and more full, I realized to my dismay that I would have to make two trips. It all came down to clothes and my bike. Had I taken the TV, bike, and chair home the weekend before, I'm sure I could have gotten everything else. Luckily I didn't have to worry about the couch because Audie and Kristy were kind enough to keep it in a storage closet at their future apartment. The downside was that the closet was up four flights of stairs!

I finally started driving home around 10. I was so tired I didn't even bother unpacking my car; I just went straight to bed. The next morning (far too early for a Sunday, I might add) I drove Dad's SUV back to Purdue to pick up my clothes and bike. Because I had left my car at home, I didn't think to bring my key ring upon which I kept my room key. The very key I needed to turn in during checkout.

Proceed to bang head against wall...

I was ready to pay the $25 lost key fee— I certainly wasn't about to make another trip back and forth to Purdue— but the lady at the front office told me I could mail it to the dorm on Monday. Thank goodness.

When I finally got home for a second time, my family was in the throes of a Mother's Day gettogether. I joined in and finally had a chance to relax a bit. After that, I started unloading the cars.

I've come to realize since then that I have far too much stuff. For the past eight months I've lived in a rather spartan dorm room filled with things I need or have used recently. Coming back to my room at home where I've accumulated several years' worth of stuff was quite a shock. Before I could begin moving back in, I had to throw away, reorganize, or move loads of old books, magazines, electronics, toys etcetera etcetera etcetera to make room for the contents of my dorm. I installed some shelves over my desk and piled up at least a cubic yard of stuff to sell at a back-from-college sale I'm planning to have this Saturday a week from Saturday. Anything that doesn't sell I'll toss out or sell on Ebay. Let me know if you're interested in coming to the sale so I can send you directions on how to get to my house.

Now that I'm mostly settled, I can start readying myself to begin work another year-end wrapup at some point.

Every geek with a website dreams of one day getting Slashdotted. Tonight that dream was fulfilled (sort of) thanks to this comment which links to my tour of the Purdue particle accelerator. When I first saw Slashdot in my referrer list, my hands started shaking and I got more excited than any other time in recent memory— it's sad, I know. For the past hour or so I've been joyously watching my hit counter tick up, and up, and up.

Amazing. From just that one offhand comment I'm seeing more traffic than I had in the past year or more.

Update: here is the graph showing the spike of hits. It's certainly not very big by Slashdot standards, but it's still quite impressive.

Finals, finals, finals. What fun. This week is always strange: vast gulfs of boredom overshadowed by the feeling one needs to study and broken by islands of stressful mental acrobatics during the tests. I have it better than some, at least. I have only one test per day, and I don't have to take one of them because I did well enough during the semester. On the other hand, my computer architecture final is on Saturday at the last possible time.