I still exist

So you ("you" being the 3.5 people who read my blog) may or may not have noticed that I've been pretty quiet lately. Reason: real life is getting in the way. Between school and people and contemplating life issues, there has been no time for much else. Besides, blogging has a niceness of about +15 (even lower priority than slashdot!).

SBP elections are today. What political drama...but I actually voted this time because it requires no voting fee (free is good!) and my vote might actually have a minor say (~1000 votes total => 0.1% of the votes are mine). Both candidates are pretty good this year, and it will be interesting to see who wins.

I had some excitement the other day with my compy. Once in a while a HDD cable will become loose, or something happens that causes the hard drive to stop communicating with the system. So I'll do fun stuff like "ls: command not found"--that's my cue to check the cables. After several reboots and messing with my compy's guts, I couldn't get the hard drives to show up in the BIOS, so I was left with Windows until I was able to fix it the next day. I ended up replacing the cables and blowing the dust out before they worked again.

When I booted, KDE started automatically with default settings instead of the expected Fluxbox. Oops. I load up a terminal and come to find my /home partition is not mounted, nor can it be mounted. Then I FREAKED OUT. I thought all my data could be gone, especially after fsck told me there was "an error" on the partition and exited. Fortunately, another run of fsck scanned the partition, found the corrupted data, and fixed the problem. A reboot started me up with my /home intact. The very next thing I did was to rsync my /home to my external hard drive.

Meh, time to go.

Mmmm, salmonella

It never tasted so good.

Class Redundancy Considered Harmful

I'm starting to get sick of learning the same thing over and over again. I feel like the first week and a half of all my classes (except maybe one) where I am supposed to learn something has been nothing but a waste. Last week I got an introduction to Perl regex in a 300 level course, and yesterday marked the 4th time I have officially "learned" about finite state machines.These are the things that should be taught in a freshman level intro to computer science course. Come on profs, we already know all this stuff! Not that it isn't useful, but teach us something we don't already know!

And to make matters worse, professors at Christian colleges like to require attendance, as if class time was actually used for learning...

Pfargtl

Everything wants to happen at 7pm on Tuesday. Is there something special I don't know about?

I Can't Wait...

...for when the hardware abstraction layer software on linux reaches version 9000...

Semester

Yay, the semester has started, and I'm taking it (relatively) easy this time with only 15 credit hours! Here's what's been keeping me busy lately, in no particular order:

• Getting a gf
  
• Spending time with gf
  
• Reading, reading, reading
  
• Going to classes
  
• Differentiating already which classes are going to suck and which ones aren't
  
• Spending more time with gf
  
• Applying for summer overseas missions trip
  
• Applying for passport
  
• Making two trips to Indy in three days (including drinking Starbucks, listening to the symphony, reading at Barnes & Nobles, losing the airport...)
  
• Changing my major to art education
  
• Refusing to eat my vegetables
  
• Working on my 1.5 year plan
  
• ROFLing at today's xkcd. (gotta love stats jokes...)
  

Ok, so I am not really changing my major to art ed. But I did fill out the form because I'm declaring a math minor that's already finished but not yet declared (plus my major concentration that hasn't been declared yet). So I tell people I'm changing my major and see what their reactions are. Things on the agenda for next week:

• Finish application(s)
  
• Broomball
  
• Opera
  
• Homework
  
• Sleep (10pm bedtime!)
  
• More reading
  
• Small group/FOSO Fellowship/Gentleman's Club
  
• Slashdot
  
• Minix
  

Should be fun.

The One

Lyrics of the Week:

I am here and I'm with You now
And I didn't think I could feel this way
I am here and I'm with You now
'Cause You found me somehow

I can be the one tonight
When everything seems out of sight
I will follow You with all my life
I can be the one tonight

Jesus, You are the one
That makes me smile over and over again
I am here and I'm with You now
I want to hear you somehow

I can be the one tonight
When everything seems out of sight
I will follow You with all my life
I can be the one tonight

-Everyday Sunday