IBNeko's Journal-Nyo~!

By way of the delightful xkcd comic xkcd_rss / http://xkcd.com/c219.html (Tangent: mrrr, I want to build fort and.. yeah. T.T World still too big right now. Need to be able to get to the other side in under 3 hours, for less than $200 dollars.)

I came across this community: fort_building.

TODO <= "Build large fort at someone's party."

...I think I'm losing touch with my inner child - Letting go and being randomly silly is getting harder. Then again, I'm more often alone than not these days, with enough homework and extracurricular things to do. Sad much.

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I like this song. It's pretty. Not exactly uplifting, but meh, something about the melody makes it yummy. I need to edit this mp3 or maybe the album version to remove the silence, or that not-song-part.

And yes, no musicals were posted today, due to the nasty windchill (-20 last night, and not much better today...) (Lady, thank you for the bomber throw from way back then~ it's being the most useful present I've ever received, I think.), I haven't ventured out of the apartment for the entire day.

School todo:
GER250 essay - mmm, 5 pages by friday, draft by tomorrow. Progress: 0%.
ECE410 homework - need to get started on that. It took forever last time, and it probably won't be better this time.
Need to install matlab.
At some point, I really need to review calculus and basic trig identities or something. Needing to think about them/verify my guesses while doing stuff is slowing me down.

Now to pack, clean the apartment, run some last minute errands...

CLCV115 should be a B-. I think, based only on the number of multiple choice problems I was absolutely sure on... which was approximately 62/110. Not a very good number, but this was "absolutely sure". The rest... we'll have to see how lucky I am. Most problems I had eliminated at least one answer, so 1/3 chance... If I'm very unlucky and get everything wrong, I'll have a C+. 30% right... borderline B/B-. Joy. Will need a 87.5% guessing accuracy in order to get a B+. Heh, that ain't happening.

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And a wonderful person on the macwarriors mailing list had a broken 3rd gen iPod - like the one I had. But apparently the hard drive was busted, so he said he would give it away to anyone who wanted it. So I have an iPod now! ::much glee:: Came with a dock too~!

Now to see how badly the hard drive is messed up.... if at all? ::knocks on wood::

[edit] Huh, hard drive doesn't look messed up. It's not taking the firmware update though... o.O I hope it's not a bad flash memory issue like mine eventually turned out to be.......

[append #2] Ok, silly me - iPod needs to be rebooted to actually "install" the update. Doh~ Update installed. Looks like I can put music onto it. (I think) I ran a surface scan using the iPod tools (back+forward+select at boot, then HDD Check). It said things were good. All other diagnostics said things were good too.

...24+8.75 hours until the next crazy bloody exam of doom.

This exam (IB150) either went really well, or really badly. We shall see. I still hate how one three hour exam could mean the difference between a D or C and an A. It's stupid. (Granted, if I knew the material as well as I probably ought to, it should have been a guaranteed A. Or so goes that other reasoning. WTF anyways.)

I'm going to go take a nap. 4 hours last night, and almost 5 hours this morning is not enough for this kitten.

There's a little less than two months before I go back to school again.

And it's been a little more than a month since summer vacation started.

And I haven't accomplished much.

Bad.

(interpret as you will. Bad time, Bad me, Bad things-not-accomplished-by-themselves-yet-things.)

CS440 was today.

It was ok, I guess. Could have been worse, but it could also have been better. Maybe if I wasn't stupid and actually reviewed more of the homework problems. Notably the last one. Some of the conceptual stuff was a bit odd, and required some BSsing, but... the rest.. if I kept my formulas straight, they should be alright.

Grading has been rather harsh in that class though. So it might be like the midterm, where I thought I did well, but I still ended up being below average with something like a 65-ish%. :\ Should have sucked up to the TA a bit more. And offered chocolates. Maybe. ^^;;;

Now for math, tomorrow at 8 AM. Oh joy.

I think I'm going to drop ECE329.

It's one of the major classes I have to take, in order to progress onto other classes.

If I stay in EE, that is. If I switch to CE.. then, I don't know.

Why? Mostly because my first midterm grade means the highest I can get in that class, with perfects on the second midterm and final, and perfects on the remaining homework problems, will probably be around 78%. Assuming no curve.

But it's impossible for me to get a perfect. On anything. Time proven fact, yo. So my final grade would probably be worse, around 68%, maybe, if I'm lucky. I don't know.

I've e-mailed my professor, and the advisors for ECE. The drop deadline is this friday.

I really don't want to drop the class though... I dunno... somehow... it's been ingrained in my mind that giving up=failure.

I know it's not true. And that since I'm taking 16 hours, dropping won't hurt me that much. Although I'm not all too sure if there's a penalty involved with dropping, at least before friday. Dropping after friday = automatic F.

Yeah, I really hope I can stop posting depressing content soon.

I think I need to spend all of spring break at home, studying. I need to study Math, ece391... possibly ece448. Read ahead in physics.

Gods, what's wrong with me. My studying abilities have gotten progressively worse, I think. Focusing is often an issue. Remembering things usually doesn't happen at all. And exams scare the fucking bejebbers out of me. Although that's probably just due to low self-esteem.

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I went to someone's house (or rather, was driven there by said client) today. He had a pretty 20" new iMac. And... I don't know. It wasn't that he didn't understand computers... it's just... the way he looked at things... was different.

I think it's because Apple's made things so... userfriendly.. that people can't... no, don't.. have to learn. They just use. Until they run into problems, or something they don't understand. For example, he kept referring to his home folder as the "[username]" drive. I didn't try to correct him, though... really didn't want to confuse him further.

I don't know... it's these kinds of people who see error messages and just don't bother trying to read them. Kinda reminds me of... mem actually. When it comes to textbooks, actually. When I'm tired, and come across stuff I don't understand. Huh. Now that was an eyeopener. Kinda.

But yeah... Spent an hour and three-quarters at his house, showing him stuff, and running backups (which, interestingly, don't work when your external hard drive is formatted as FAT. Weird..). And then, I spent about 45 minutes at home, on the phone with him, walking him through the Tiger installation process.

Oh, and Apple support = stupid. Apparently, he called them. And they told him he should backup his home folder. So he tried copying it, which gave errors. And then he renamed it. Causing him to "lose" all of his data. -.-;;;; And Apple told him to find someone locally to fix his system.

Oh, and apparently he has issues with eudora and attachments. And the attachment he was having trouble with opened perfectly. And then wouldn't open in Word because his Office Test Drive time was up. So Apple told him to get Stuffit. Not download, but BUY. -.-;; The poor man didn't need to buy the $30 software - Stuffit Expander is Free! And zip files open automatically in MacOS X by default.

Alrighty, I'm going to bed. It's 3 am again. And e-mails have been sent, homework has been done, and textbooks have been read. So it's time for sleep. Rejoice.

my ECE391 (system's programming) MP2 is a race-car game. With bullets and barrels.

Our job involves fleshing out the game: adding upgrades, making images delete the old ones, etc. Most of the logic was completed for us. (probably.. a good, 80% of the code).

The whole point of the MP? To learn graphics card interfacing (Mode X! Hehehe) and writing drivers in linux.

'cept now I'm stuck on a graphics section and not too sure how to proceed. Ragh.

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Hm, question for those who might notice it more / use it more than I do:

Since the livejournal update page now autosaves, where does the data get saved? In your browser? Or on their server? 'cause if it was on their server.. then... whee, sticky note ability. Kinda. 'cept you can't really force an auto-save. (manual... save? Oh, wait, that's called Posting.)

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Eh, yeah, enough rambling. Complaint of the day: Yaoi_daily on livejournal has way too many posts. Daily_Yuri doesn't have enough. (no, really... 7 posts in a row from Yaoi_daily is slightly annoying...)

I'd unsubscribe, but occationally, there's nice gems~ (hehe, slightly attracted to shota, 'cause it's so damn CUTE, usually. Ignore all the sex and nakedness... And on occations, there's other nice, amusing ones, like the Wolves series some time back (not the real name - I'll look it up if anyone curious; I have it saved on my computer).)

Still, it does tend to push new friends posts off my friends page (of 50 entries~!) before I can get to them. Especially when I'm checking my friends page less than once a day, now and days. Life has gotten busy. So yeah, if you want my attention, e-mailing me would be better now. E-mail me. I miss long conversations over e-mail... wonder if I still have our conversation over e-mail saved somewhere, Sis.. that was... over the summer between middle school and high school, I think? So long ago...

I really need to finish registering for classes before it gets too late. -.-;;; Still not too sure what I'm taking though...

And yes, so the second set of hour exams are on us. Although this time, they're nicely spaced out at one per week, ECE210, CS225, and PHYS212. Annoyingly enough, CS225 didn't come out as well as I had hoped (the grade's a B-, but seriously should have been higher.) The problem there? Too much copying and pasting of old code, so I wasn't sure of syntax on the day of the exam, resulting in some made up crap, and a completely incorrect section, resulting in a loss of 'bout 15 points. Ow, yes. Stupid also. Frigging hell, this was supposed to be my best class. Although... I still prefer Java. And Perl.

ECE210... I'm going through and reviewing chapters 1-3 today, redoing all of the homework problems, plus the extra ones. I'm going to try and install the simulator thing to generate more problems and work on those. Hope the learning curve isn't too steep for that.

Another problem of mine is that I'm lazy. I hate... and I mean, I seriously despise memorizing things. Honestly, it's just stupid. If I just went and memorized some basic things, things that logically make sense, but still take too long to think out on the exams (or, god forbid, my brain freezes like it did for the first ECE exam, and refuses to think much at all)... life would be easier.

Physics. bleh, I've always hated the EM section of physics. I'll study more, but not for a while. This is the last exam of the three that are coming up.

Ice skating starts this week. Let's not break anything, kitty. I don't want to regret taking this class.

I'm not going to be on AIM much this weekend.

PC has been installed and it runs. I've sunk a few hours into the Shrine Maiden series (th07 and th09 - go look them up yourself). And I'm getting tired of it, which is good - I need to not want to play them, so studying can get done. Kinda like how I'm tired of Kill Monty, that kickass game that I've unlocked all difficulty levels for, and just about all other things, 'cept for Jen's various other uniforms. Too lazy to go do that, and can't seem to find it. ModelSim/Xilinx runs on the PC too, which is good. I need that. I need to install VNC as well, or figure out how to get it running so I can get in remotely, and free up 4 GB of Virtual PC WinXP hard drive space.

Chances are, this won't be the last post for this weekend, even though it should be. I do procrastinate on livejournal, but not for hours on end. 5 minutes here, 5 minutes there... no more than 30 minutes a day, I believe, on blogs in total.

I need to write some PHP scripts. Then I'll be able to add PHP to my resume. It's similar enough to perl - reading the PHP for dummies book, and about... 20% done. Good light reading. MySQL's next on the list.

I want to blow something up. Or kill people. Or at the very least, get to snap at someone and tell them to fuck off or die.