perturbed

Two more weeks and I'll be home in MI for spring break. I have a couple big homeworks due Monday and an ethics term paper to write before then, but fortunately no real major projects are left. We changed gears in quantum and we're doing basic perturbation theory now as a prep for what we'll be doing all next term. It's more interesting that what we were doing before. We're apparently almost done with EM waves in E&M, which is odd because we have barely done anything with it. That whole class has been rather silly and pointless.

The prospective grad students finally came through and it was a little weird being in the opposite position of what I went through last year. I went to the dinner (free food) but not the Q&A session or the Newport trip.

I finished reading Fire in the Valley, an epic tome about the history of the personal computer. My favorite chapter was about the start of the PC vs. Mac rivalry, because I like to see Macs get an ass-kicking. Unfortunately, despite the book's size it doesn't seem epic enough. A lot of time was spent talking about the Altair and then the book covers less and less specifics as more and more happens. There was no real connection for me to what I already know about computers. Even at the end of the book it seems like a "computer" is still some sort of newfangled toy. The book is also out of date already - it ends in 1997 when Microsoft just got sued over IE, it didn't even get to Windows 98. The book is also kind of badly organized, with chapters broken into many sub-chapters consisting of only a few pages, even though they mostly talk about the same thing. I can't stand when authors do that.

One of the big things about the early days of computers was the whole magazine scene. A lot of computer stuff was just advertised in the back of the magazines, and the articles talked about exactly what hardware can do and how to program it. I would say that modern magazines are not like this at all, but I recently found an interesting magazine called Make that tells you how to make stuff like windpower towers and a pulsejet-in-a-jar, and there are ads for circuitboards and stuff. One of the neat little things in the magazine was a way to make origami envelopes, which is pretty cool.

I haven't been playing any games since I got fed up with Black & White 2 and uninstalled it, which is just as well because it's been busy recently. Some tempting release dates are coming up though - Kingdom Hearts II, Ace Combat Zero and the Half-Life 2 expansion should all come out later in the spring. It's about time some good games got released.