regardless of warnings the future doesn't scare me at all

I think it's going to be another fairly manageable week, which is good. I had an E&M exam this morning, which could certainly have gone worse. I might have actually done really well if I'd known what the hell I was doing, which would have been a coup almost worthy of PHY410.

It's already the seventh week of the term. I think I'm mostly past the grueling stuff and classes are now just a matter of making up for some rough spots I had earlier. Today's department seminar was actually pretty sweet, a guy from NIST talking about quantum calorimetry to detect hard gamma rays to fingerprint "special nuclear material" for nuclear weapons inspectors. The results he showed were pretty stunning compared to methods in use right now.

I am currently banging around in Dreamweaver in preparation for my PSM seminar tomorrow. I have no intention of using it except that's what the prof has picked for us to use in our website-making module, so if I figure out how it works ahead of time I'll look as smart as I should. This is especially important because Dreamweaver sucks and isn't as good as FrontPage, which I actually use. So some advance prep is required. Street price for Dreamweaver is $400. I don't think I'd pay a nickel for this crap.

I got to thinking about how I made MSU's SOAR website, and realized that I had no idea where I put all the cool pictures of the telescope. I think I wiped them off the drives, but fortunately I back things up to CD - apparently weekly, back then. I did find the enormous original files I was looking for. Some of them are pretty stunning. I should get out and take some pictures somewhere - I've only broken out my camera once so far this year, to document the migration to a proper desk in my apartment.

webcomics

It seems like all my favorite webcomics are dying. PHD is starting to graduate people - first Mike (of all people), and maybe now Cecilia? Real Life is definitely past its prime, as well as Megatokyo. 8-bit Theatre is getting messed up so much if it doesn't die it will hardly be recognizable. Dilbert seems to have jumped the shark. It looks like even Ctrl-Alt-Del is going to start settling down and marrying people off. Perhaps the golden age of webcomics is over.

crushed, pt. II

Oregon's weather right now is fantastic. It feels like a spring day would in Michigan, and it's early February. The sun is out all day, the days are getting longer, and the temperature is high enough I didn't wear my jacket.

Today I harassed several distributor branch offices and eventually Dr Pepper / 7Up itself, and found that what I feared is true - there is no distributor of Crush in Oregon. DPSUHQ told me the nearest distributor was around Seattle. However, L swears she's seen Crush somewhere (not in town though). Incidentally enough, my parents sent me a couple six-packs of Crush that arrived today, so I related my troubles about how impossible it is to get Crush to the other PSMs while drinking Crush. Now they think I run some kind of Crush smuggling ring.

Tomorrow is Friday. I am more than ready for it to be the weekend. However, tomorrow has a greater distinction than that - I will be a quarter of the way through my Master's program. Already! I am probably going to Salem tomorrow to celebrate with things I can't get here in Corvallis - a Best Buy run and a Papiano's pizza. Then there will be much gaming. No exams to grade this weekend.

crushed

I still can't find Crush out here. I do have some that I shipped from Michigan, but it's being strictly rationed and is already about halfway gone. I went through most of the grocers in the Corvallis phone book last week and no one has it. I might start bothering stores to see if someone is willing to get some.

I have also been scouring the internet for Crush. There are a couple of websites you can order pop from but I am kind of iffy on that. It also seems like there might be places in Portland where I can get Crush. I wouldn't go to Portland just for that, but I haven't been to the science museum up there yet and if I can come back with a trunkload of Crush that's even better.

superbowl sunday

So yeah, it's been a long time since I updated. I haven't done anything particularly interesting since last time, just school. Grad school will rough you up. The end of this coming week marks halfway through the term though.

I did end up buying Civ4, but it's less exciting than I'd hoped. In particular the combat stinks, but at least they fixed the screwup from Civ3 where spearmen would beat tanks. I have pretty much thrashed Ace Combat 5 except for a couple of medals left to earn.

I'm grading exams this weekend. Circumstances led to my pulling double duty this time, but that should mean I get a really easy time later in the term when I'll probably need it more. I'm halfway done so far, I need to put another six or seven hours in today.

I'm getting some useful stuff done on the side though. I finally filled out a draft for my program of study, and I graded this week's prelabs which are a big help during the week. I seem to be having a little more trouble putting names to faces in my labs, and I forgot a couple of people that I had last term but aren't in my current labs. And then there was the dude who shaved his heavy beard, thus rendering himself completely unrecognizable to me, to his great amusement.

IE7 Beta is out, but I haven't used it yet. Not for lack of trying - it won't install because of something I did to Windows a couple months ago to free up drive space. I wish laptop hard drives were bigger. I hear IE7 is a good step up though.