every morning i walk towards the edge and throw little things off

It has now been one year since I graduated from MSU. I'm not sure how much progress I can say I've made except that I'm about halfway through my Master's degree now. I swear I'll be done with school after this degree. I'm only halfway through this silly term, but it's getting close to the end of the year. Unfortunately I have a damned quantum final on my birthday, but I have plans for that. I'm not one that suffers things like that quietly.

I've had my iPod for over a year now. I've managed to keep it fairly scratch-free, so it looks nice. It's gone a bit mental though. It keeps locking up when I'm skipping through songs rapidly and I have to reboot it repeatedly, and if I leave it hooked up to the computer it will claim to not have any playlists one it until I reboot it again. I also found out that something else I thought was a defect was actually a feature. As if to prove a point, my iPod decided to crash and lose all its songs, requiring a ponderous reloading of 16GB. I bought some new headphones for the iPod, a different brand this time, and it has a wider response range and I'm impressed with the results. Especially for $5.

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children finally came out on DVD. I have to say...the English dubbing didn't really work as well as I was hoping. Especially when they give Cid a Southern accent, and Cait Sith is Scottish? I think it was almost more confusing in English than it was in Japanese. The movie just doesn't click with me.

Corvallis has once again proved itself to be commercially useless, this time for restaurants. Eugene, which is as far away as Salem, has the nearest Chili's. Both cities have an Olive Garden. We don't even have a Denny's or IHOP (guess what, Salem again). There are no Big Boys in the state, and apparently National Coney Island is a Detroit thing. The nearest Cracker Barrel is in Idaho, 350 miles away, with the closest one after that in Montana. All the restaurants we have are either college food (pizza, Chinese, McDonald's) or uppity fancy places.

The new series of Top Gear started today! I really wish Honda would bring the Civic they have over here because it's a million times cooler than even our new Civics. They're going to review a C6 Corvette Z06 among other things, they don't usually review American cars but this one they can't just ignore. The new series looks awesome.

510 nm

Being the only sober person on St. Patrick's Day, I have some time on my hands. I finally got around to typing up all my quotes from Dr. Stetz. It was no small feat. So go check out my updated quote board.

Today was pretty good with the exception of my being vaguely unsettled all day. It was the last day of classes for the term, so that was good, and spring break is finally just a week away. I still think it is stupidly late. That makes me a hair short of a third of the way through my Master's degree, and 40% done with my classes. So I'm making progress, slowly. But I am starting to wonder what I'll be like on the flip side and if that's really what I should be shooting for. Some in-flight corrections may be in order.

I am also suffering from the engineering bug because I've just been saturated with physics not-practical stuff all term. If I were still at MSU I could just run off and take another civil engineering class to satisfy my need for balance, but finding time for it here would be much more difficult.

Michigan State got beaten in the NCAA tourney in the first round, which is very sad. March Madness is gone already. Now all I can hope for is that Duke and UNC will get beaten. (UNC because they beat us last year and I had to deal with those bastards while working on the SOAR telescope at MSU.)

Tomorrow I should start writing my HEP doomsday term paper for ethics. My presentation earlier this week about my topic went well. So well that it's probably hyped up to a level I can't possibly meet. Ah well.

For some reason I am still not big on video games at the moment. I played a little R&C3 earlier but put it away after quickly tiring of it. I tried to find a new book to read (I tore through Catch-22), but I couldn't find anything in Borders worth getting. I've kind of overdosed on Top Gear at the moment because I've been compiling a personal cheat sheet for the good episodes. And I'm too exhausted today to bother going out. So I have been trying to find things to do today to unwind. Hence the Dr. Stetz quotes. He's a funny guy.

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.

unquote

I went to go read my quote board and found that MSU has stolen my web space, so I will put up a mirror on my OSU web space when I get the chance.

I had a bizarre dream last night about having a food fight with Cerberus. I think that threw me off for the rest of the day. I have a lot of TA stuff to do tomorrow, hopefully it will go smoothly.

I have to do a stupid service project for my PSM seminar, but there is a chance that the other physics PSMs and I can use this to get hooked up with the motor pool's project to deploy biodiesel vehicles in the campus fleet. Apparently they want to get the biodiesel from on-campus sources...and they want to make the biodiesel facility solar-powered. That is really freaking cool. Lisa has to go talk with her motor pool contact about it though.

performance tests

I spent most of the day at my cousin's high school graduation open house. She is going to MSU, and I wish her well with that. I got to talk with the extended family about Oregon. Most of them have at least a general idea about my program, but me getting a summer TA position is new. I did attempt to explain my program once but only did a halfassed job of it. I always have to explain my program because it is so unique. I wish I had a brochure or something I could hand out. Another cousin was warning my parents that I would come back from Oregon with a goatee and a ponytail, but I told her that I am not the 'do as the Romans do' type. I got to ride back in the Solstice, which was fun. I watched All The President's Men with my family, I liked it.

I reinstalled Generals on Freeman and it runs about as well as it did on my old computer. I had some fun playing with that but now I am moving on to the final performance test, Half-Life 2. I didn't get around to installing it until now because it spans 5 CDs. We'll see how it runs. Freeman is certainly holding up as a replacement for Riemann Mk. II. The laptop is pretty anchored to my desk right now though - I've got my own mouse, better speakers and now the external hard drive. It's basically a docking station.

Only about 3 weeks until I leave for Oregon - time to start getting things together. I'm pretty nervous about everything but it will all be worth it.

Monday is my birthday!

avionics systems online

I finished Part II of Atlas Shrugged a little early, so I'm doing some cleanup and figuring out what I can get done.

The Hard Lessons concert is tomorrow! I would have gone and scoped out where the club is today, but traffic around here is really bad, doubly so because it's Memorial Day weekend. Besides, I was caught up in my reading.

I have been getting an inordinate amount of spam email. I think everyone at MSU has. Whatever shielded me from spam for 3.5 years is gone now. I would just switch over to Oregon State email but they won't let me set it up until the day I start working for them.

I want to get a laptop. I don't know what to get though. The sticking point is the hard drive. I am willing to get a laptop with a slower processor and less RAM than Riemann Mk. II, but I still need a ton of hard drive space. It doesn't look like most places are willing to let you get a system that is way out of balance like that, so I can either pay more than I want or find an alternate data storage solution. If I get a laptop I'm going to name it Freeman.

I got my diploma today, so I'm official done dealing with MSU.

aligning sensor matrix

I've been graduated for about three weeks now. I'm not sure what to think about MSU now. I beat it. I won. I graduated - with honors, even. I am fairly indifferent to MSU right now though. I am not sobbing like everyone else is about how my carefree undergrad days are over. It is time to move on, there is no reason to look back. I'm recovering and moving on. For me, Oregon State is not just about getting another piece of paper. It's about leaving behind what didn't work, taking what does, and using it as the foundation for the next phase of my life.

I've been up to East Lansing a couple times this week. The weather was very nice, the campus is very green again, and it is much quieter with no one else around. I think that's how I want to remember it.

One more chapter of Atlas Shrugged, then it's bedtime.