The class that was supposed to be my easy class has turned out to be obnoxiously difficult, or rather tedious. I dedicated the entire day to working on our CS project and there’s still a good bit more work to do. The task of populating test data into the database has also fallen upon me, in addition to my original task of coding the backend Oracle interface. I used a utility called SQL-Loader to do the grunt-work. It utilizes a control configuration file to load data from a plain text file in some delimited format. It still required a lot of time and effort on my part, which mostly involved honoring integrity constraints and make adjustments to the data set.
At one point I did take a break to get some food and watch the first episode of FLCL (pronounced Fooly Cooly or Furi Kuri). It’s wacky in the best sort of way and has some cool punk rock music.
For all intents and purposes, my Thanksgiving break ended today. I packed up the car to make the return trip to Atlanta. Before I left, though, we discovered that my car indeed does have a working security system that I unwittingly triggered somehow. I’ve had the car for four or five years now and I’ve never seen or heard the security system until today. Regardless, it worked a little too well and the car subsequently refused to start. In the end, it took some bizarre ritual to set everything back to normal.
I spent most of the evening working on my CS project and sending correspondence to various members of my group. Appreciable progress was made but I’m not as far along as I would like to be. Tomorrow will be more of the same.
The day after Thanksgiving is when the holiday shopping season officially begins. Keeping with this theme, Mom and I hit a few of the after-Thanksgiving sales.
I took advantage of a Buy X, Get Y Free-type sale at Waldenbooks and stocked up on manga to keep me occupied a little bit longer. While I was trying to decide on a purchase, I noticed that a larger number of mangas are published in the traditional Western left-to-right format than I had previously realized. I’m guessing that older releases are more likely to be left-to-right than newer releases and that the format stays the same throughout a series. Still, I wonder what the rationale is behind choosing one format over the other. Is it determined by the publisher or the author?
We ate lunch at Hot’s Deli, my favorite stop for delicious subs. Pretty much all their stuff is oven-baked and made to order. It’s really good. I watched X2: X-Men United on DVD with my parents in the evening. I don’t think they had previously seen it.
I gave my car a full wash and wax with a little help from my dad. Afterward, I took it out for a spin down the highway. There was more traffic than I would have liked so I couldn’t really enjoy the trip to its fullest.
My grandparents came over in the early afternoon and we all had a nice Thanksgiving dinner with pork loin roast, broccoli au gratin, Thanksgiving potatoes, and some triple-citris cheesecake for dessert.
I finally started in earnest on the final part of our CS project. I’ve only prototyped all the functions so far and it was a chore just to get it to compile. It seems I’m a bit rusty.
I went to get my hair cut as the first order of the day. It didn’t take long at all, which is good because I don’t like to sit still. I did more shopping around town with Mom and we had a light lunch at the local Longhorn. I had a salad and baked potato; both were good.
Over the course of the afternoon I read an entire volume of “Chobits” manga and began the process of reinstalling Windows on my parents’ computer. I got another license for myself through my department at school so I transfered control of my retail copy of XP to my parents. I anticipated having to make a call to activate Windows, what with it being formerly activated on my computer, but I had no such trouble. Come to think of it, I didn’t have any trouble with Office either when I reinstalled that on my machine recently.
