In the morning I took care of the day’s business out at the plant. While I was there I paid a visit to my old department and visited with co-workers. It seems there have been some significant changes since I left.
Later in the morning, Mom and I picked up my grandparents and we all went shopping and had a nice lunch at Pizza Hut. I found a couple of nice long-sleeve t-shirts to take back with me. I surveyed the manga selection at Waldenbooks and I came away quite impressed. Despite the relatively small size of the actual store, they manage to maintain a much better selection than much larger bookstores such as Barnes & Noble and parent company Borders.
I still need a haircut.
I woke up to a rainy, overcast mornining sky which showed little promise of a pleasant day. This wouldn’t last though and I survived the day without great physical or psychological injury.
The databases test had a few surprises but nothing I couldn’t handle. Combinatorics began the first of many review sessions between now and the final exam. The professor has picks problems from the book and has students come to the blackboard to work them. It’s an old but effective trick. During VLSI we received promptly graded projects and not-so-promptly graded exams. I beat the curve by a comfortable margin but I wasn’t as close to the top as last time.
After classes I immediately returned home to pack for my trip and eat lunch. I watched an episode of “Ikkitousen” over Chef Boyardee. Neither was very filling.
The drive back to Dothan, Alabama, was uneventful. My parents have made a few subtle changes around the house in my absence, my room included.
In the evening I tried to set up a BitTorrent tracker so send a file to a friend in need. Unfortunately, I was never able to successfully get all of it working. The process is more involved than I initially thought; not impossible, but not as easy as some either.
Met with my CS group around noon. I will be doing the JDBC portion of our project which will basically involve coding all the portions that interface directly with the Oracle server. I’ll have to do most of this while I’m at home, though, and my productivity at home is notoriously low. I’ll get it done one way or another.
Titus and I finished off the fourth volume of .hack.
I spent much of the evening preparing for an exam in databases.
The site now has a dynamic 404 error page as opposed to the crummy static one. Hopefully, if I’m doing my job right you shouldn’t ever see it but it’s there if you ever need it.
The blog archive is now organized by month and year and all older blog entries from my PRISM page have been added to the archive.
I recoded the blog archive section to allow selection of a specific months of blog entries. I also figured out how to add a configuration file to point to a new PHP error document.
In the evening, Titus and I were reminiscing about the glory days of MUDs, BBSs, Gopher, and QBasic. Actually, it was more like me listening to him talk about them, but it was fun nevertheless. It prompted me to pull out some of my oldest backups and rummage through them. Unfortunately, I didn’t find much: some old warez, system files from my old Dell (now Freya), and a few documents from the ASMS era. These included some ugly graphics designs of mine and a throwback newspaper publication we did for a history class. I also located my long-lost PGP key, which I was sure were forever buried in the vast bit bin of time. I think it needs a password though and I can’t figure out what the hell I was thinking five years ago, much less remember a password to something I never used.
I prepared a frozen, ready-to-make chicken and pasta dish and we watched some .hack//SIGN courtesy of a recent DVD purchase. Both were pretty good. The most recent episodes of .hack have been quite engaging. Each focuses on one of the characters near Tsukasa who’s undergoing some kind of turning point or self-assessment. It makes for some of the best episodes so far and I have no reason to believe that future episodes will not improve even further. Unfortunately, it looks like we’ll have to wait until March to complete the series.
