Brian's World

Winter Vacation

I got home from RPI last Friday after my last final, Physics 1. Overall I would say finals went well this semester, I didn’t find anything unbearably difficult. My highest grade on the Final Exam was in DSA, which I am moderately happy about. I was able to do well when it was most important, the other classes ranged between A’s and B’s… acceptable by my book.

The day after I came home, Saturday, Katie and I went down to New York City.. our second trip of this nature. Overall this trip went better, I like to think I was much better at navigating us from A to B than the previous trip, and overall I was much more stable. While I do not know what the future holds for me, I would not be opposed to living in a very populated city environment. Walking is something I enjoy, and a city facilitates lots of that.

I spent the majority of Sunday and Monday installing OS X 10.5 here, its pretty neat. I’m not a big mac fan, mainly because I enjoy the flexibility Windows offers, but there are some things a Mac is better at than a Windows box, so I’m using it for that. Right now I’m actually blogging from Mac, I’ve yet to unpack my windows desktop [primarily due to lack of desk space or KVM availability]. My mouse is broken, so clicking doesn’t work.. I like to blame it on the Mac for being stupid about mice.. buts thats probably not very fair.

Things are certainly busy around here over break. Between Digital Signage at RPI, cleaning up this Widget I’ve been working on [Dashcode is a great mac program btw], and today I just got called in on another project to work on a mockup/demo in ASP.net. I don’t know much ASP or .NET stuff, but tomorrow morning I’ll quickly figure out how do-able the project is and see where I go. I hate saying no to opportunities, especially moderately cool ones, but I am positive my mental health sometimes suffers.

Christmas is around the corner and I failed to make a list for my parents to shop for me, they have forewarned me failure is likely. I have a few ideas floating around out there, but I doubt they will find them in stores. I wish I was better at thinking up what I want. For example tonight I realized I need a Multimeter. I was fixing this TA3F [Mini XLR] to XLR cable that someone broke, and to verify/test the pinouts I was using a battery tester, some wires, and paper to hold the connection open. I’ve been doing this for several years now so I’m pretty good at it… but stupid Shure people.. you should not make the Red cable Negative, that is very counterintuitive to me… Black should be Negative, Red Positive, and the other one Ground. Please fix this in all of your cables. It only took me the better part of 2 hours to repair it, I can only hope it works in the morning for them.

I should be going to bed, I was hoping to konk off at 11:00 and wake up at 7:00, but I guess I’ll have to live with 6.2 hours of sleep for tomorrow.

Goodnight Moon