Big changes happened at work last week. Quite a few people lost their job due to promises not kept, or at least that's what we were told. Alot of other people were moved to other parts of the company. The manager for my group was moved to another part of the company and our Oracle DBA was let go. This all basically means more work for everyone who's left, which thanfully includes me.
The SDSL modem started having some annoying issues last friday and, unfortunately, it wasn't under warranty. Ended up having to replace the stupid thing because it was getting errors at 768k. The new one has a warranty of one year though so hopefully everything will be good, havn't had any problems yet at least.
Had a very cool cook-out on Memorial Day (this past Monday). Picked up some patio furniture over the weekend for real cheap (60"x60" table and 8 chairs for under $300) and that worked out very well. Also got to use my new grill (finally). The grill worked out very nicely and I managed to cook up some burgers and chicken without killing anyone. I expect to be using the grill more in the future, it's pretty fun to grill up burgers and stuff.
My second set of summer classes have started and I'm afriad they're going to be rather evil. The books for the classes cost around $100 new, each. It appears that there's going to be a fair bit of calculus used in each of the classes as well. We went over set theory in the probability class which was pretty simple but I'm afraid it's just a trick to lull us into thinking the class is easy. I hate it when they do that.

Taking classes at GMU this summer and they just started today, exactly a week after the last of my finals for Spring semester. Gee, what a nice long break that was. :) It was fun, went to a wedding over the weekend for my friend Karen's sister Sharon. Also got to spend yesterday mostly just hanging around at my gf's house not having to worry about any school junk which was nice.
Oh, and my summer school schedule is up on my projects page if anyone is curious.

I managed to pull a B- in calc3! What's better, that was my lowest grade this semester! I got an A- in CS450 (Database), a B in CS483 (Algorithms) and a B in CS421 (Software Engineering)! Talk about very cool. :) This, of course, also means I will be getting a ton of money back from work in my next paycheck or so. I've been thinking about what to spend it on and have been very tempted by the SunFire V100. Talk about a nice cheap ($995!) Sparc box. They're cheap enough that even CDW is selling them, which is probably where I'd end up buying it from. Other possibilities are a bunch of rackmount cases for the various machines in my house. Even for that, pretty cheap, rackmount case we're talking $700 for 5 of them, equipped how I would want them. Now, I suppose if I wanted to spend all of the money I'm getting back for school on computer junk I could do both... I guess that's something I'll have to think about, that would certainly be *very* nice, but wouldn't help me pay off my CC or anything else useful. Of course, I could just pay off more of my CC from my normal funds this month too.

Star Wars, Episode 2: Attack of the Clones. I thought it was pretty decent. It certainly could have been better and it reminded me a little of certain recent Robert Jordan books where amazingly little really moved forward after a great many pages. Even so though, I enjoyed it and will probably see it again before it's out of theatres, maybe even in a better sitting position than the house-left side of the very first row. I still need to see Spiderman since I've heard good things about it. SW:EP2 definitely set things up in an interesting way for the Episode 3. I hope they do a really good job with it and tie everything together well. Unfortunately my concern is that SW:EP3 is going to feel like a bunch of very loose ends being tied together with duct tape and bubblegum. I guess we'll have to see. Until then we have The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers to look forward to showing up this winter which should be very cool.

Finally finished with GMU and classes for this semester. Summer semester for me starts on Monday. Thankfully that class is just this Astronomy lab thing I have to do and is only one credit. The more annoying classes are going to be the OR481 and the STAT344 classes. OR481 is Numerical Methods and STAT344 is Probability and Statistics. I've also registered to take a bunch of classes in the fall. Hopefully in a year I'll have my degree though.

Okay, the new Matrox Parhelia512 card looks absolutely awesome. There's a pretty detailed Review of it out that just makes me drool. I've been thinking about getting a new card for a while (or a couple of them) to support the 3 21" monitors I picked up but I havn't really found anything I really like. I think that might have changed with this very, very, very cool card. So, in addition to buying that card soon I think I may be getting a desk very shortly and moving around alot of stuff in my basement possibly. Have lots of ideas in my head and little money or time to do things about them.

Through much insanity I managed to get all of my projects finished and turned in. Still have two finals on Monday which are going to suck (well, mainly the calc3 one) but at least that's all I have. I've been trying to study for it this week and havn't been doing a very good job of it. Hopefully I'll be able to get more serious about it this weekend and on Monday. My software engineering final probably won't be too bad, I managed to ace the midterm and I think the project turned out pretty well. Definitely been a pretty rough semester overall though I think, and these last two weeks have been downright hellish. I think my body is starting to tell me that I really do suck for all of this. :)

Okay, you see the timestamp, yes, I'm still up. This weekend has been totally insane. I'm working on printing out and putting together my algorithms project. Then I have to print out my Software Engineering project. Hopefully someone will print out the junk for my database project. I've got 9 more hours on my algorithms project, thankfully I don't believe I'll need them. I've got about 16 hours for my software engineering project but that's basically done except for being printed. Around 40 hours till my database presentation, hopefully I'll be able to get some sleep before it. Not planning on sleeping tonight, don't want to sleep past noon or something and miss the deadline for my algorithms project. Does mean I'm gonna be a little groggy most of the day tommorow but oh well, I did it last week, I'll survive it this week. Anyhow, the basic jist of it all is that school is kicking my ass right now and I might be willing to speak to you again after my finals are all done (5/13/02) and I get some serious sleep.

Woke up at about 4:30am this morning. Showered, got dressed, grabbed all the stuff I needed and jumped into the car around 5am. Drove 30 minutes or so west to Manassas, my gf's house specifically. Stood outside the door quietly knocking on it trying to get her dad to wake up and let me in (without waking my gf up). He had promised to unlock the door at around 5:30am but apparently had a late night. He let me in (finally) around 5:50am, only was out there for about 15 minutes, not too bad. I haul all my junk into the kitchen and start slicing up the strawberries into a bowl (and washing them). Once I get that done I hunt around for a mixing bowl, not finding one I just grab a pot and throw stuff in there and mix it up. Then I slap the stuff down on to a cookie sheet and let it bake. Pull out the biscuit-like things, slice 'em open and stuff them with strawberry slices. Then I slap some cool whip on them and put on some more strawberries, tada! strawberry shortcakes! I take them downstairs to my gf's room and open the door and wake her up w/ breakfast in bed, pretty slick, eh? Okay, while things were baking upstairs I also took the really big bear I bought for her and put it at the top of the stairs (her room is in the basement) and put its arms out and place in its little hands a jewelry box with an emerald and diamond necklace in it. After we ate the strawberry shortcakes I head upstairs in front of her and she comes up after me and spots the bear and is suprised yet again. ;) Mwahahhahaa, it all rocked. I drove her to work this morning and then drove to work myself (30 minutes east, not too much traffic, amazingly). I'm about to head off to pick her up from work for lunch at noon and then I'll head back to my work, do some more stuff, and pick her up from work this afternoon (she loaned her car to her brother for about a week).

Oh, yeah, it's her birthday. ;)