Linkstew

I slept for three hours off and on this morning before finishing the term paper. I wasn't particularly thrilled with the final result, because I basically grabbed the first bits of "data" to prove my point that was remotely in the neighborhood -- I didn't have time to find the proper supporting evidence I should have dredged up weeks ago.

I really liked the topic, and I wish I had had more time to work on the paper. And by "more time," I mean I don't mean I wish I'd just had "another week." Rather, I specifically wish that given what I just wrote, I wish I had a week to revise it. But it's not like I'm going to mess with that now.

Anyway, with the completion of that term paper, I just turned in the last assignment of my undergraduate career. All that's left now are two finals. And those are more than a week away, so they're the least of my worries.

Something more interesting later, perhaps. I might be mostly done, but that doesn't mean that I don't have anything I need to do.

So I got my Linguistics homework back in section on Thursday, and it turns out that I was worrying needlessly. I got a check plus (on a plus, check plus, check, check minus, minus scale... which makes a check plus about equivalent of a B+/A-, though they claim if I got a check plus on every assignment I'd get an A overall.)

What amuses me, though, and what makes this even worth comment at all, is that at the end of my assignment, my GSI wrote the following note:

Good job. Some really good concrete examples of evidence for your criteria (though I'd like to see even more).

This made me both groan and laugh, because I did have more evidence... I just frantically cut it out to make my answers fit within the page limit. Heh. D'oh!

Yesterday my first homework assignment of the semester was due in my Linguistics class, but things certainly could have gone smoother.

Though I met with a group of classmates on Sunday afternoon to discuss the assignment, and knew what I was going to write, I didn't actually start typing up my responses until it was so late Monday evening that it was very nearly Tuesday.

All along I knew there was a 5 page limit on how long our submissions could be, but I honestly didn't think there'd be a problem. I merrily tapped out my responses, and by the time I finished around 6:30 am (What can I say, I'm easily distracted! At 4 am, for example, I decided I wanted some new playlists for my iPod and spent an hour playing with that...), I had about 4.9 pages.

"Perfect," I thought.

However, I was a little tired to proof-read my submission, and because the assignment was due at 11 am sharp, I decided to print a copy and go to bed, and proof-read and print again if I had time in the morning.

But when I grabbed the printed pages from the printer, something looked funny. I looked closer, and realized that it was single spaced.

I'd written 5 pages single spaced for an assignment with a length limit of 5 pages double spaced.

You do the math.

I never write papers in Word. Normally I use a LaTeX template that I've developed over the years to write papers with. That template defines all of my fonts and spacing and I just have to fill in the paragraphs and TeX does the rest for me. But for some reason, when I started this assignment, I thought using Word would be a good idea. It never occurred to me that Word was a WYSIWYG editor beyond the part where I was using it to visually determine how many pages I'd written. The last time I used a WYSYWYG editor to write a paper, I was in High School.

So it was still 6:30 am, and I was still too tired to care, so I tossed the single spaced copy in my backpback just in case and went to bed. I woke up at 9 am, and spent the next hour and a half doing my damndest, and the best I could manage was 5 pages at 1.5 space with an 11 point font.

I decided that that would have to do, printed again, and headed off to class. I walked into the lecture hall and up to the podium where the assignments were being stacked, and saw that Professor Lakoff was looking at the top paper on the stack. In fact, it looked like he was reading it. I hesitated about dropping my paper onto the pile, and he sensed my presence and looked up at me.

I quickly lowered my eyes and dropped my paper onto the pile and took a seat near the back.

I hesitated not because I was worried about Lakoff reading what I'd written, but because the print on my assignment was so much denser than that paper that was on the top of the stack. If I'd dropped my paper in front of his nose, the contrast in the density of the text would have been immediately obvious. He would have to be blind not to notice that my paper wasn't double spaced and that my font was smaller.

Pardon the silence, but last night, when I had intended to be doing my 188 homework, I suddenly got mysteriously sick, and huddled under my covers alternately shivering and sweating. And I stayed there, with a wicked headache and drinking water and too cold and too hot and feverish, for the better part of 18 hours.

And so not only did I not work on my 188 homework, but I missed my first folklore lecture all semester. Let alone was I feeling up to updating the sites.

I feel like I just lost a day. I effectively did. Though I've been up since 2 today, I've just been sitting in bed in a daze.

But tonight, despite a still lingering headache and fever, I've got to do the 188 homework.

The upshot of all this is that I just found out that the 188 midterm got pushed back from this Friday to next Wednesday. Woohoo!

So uh, more later, when I'm not busy and delirious.

Not only am I suffering writers block, but apparently I'm also kind of busy.

1. cs 170 homework due Wednesday at 4pm.
2. anthro 160 midterm Thursday at 2pm.
3. cs 9e assignments due Friday afternoon.
4. cs 170 homework due next Monday at 4pm.
5. cs 188 homework due next Wednesday at 10 am.
6. cs 188 midterm next Friday at 10 am.
7. more cs 9e assignments and quizzes next friday afternoon.
8. cs 170 homework due next next Monday...

Basically, I've got at least one thing due every other day for the next two weeks (and I haven't even looked beyond that, so who know's what's lurking out there...), not even counting work.

And yet, looking at me right now, you'd never know it. It's almost 2 am and I haven't started the 170 that's due in 14 hours. Though to my credit, I have started studying for the folklore midterm, but that's not worth much, since I've already been to every lecture in the class, and I've already done about half the reading.

I've been going through this semester with my eyes closed, doing as little as possible to get by. I've been lethargic and apathetic and unmotivated and generally lazy. And this applies to not only school, but also to work, and even to the sites.

Translation: I now have more excuses than just "I'm a lazy bum" for not writing a good update.

In a vain effort to do anything but think after finishing turning in my compiler last night, I just spent four hours cleaning up my apartment. I scrubbed the kitchen and bathroom counters, cleaned off the surface of the stove, swept the floor, cleaned the sinks, and even worked at the mold on my bathroom ceiling a little, because nothing has been done about any of that in like, four or five months. I've just been too busy to think about it. But now, with my compiler turned in, all I've got left this semester is a homework assignment and four finals. Unless we decide to try to write an optimizing compiler... But at the moment, the thought sends me into a fit of mad laughter.

I'm sitting here working on my Linguistics homework, and I was faced with the question of "Is it strange that Mixtec (A central american language) borrowed the spanish word for garlic?" And this page tells me more than I ever needed to know about garlic. Notably, by telling me that Garlic came from Europe, more or less, this page tells me that it's perfectly natural for Mixtec to have borrowed the Spanish word for Garlic. There's also other neat Garlic trivia, like it's mythological significance in ancient Greece...

Mixtec borrowing the spanish word for white, on the other hand, is just plain weird.

I've had better weeks in every possible way. This is the sort of week that I should probably go out and get drunk over, especially now that I'm 21 and all... but I won't, because it's too much effort.

Next time I have a test right after spring break, remind me to plan on my grandmommy dying... because then I would have known to study for my midterm after spring break before spring break. As it was, I didn't get to start studying until 12 hours before the midterm, and even then, my book was MIA, so I couldn't study very well. All things considered, the 58% I got on that midterm could have been worse -- For example, I was a whole 8% above the lowest score on the test!

Oh, and next time I'm taking a linguistics class, remind me to consider enrolling in that "How to take a two hour linguistics test in one hour" course they advertise on Sproul... Because no one finished today's linguistics midterm early. I certainly felt less than stellar about my performance on the test, and Kevin said he felt about the same way. So I shouldn't feel too bad, because even if I'd been totally prepared, I would have still needed a lot more time to do well on the test.

I've never been so relieved by a spring break. Last night at around 11:50 we declared our CS project done, but we lost a few minutes when cvs had some trouble synchronizing our files. When we tried to submit, we were told we didn't have "good.output" and "bad.output," and by the time we fixed it, it was after midnight, so the project was automatically an hour late. So I spent another 45 minutes testing things, and just before I was about to submit again, I found several bugs. But at that point I wasn't about to try to fix them, and just turned it in.

So I got home at about 1 in the morning, finished reading my book about Navajo Code Talkers in World War II at about 4 am, got up at around 10, and went to the office with the intention of doing my Linguistics homework before starting my paper. But then a friend of mine in the class pointed out that our lowest Ling homework grade gets dropped. So I wrote my paper and turned it in at 4:55. Not too bad, all things considered.

But now I'm exhausted. I'm going to go home and sleep so I can get up early, come to the office, and wait patiently for Mac OS X to arrive.

My term paper is now officially late, and I'm still plugging away on my CS project. I gave up on trying to get my term paper done on time yesterday when I tried to get a journal article to reference and found out that the volume I wanted was only available through the Bancroft Library.

Before I go any further, there are two important points you should know. First, I was trying to find Volume 72 of the New Mexico Historical Review, which was published in 1997, and Second, the Bancroft Library deals in rare and valuable books. Further, volumes 1 through 71 of the New Mexico Historicla Review were available in the main stacks, available for anyone to defile at their leisure. To add insult to injury, they didn't even have the book on campus -- they had to airlift the book in from their armed fortress order the book from NRLF. So there was no way I'd be able to see the article before today at 3, when the book was scheduled to be delived. My term was due at 3:30 today. So instead of spreading myself thin today trying to finish two projects, I resigned myself to doing a good job on the cs project and turning in the term paper by Friday at 5, which is the first late deadline.

Of course, when I went to Bancroft today at 3 to view the book, it took them an hour and a half to bring it to me. So I sat there, bored out of my mind, because they wouldn't let me bring in my backpack or pens or anything remotely interesting, so that I couldn't damage their rare books. Oh well, so much for dedicating the whole day to the cs project.

There's still the question of why a book released in 1997 was considered a "rare book" though. And it's still my fault for not starting sooner.

As I sat in the office working on my CS project with my partner Ben (which is more confusing than you can imagine), I mentioned that not only do I have 48 hours to finish this project, but I also had less than that much time to hopefully finish a term paper and a cs homework assignment. That's when three people in the office piped in and said "Which project is this? The semantic analyzer? That took me two days to debug." Sheesh, thanks for the encouragement, guys.

But for once it's not my procrastination which has got me in this bind -- it's that I had completely too much to do and too little time to do it in. The last couple of weeks I was completing a huge project for work which went live monday morning. My top priority is the cs project, though, because my partner is counting on me for that. I'll bite the bullet and turn in my term paper late if that's what it takes to finish the cs project, even though the term paper is a larger percentage of my history of technology grade than the project is my cs grade.

I slept an hour last night. I started programming and I was being super productive, and I didn't want to let that productivity go to waste, so I just didn't go to bed. But then I had to wake up and do my homework, and then give a demo for work, and then class, and then more work. But that's left me bleary eyed as I sit here in the office on a Friday night. I'm too lazy to go home, and yet my productivity has failed out of exhaustion.

Oh, and I had a midterm yesterday. It was okay. I thought I did poorly on a test in this class earlier in the semester, but I did really well, so I'm totally unsure how to feel about the midterm yesterday.

On deck this weekend? Lots more programming. The project is due to be completed soon, though. Then I have a term paper and a class programming project due, and then I'm free for spring break. Only two weeks! I can make it! Hooha!