Odds and ends

Hmm, well I few odds and ends to talk about...

Red Sox lost the series last week (2 weeks ago, actually, I guess). Not a big baseball fan, but the big games are fun to watch and it's too bad we got so close.

Got to go to my first UNH hockey game of the season (on the same night that the Sox lost the series). I love UNH hockey (and as anyone who follows college hockey knows, UNH has a very good time, came in second nationally last year). I like going to games but always find that it's hard to be able to go a lot of the time. This year, my goal is to go to every game... so if I don't meet that goal, at least maybe I'll have gone to a lot of games :)

Working on two big projects for... the big AI project and the big Object Oriented Design project. The AI project proposal is due this week, and surprisingly (maybe), I'm not doing anything related to natural language representation or knowledge bases. I'm doing a scheduling program using constrain satisfaction techniques... I'm sure this particular problem has been done before, but it's still an interesting project to work on. The OO project is an assigned one we do in teams. I'm happy with my team so far... good hardworking people... and the project seems doable, possibly with a nervous breakdown figured in :)

And I realized I love Apple iTunes music service... downloaded it the day it was released for Windws (now where's the Linux version... ;-) ), and have already downloaded a few songs. I love being able to legally buy one song at a time, it's just what I want from the music industry :)

OK, that's it. Come on people, discuss something in the message board. Anything. :)

Finally done the GRE!

I'm in the best mood I've been in all semester right now, because I am DONE the GRE!!! I've studying for this since, like, August, and today was the day! I've been VERY stressed out for the last week or so (just ask anyone who's been around me... ;-) And today I was up at 5:45 to go take it at 8. Ugh.

But surprsingly, I felt less stressed this morning than I did for the last week, and felt confident while I was taking the test itself. And the final scores are (dum dum dum)...

620 verbal, 760 math.

Which I'm happy with. I reported scores to UNH, UMass-Amherst, MIT, and Cornell. And soo I'll have to actually apply to those school. But for now, I'm just happy to be done with the GRE. I'm doing work for right now, and then my girlfriend and I are going out for dinner to Maragaritas to celebrate (she also took it today and also did well, and was also very stressed).

Can I burn my flash cards now? :)

New toy!

My life revolves around my Palm computer.

I've had my Palm for over three years now. It's a Palm IIIxe... a truly great model, if you ask me. Some people think that Palms are just glorified organizers, but for some types of people, they can be incredibly useful -- myself included. I regard my IIIxe as the most useful thing I ever purchesed.

Sadly, the power button recently stopped working. This isn't an end-of-the-world problem, but the power button not working means that you can turn it on and see the last screen you were at (you can, however, use the function buttons to go straight to one of four applications), you can do a hard-reset, you can't turn on the backlight, and you can't explicitly turn it off (although you can just it left auto-turn off after 30 seconds). I decided that the IIIxe had servered it's purpose, and that this must be a sign that it's time for a new Palm computer.

Which is a huge decision for me, since my entire life is organized in my Palm. At first, I was looking only at models made by Palm, Inc., since they made my Palm IIIxe and I loved that. But, none of their current models jumped out at me. I wanted to stay with the Palm OS (I could go off now on why I absolutely hate the whole Pocket PC market, but won't), so I looked at Handspring (who only seems to make business-class Palms now), and Sony. Surprisingly, I found exactly what I was looking for at Sony.

A Sony Clie PEG SJ-33. It's full color, high-resolution, can play MP3s and videos, has 16MB of RAM built in, and accepts Sony Memory Sticks for expandable memory. Plus, all the features of my existing Palm. Such a cool device.

I went looking for one at the local Best Buy, Circuit City, and Staples, but no one had one in stock. So, I ordered one online from NewEgg. It was a very good experience -- ordered it on Saturday, got shipped Monday from California, and was here on Wednesday.

And I love it. That's all I can say, I really think it's a great, quality device. I never thought my IIIxe was outdated till I saw this new one. It's so amazing. Works great as a music player, videos look great, games look great, and the standard PDA functions are more responsive.

It's a great new toy :)

In other news, I went to my first Pi Mu Epsilon meeting, and intend on going to more in the future. I went to the UNH homecoming fireworks on Friday... the fireworks are one of my favorite events here, and it was sort of sad going to them for the last time. But the fireworks here are seriously some of the best I've ever seen. UNH goes all out for homecoming. And yesterday I went to Boston with my girlfriend and some friends. Had a great time, despite the rain.

Today is a day off ("Fall break"), but I've been doing homework all day. Now I'm off to take my well-deserved break. Phew.

One great weekend

Well, I finally had an exciting weekend... ;-)

I ended up being invited to the wedding for my girlfriend's cousin. It was down at Cape Cod, so I spent the entire weekend down there. Apparently it rained everywhere BUT Cape Cod ... all I know is that the wedding was beautiful, the weather was perfect, and Cape Cod (where I had never been before) is a great place. I got some great digital pictures of the wedding and some of just the surrounding area, but I won't post them here... you'll just have to go to Cape Cod yourself :) In addition to all that, my girlfriend's family was really great to me, and it was nice to feel accepted there even though I'm not actually family :)

Yup, a great weekend. Now I'm back at college and buried under work for a while. Actually, I went to the opera here at UNH last night and saw Don Giovanni. It was a good production, best I've seen here at UNH so far (it was done by an outside professional opera company). And tonight I'm going to the gym -- which we all know I must do in order to keep up my extreme buffness. But other than all that, I'm buried under work.

Hey, gotta relax and have fun too. :)