I went to get chinese for lunch today and got the fortune: “Pleasant days lie ahead” or some such. Strangely, I just aced an exam I did almost no preparation for, got a call from amagdalyn with very happy news (which I’m sure she’ll extole upon you later), and am the recipient of a free iTunes song in my first bottle of Pepsi in a long time. To top it off, I have only a small pile of work and have actually been productive already today. I feel like going out and having a beer to celebrate the good fortune.

The weekend was fun. Friday night was full of amagdalyn - we went to see American Splendor, which was an excellent film that I would suggest to anyone. It definitely included many oscar-quality elements - I would almost suggest that it get best actor for Paul Giamatti - he really got the mannerisms down and played the part well. After that was bowling with the CS graduate students and prospective students. I bowled a 151, which is better than I’ve done in a long time. I wonder if I could join a league somewhere or something. The group went out to Sallys (which was surprisingly non-smoky) for drinks afterwards. Amy got reasonably drunk.

Saturday was a lazy day for me. Stayed in and played lots of web games. I’m not too great at any of them, unfortunately. Sunday was productive. Of a list of items, more than half got completed. Had IHOP for breakfast/lunch, went out and did some errands (including getting some pocky from united noodle, which is surprisingly close to my apartment). Got lots of Girl Scout cookies. Went to watch adult swim at silvrayn’s place and played some Carcasonne there.

Weekends are entirely too short. I need a 3-day weekend built into my schedule. I may be able to pull it off next year. Isn’t college great? This week doesn’t look too busy - just a “normal” schedule.

Still going to try a non-“this is what I did today!” post sometime later this week.

Questions of the day: What one movie have you seen on video/DVD that you would want to see in the theater? Why did you miss it in the theater the first time? Why do you think it would be better on the big screen (as opposed to the small screen)? (I could have made this a poll, but this way is easier anyway and more free-form)

Well, it’s not quite “tomorrow” from my last update. I really mean to update this more often, but it’s turning into a “what did jamuraa do today” type of thing, and I don’t think that’s all that interesting, myself.

Monday was fairly normal. I surprisingly didn’t fall asleep in class, even though the professor was going over material that he had already covered the day before. I had a Mello Yello during the class, which may have helped a little. Also, I was attempting to think of how the statistics would actually apply to my work - which was an interesting exercise because robotics and statistics aren’t really peas in a pod, but they are used together a lot. Mostly for things like covariance testing. Monday night was fairly uneventful.

Tuesday I surprisingly didn’t go to sleep in my Distributed class. It could have been because the material was interesting, nbut it was more likely because I got enough sleep on Monday. Watched some of the caucuses tuesday night, I was happy that Kucinich made a strong showing in MN.

Wednesday was a short day due to evening festivities with amagdalyn, so I didn’t get much of anything done at work except for normal, run-of-the mill stuff. Wednesday night was a planned fun evening with Amy - ordered chinese, had dinner and generally enjoyed the company of each other. Went for DQ afterward because even though it was freezing, earlier in the week it was feeling like spring, and time for ice cream again.

Yesterday was normal, if you can call any Thursday that I have normal. I will say one thing, I will most likely never volunteer for a 8am to 9pm day ever again. amagdalyn was a sweetie and picked me up from work at 9 when the sky was impending doom upon us all. Luckily it didn’t start until after.

This weekend isn’t quite full yet, although tonight is pretty taken. American Splendor is playing on campus in the West Bank Auditorium for free, which will be watched after free burritos (Chipotle rules, they have the niftiest promotions). Anyway, this went way too long. Time for donuts.

Sorry for no updates over the weekend, not even a rant or two. I really need to have one bubble up sometime soon, otherwise I’ll be stuck with just updating with the status of my life, and we all know how boring that is.

Last Thursday (yes, it’s been that long since I updated), was a nice day. I drove in as usual and got a decent spot in the ramp, and was early enough that I could stop and check my e-mail. The lab sections were going over review for the test on the next day, so for the first hour of the day I got to do actual work for the class, which means grading. Most of the students are doing fairly well in the class, but some of them just don’t get it. I really wish those students would come into class. I got to go over the test they just took in the second hour of the lab, which I enjoyed greatly as I enjoy all teaching. I really love teaching new material more though. In class, there was a guest lecturer, which wasn’t too interesting.

Friday was office hours, which a few people showed up to, but not many. I expected more, since they all should have had questions about the test that they were taking later that day. After that, Statistics and 15 minutes of Coffee hour before I went to a visiting speaker to make up for the class that I missed last Monday. The speaker was excellent, and presented the material very well. I really think he would be a great addition to the faculty here. His research was very impressive. Later in the day was proctoring the test, which, as always, is very boring.

Friday night I took amagdalyn out to eat at Applebees (yummy hot wings) - I was very hungry at that point, having had a total of like, 3 donuts intake the whole day. After that we went back to my place and attempted to watch Twelve Kingdoms, one of my favorite anime ever. Amy fell asleep as she is apt to when watching movies late at night. The bed was really too small for the both of us, and we gave up on watching the show pretty early that night, so I had a hard time sleeping. I really didn’t care much though.

Saturday I had to go to the U in order to grade the tests from Friday. It took 4 people 3 hours, but we got them all graded and added up. Most of the class did fairly well, but there were the ones that did badly. I was glad to get it out of the way. The rest of the day was lazy but gorgeous! Such wonderful weather coaxed us to walk down Nicollet for lunch. We ended up stopping at the Jasmine Deli and had some wonderful soup and Papaya Salad. It got a bit busy while we were eating, and I was glad to have the waitress tell us how the food is meant to be eaten – I always worry about doing things the completely wrong way at restaurants. After supper I was on a quest for pocky, so we walked through a couple of the international markets to no avail.

Sunday was a lazy day as well. Ended up getting up around 2pm. After that it was just a adventure in killing time - I watched a bit of Mallrats because I wasn’t sure if I had seen it or not (I had). Another great day weather-wise, so we walked to Chipotle, which took an amazingly short amount of time compared to what we thought. We met with sugarbeet there, who graciously gave us a ride back. Watched Peter Jackson take home tons of Oscars.

This is getting way too long, so I guess I’ll write about yesterday, tomorrow. Time to get some work done!

Well, yesterday was Wedndsday again. Class in the morning - in which I learned I missed something semi-important on Monday, so I had to read the stuff from the book instead. This isn’t such a bad thing, but it just makes my day longer on thursday.

Last night I went over to amagdalyn’s place again and we watched Millenium Actress, another Satoshi Kon movie. The premise was interesting and the style was somewhat reminiscent of his first movie, Perfect Blue. It seemed like this one was more polished, however. Amy slept through part of it again, but it wasn’t the important part this time, so I think she still got the full effect. There was a 40 minute “making of” special on the DVD, they pointed out some of the stuff that you don’t usually notice in the movie, like the backgrounds and how they’re different.

Today was the long thursday again. It was a review session for the test that the class has tomorrow, so it wasn’t as busy at all as before - they had an hour of a practice test to take which made the first half easy to do other things in. I still have about 10 emails to grade from the last lab, which should be finished tomorrow sometime. After that, it’s the test grading on Saturday (hooray).

I kept dozing off in my mid-day class again. This is beginning to become a problem that I need to find a solution for. I get to go to a talk on Learning Temporal Logic because of the class that I missed on monday. I think this one may actually be more exciting - I hope I don’t fall asleep again, it’s that same time of day.

Today is the day after yesterday, and before tomorrow.

Okay, it’s been since friday since my last update, and the weekend was busy, so this may get a little long.

Friday was fairly uneventful at school, with a slightly busier office hour because the lab for class was very long and some people didn’t even get one step done. Friday night was free beer and wine thanks to GAPSA at the union on campus. Chatting with everyone I don’t get to see too often (including peaches_phd) from the lab was nice. After that, excellent jambalaya was to be had at silvrayn’s place along with a bit of DDR and fun drinking games. A couple of the non-normal crowd came along, which made the night more interesting (not that it wasn’t bound to be interesting to begin with). Alas, I planned on driving home, so I couldn’t get too drunk.

Saturday and Sunday were happily full of amagdalyn, th0rny and Jared. We went to the science museum, which has a pretty cool robot exhibit right now, and of course many other cool exhibits. I can’t help but feel like a kid when I go - it’s just too much fun. Good breakfast at Triple Rock was had.

Sunday night I went with amagdalyn to Tokyo Godfathers, Satoshi Kon’s most recent work. It was very good, one of the best anime movies I have ever seen. There were funny and touching parts, and parts that ended up funny and sad at the same time, which is hard to pull off. Lots of coincidences happen, which makes the whole sequence kind of unlikely unless you believe in a higher power or suspend your disbelief something serious.

Slept in on Monday, missing a colloquium class and statistics. I attempted to get some lab work done, but was waylayed by cookies and lemonade, a bunch of email submissions to grade, and various other things.

Tuesday was more productive, but unknown forces kept me from doing any of the real work that I attempted to do. Almost fell asleep in class again. I’m wondering if it’s just the room or something that’s keeping me asleep. I don’t seem to have issues staying awake in Statistics anymore (we are covering new material now however). I should doodle some more, or come up with a project when I’m bored. Unfortunately, that class has a total of 6 students in the room, so I think it will be fairly obvious if I’m just killing time on something else.

Last night was the LJ Meetup. A very different crowd showed up than last time - I think there were a total of 2 people who have shown up to both I went to, me included. Met raeosunshine, wulfsbane, ashedreyvin (who I’m sure is an anime watcher as well, the way she knows how to pronounce japanese), new_iconoclast, h2bhc, and a few others I can’t remember or didn’t catch the LJ names of.

Okay, that was way long. I’ll post about today/tonight tomorrow, I guess. I have a rant or two bubbling up in my head as well, I’m sure it’ll show up soon.

jwendl

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When was the last time you…

1. …went to the doctor? Last time I was sick enough - probably more than 4 years ago.

2. …went to the dentist? 2 months ago

3. …filled your gas tank? 2 weeks ago

4. …got enough sleep? last weekend

5. …backed up your computer? the whole thing? never (crossing my fingers) I backup various important stuff (finances, tax records, etc) every month or so. (I should do that now)

Monday is a fairly quiet day for me at school, so I decided to waste a ton of time making my journal look like my homepage, in the hopes of merging them into one this weekend. If only I could get the comments pages to look right. I’m willing to let basically anyone use this new style that I made (I actually modified “A sturdy gesture” heavily). All in all, I’m pretty happy with the new page. I have a couple things that I still want to fix, like putting a navigation link at the bottom of the page, and some more links to facilitate things like editing entries.

Monday night I went to amagadalyn’s place and we watched Kiki’s Delivery Service. It was her first time watching it, and my first time watching it in english. I was happy with the way that Kirsten Dunst played Kiki. I brought over Laputa as well, so we’ll probably watch it sometime. I think it’s a bit better than Kiki, and she seemed to like that, so I have high hopes. We’re definitely watching it in japanese in order to avoid James Van Der Beek’s voice acting.

Tuesday was “change Amy night” - she got a haircut and decided to get a labret piercing. I was thrilled to go along and kinda wanted to watch, but it happened kinda fast and I was guarding her stuff. It looks really great on her - I’m sure she’ll post pics as soon as her camera works again.

Yesterday I actually attempted to get some work done on the iPaq interface to the robots, but discovered that the one that I needed to work on was completely discharged of all of it’s battery power. We discovered some adapters that seem to work for charging them - I hope that when I get in today I can attempt to get some work dona again.

Last night we watched Dancer in the Dark, which was an excellent movie with a shooting style I found very interesting (although at the theater it could have been nauseating). It had camera movement which seemed very similar to a home-movie type thing. As for the content of the movie, it was very sad - it had a melancholy feeling from the start, and didn’t really get any happier from there. Probably the most serious musical-type movie I’ve seen in a while - and Bjork’s musical style was perfect for this movie.

Today is another long thursday, and I need to do my homework for tomorrow and grade about 10 more labs that got emailed to me last night. I’ve also forgotten my lunch at home. Statistics lab is a great time to update my LJ. I’ve been very forward-looking lately, and have a desire to actually get things done at work. I’ve decided that I don’t really go to sleep in class because I’m sleepy, but more because I have a general tired-ness going on and I get bored at the content of the classes I’m going to. I’ve stopped reading for both of my classes in hopes that I get interested when the material is actually new to me. Oops, class is over already.