This weekend was the first time in a few years that I have done anything on Valentine’s day. It was my busiest and best ever, I think.

We had a lab meeting on saturday about the new scout user interface as a check to see where we are on the project. I think it’s turning out really good, as someone who is mostly sitting on the sidelines helping out when I can. I wish I could put more work in on the project, but I think we’ll run into a “too many cooks” problem before long.

Amy came to the lab and we had lunch at Sally’s and played some pool with silvrayn, want_a_be, Chuck and Andi. Afterward there was yummy ice cream at Ben and Jerry’s. Amy and I still had about an hour to kill, so we went and played some more pool in Goldy’s Game Room.

Then we went to The Vagina Monologues. The show was actually much better than my preconceptions placed it. There were a lot of funny stories with a smattering of very serious facts and touching stories. It was well done, I’d recommend it to anyone (even the guys).

Sunday was the party at kitchenwitch’s place. Lots of new people met. We ended up playing a bunch of games of Fluxx (which reminded me that I want to buy a set of IceHouse) while a rousing game of Clue was played in the other part of the room. It was certainly a fun time.

The web servers are down here at school today, so my office hours are quieter than I thought they would be. Maybe I can get some work done later today.

It being friday, I attempted to make today a do-no-work day, as I try to make all fridays. It gets hard when I have office hours scheduled. A lot of students yesterday didn’t finish the lab (in fact, no one did, that I know of) and that means busy office hours on Monday at least, and it meant a bunch of questions today. This is the gut-check lab for most of them I think. It’s hard enough that if you don’t get off your ass and do something, you aren’t going to do well in the class.

Do-no-work day be damned, I remembered an assignment that was due today (and I didn’t do earlier) that I had to finish, so I had to do actual work around 6pm today after supper at Sallys with silvrayn, the non-posting want_a_be and the rest of the gang from the lab. I swear that Sally’s buffalo chicken wrap is awesome for stomachs that have had only junk food. I finished my homework and attempted to do more actual work (now that I had blown the whole no-work thing) and ended up playing a lot of Crack Attack with some people who are trying to finish a long homework. That game is seriously addictive.

I also discovered that it is impossible to embed libjpeg into a reasonable C++ object. I now need to find a C++ library for jpeg, or continue to compress frames from a robot in the old way, which I think is hacked and sucks. I really need to get the new interface working. It’s probably more important at this point than the server with heartbeat that I am writing, and the server which I thought would be a major change is turning out to be (mostly) a retyping of the old server, with small improvements. I’ll probably give up and start on the client end again next week sometime. This would require me to dive back into Linux on the IPAQ again, which was fun for a time.

At least this weekend seems full, because I get to do something nice for someone on valentine’s, and as an added bonus, I’m going to a party on sunday! Yay! Okay, time to play more crack attack, and maybe get some reading for work done.

Well, here I am in the middle of another long tuesday. I’ll probably be updating again later today - during my extremely long break. Right now, I’m taking a short break from statistics, because the lab isn’t really all that interesting to me. I skipped last week because of my extreme tiredness. Today, I’m not tired, but if I wasn’t keeping myself entertained, I would probably be falling asleep anyway.

Let’s see, what happened since I last updated. Went out to Plan B for coffee with amagdalyn on Monday - quite the relaxing, laid-back place. The army and NSF visited the lab to check out the robots monday and tuesday, so everyone else is getting stressed out. Sometimes I get the feeling that the room is going to explode around there. The robot decided to not agree with it’s user on Monday. I need to get working on a solution to that problem (maybe something I can get done in my break today).

Saw Lost in Translation with amagdalyn last night. Bill Murray can actually act if he needs to. There were the funny parts of the movie, and the sad parts. The feel of the whole movie was very interesting though. You really got the feeling that you were far from home and just worn out with life, like Murray’s character. Meeting someone from closer to home with the same feeling put the whole movie together nicely. I expect I enjoyed the movie slightly more, owing in part to my knowledge of japan (due mostly to anime) and partly because amagadalyn was dead tired and slept through some of it.

Well, last night I went out to chuck’s place to party with the whole lab gang. We watched Swingers and partook of a lot of alcohol. Actually, I think there was more partaking of alcohol and lively conversation than there was of watching the movie. It was loads of fun - I’m sure pics will be posted by silvrayn, who was also there (or maybe even want_a_be, who hasn’t even used his LJ account yet). I invited amagdalyn and she came along and drove, which was very cool. I had far too much Guiness - 4 extra stout and 1 bottle. It didn’t get me as drunk as it did fill me up - I was definitely not sober by the end of the night though.

I’ve been feeling like I should do more work lately, which is most likely a good thing. I have to figure out exactly what in robotics I’m planning on doing my thesis on, and that means basically reading papers and books to kingdom come. I shouldn’t have a huge problem with that because this semester is not too hard classes-wise.

I get to give the Pioneer robot intro speech again tomorrow like I did last semester. Apparently I’m the go-to guy for it now, which doesn’t bother me really, but I haven’t used the robots in almost a year now. I’m excited to stand in front of a class and teach again though.

I hadn’t updated for a couple days, so I figured I should put something up.

Tuesday night was Starfarers of Catan with silvrayn, Ben and Ben’s ex-roommate. We played a couple times (I always forget how long those games are) after finding her place. Ordered pizza and watched a bit of TV.

Wendsday I went over to amagdalyn’s place and watched Metropolis. I was unaware going into the experience that it was a silent movie (for some reason I don’t equate “really old movie” with “no actors talking”). The movie had alot of parallels with the anime version - kindof the same plot, and the imagery was basically the same. There were shots in the old movie that I was like “oh that’s exactly like this shot from the anime”.

Amazing parts of the movie were missing, like they had plot intertitles telling what there would be in the story at that point. I kept trying to imagine watching the movie without knowing those parts of the story, and realizing how much you would have missed when you saw it in the theater. For some reason I thought it had a very enthralling plot, even though it had some plot holes. Then again, parts of it were corny, and deserved to be picked on. Since it was a silent movie, I didn’t have any problem talking over the constant orchestration.

After the movie we chatted a while with Mariya, and then went to spyhouse for coffee. We talked about stuff there until they kicked us out, and talked late into the evening/early morning. We probably could have kept talking for a while more actually. I proceeded to get no sleep so it feels like it should be Thursday now. My 8:00am section was probably worse for it. I ended up taking a nap during my long break on thursdays, so the last lab I had wasn’t so bad.

I ended up paying for a LJ account too, so now I have this spiffy new layout. I’ll probably figure out how to use S2 to make the journal my real webpage sometime soon. I’ll probably stop posting my anime debt, because honestly, I can’t even keep track of it myself.

Ben and Kelly are officially dating now and it’s “out”. It’ll be interesting, since us three were pretty close friends beforehand. I’m not quite sure how to act around them yet, but I really hope it won’t damage either friendship even the relationship between both of them is going to the “next level” or whatever. Seeing them together makes me want to start dating more – it emphasizes my singleness. It shouldn’t be too hard, since I haven’t been dating much at all lately. Despite my recent LJ post on the subject, I think I found a online service that I won’t mind - Lavalife actually works on a credit system, which means you only spend your money when you’re actually meeting and communicating with people. It has a much lower chance of “money into black hole” than all the other services. It’s still not ideal by any means however. This new OkCupid site looks interesting though.

I got to teach class (beginning programming) Friday and Monday. I love teaching, I hope to do it after I graduate - I was really happy and enthusiastic. I covered the material sort of fast, so I hope they got it all. I was thrilled to see the class the same or even more full on Monday than it was on Friday. I think it was a good test that I wasn’t doing completely horrible. I even got a couple comments about how enthusiastic I was and taught well. It was a great time.

Went to peaches_phd’s place with silvrayn and want_a_be for a superbowl thingy. The game was surprisingly fun to watch this time. It could have been a lot worse than it was, and it’s always great when it comes down to the last seconds. The commercials weren’t bad either - you can see them if you missed them. I particularly like the Pepsi Music Download one and the Linux one - although you might have guessed that. There seemed to be a bunch of trailers this year, but it could just be my imagination.

After the game we hung around and I drunk some more (with some egging on by silvrayn needed) and watched the premiere of that new survivor thing, even though it will be impossible for me to watch it since I teach on Thursday nights when it shows, oh, and the fact that I don’t own a TV. It was a pretty fun time. Good gumbo was had by all, and friends of peaches_phd kept showing up which was interesting. Serious snowstorms occurred, otherwise I’m sure there would have been more people around.

Time to curl up into a warm bed and sleep now though.

Well, I put in my month’s weight, and I don’t seem to be making any progress.. See for yourself. The overall progress looks a lot better than the monthly one. My goal for February: 10 pounds loss.

For those that don’t know (well, that would be pretty much everyone, I think) , I’m attempting to follow the Hacker’s Diet which seems very down-to-earth to me: it’s basically a calorie counter. Having the book free online probably influenced my decision a little.

Or, I should say, online dating services suck. I want to start dating now, and I figure since I’m a pretty online guy, I would go with an online dating service or 2. I signed up at Yahoo! Personals and Match.com and put some words about me. Words about me aren’t that easy to come by for me, because I’m not a really introspective person. I guess the main problem I have with personals sites is that they all cost money. I’d certainly be willing to pay if I knew that someone was interested in me from these sites, but so far I’ve gotten one response from one person in the non-pay way (which are usually some sort of flirt or wink or something that you can’t really put anything into). Granted, I chat with that person regularly now, and she’s great, but I kinda hoped for better. Sometimes I think I’m just not suited to these types of things - that people have to get to know me first before they like me all that much. Then again, I’m a fairly weird person by most people’s standards. Oh well.

Well, I’m in the middle of one of my thursdays. They really suck for me because I have to get up at 6:30am in order to get in by 7:30am and prepare for the lab I’m teaching/monitoring at 8:00am. When that finishes, I go to a really boring class lab (that I usually just surf the web during or do my own homework), and then another class which is only 25 minutes longer, but feels a lot longer on some days because there’s no computer to waste the time when I’m bored. I’m glad about the class though because when it’s interesting, it’s very interesting. After that it’s about 1pm, time for lunch, and then nothing at all until about 7pm, when I have another lab that I direct until 9pm. It’s the longest day that I have every week. So now I’m just sitting at my desk typing into LJ because I don’t really have anything else that to do (or at least, nothing else I want to do - hooray for procrastination).

The only good part about Thursdays is that the next day is Friday.