Well today was quite the interesting day today. I had 2 meetings that I forgot about (thank god I decided to go in early to study and silvrayn was around to remind me of them) and then a test to prepare for. Of course in the two meetings I paid marginal attention. The first one was fairly inconsequential and I discovered a really cool online utility bloglines which is almost exactly what I was looking for in a RSS reader. It’s now replaced Thunderbird as my syndication reader of choice. It basically does that my Planet was doing before, but it remembers what I have read and what I haven’t read, making my life filtering out things I already know about much simpler. It has nifty firefox integration, which makes it uber-cool in my opinion. I don’t know about the staying power of it though, because it doesn’t charge for anything and has no ads that I noticed. In that meeting the group I was there to represent basically got everything it wanted without my help.

In conjunction with that, I discovered the nifty application Konfabulator which puts lots of things on my desktop (or whever I want) and informs me about the world around me even when I’m holed up my cave somewhere coding away or wasting time, as it may be. It’s nagware, but the nagging is minimal, and the application is cool enough that I just might buy it. The one thing that might stop me is that it looks like OS X Tiger (10.4) will duplicate it’s functionality with Dashboard. Makes me wonder about where the idea came from in the first place, not that it’s anything very profound. I’m just happy because now my desktop is bursting with information.

The big loss today was at the CSci 5304 test. Suffice to say I wasn’t prepared, but I am not exactly sure what I would have done to be prepared. The test had very little similarity with the practice/previous tests that were available for perusal and that the professor went over in class, and the homeworks for the class didn’t have much to do with it either. My pessimistic outlook puts me at about a 48 out of 100. This is not to say that I couldn’t have done better - there were things I could have studied and performed better. This is the first test in my life that I just got completely fed up with and left. My only consolation is that even if I completely fail the class, if I get an A in my other class (which shouldn’t be too hard) I will still have a GPA over 3.5, which means I’m still validly in grad school. It’s freaky to know that I could blow off the entire rest of the class and still be in good standing. Suffice to day that CSci 5304 is going to get a significant amoutn fo my free time for the next few weeks. If I study all that I can, and then still do horrible on the last test and homework, I will chalk the class up to a teaching style that is completely orthogonal to my learning style.