14 Apr 2003 olandgren   » (Journeyer)

Meta

Heh. I'm not precisely sure why I chose to update this now, after so much neglect. It's been nearly a year since I've written a journal entry, and I suspect I've not been missed.

School

Nevertheless, my honors thesis is but two days away from completion, or at least it had better be. Reality is, I've got a broken implementation and a paper that's really not very good when it comes right down to it. Not exactly a place I would like to be, but that's life, eh? Then a week after I turn this horrific thing over to my readers, I get to defend. And there are enough holes to drive a Mack truck through, realistically. I'm not really sure whether or not I'll even get honors. All I can do is hope for the best.
In a weird stroke of fate, that talk on Rectilinear Art Galleries ended up interesting me enough that my capstone in mathematics is based on it. There's an utterly beautiful proof that the floor of n/4 guards is all that's required to quadrilateralize a rectilinear polygon, but it's incredibly dense. My capstone ended up being a huge explanation of the paper and what it was actually saying in slightly less condensed terms.

Life

Hmmm. What to say? Life outside of classes has been great, modulo not seeing my friends very often. Fate was kind, and dropped a wonderful girl into my lap almost literally. Funny how things like that sometimes work out. I've even got a future of sorts - working for the big H again this summer and then taking off to Northeastern for graduate school. I'm going to shoot for the stars like I've always wanted to since my grandpa showed me his doctorate and see if I can get mine. NEU has one of the best programs in programming languages(it's so much nicer abbreviated PL, but only Damian can pull off a Ph.D in Perl) going these days, so that should be a great experience. Boston is sorta ruinously expensive, but hey, that's tricks. I'm sure I can find cheap housing somewhere, and I can't complain too much - a stipend is livable if I don't get too extravagant and maybe the summer can provide a nest egg. Problems with carpal went away once I got a couple of ergo keyboards and started lifting weights three times a week - my wrists strengthened up and apparently so did my hands.

Listening

Nothing. Music seems to have lost it's shine these days. I listen less and less. The past year has seen lots of jazz of the old-school variety, lots of Sinatra and other crooners, and lots of clean ambient like A Silver Mt. Zion. Music for the ups and downs of life, I guess.

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