Grad School Blues

My teacher is an asshat wrapped in a douche bag. 5 hours of my life vanished and I still get to lose 2o points. I should have just blown the assignment off.
Why would you write an entire chapter on solving a series of equations using a specific method, then have the very first assignment be to solve those equations using a different method. A method, by the way, that is described as cumbersome and complicated in the textbook, and only explained as a method that will be assigned at the end of the chapter.
Way to force me into re-inventing the wheel in a pre-determined inferior method. Good job guy, you have successfully made me want to quit school and burn all my textbooks on top of your desk. That is a unique feat. There should be an XBOX achievement for that.

Go Cardinals

A new record for most points scored in the first half... for the Bretts.. I mean NY Jets.
Seriously.. I don't even know why I watch anymore. My beer tab is getting huge trying to drown my sorrows. We look like a college team out there today.

Even worse.. Bret is all they sports guys are going to be talking about for ANOTHER week.


4th Qtr update.
On a positive note, at the half I was "motivated" to start on my homework and should have it finished by the end of the game. It is really easy to concentrate on microwave circuits when there is something else I am trying very hard to not pay attention to (but am too masochistic to turn off).
This means I can watch the Redskins hopefully beat up on the Cowboys with a clear academic conscience.


I have skipped 3 intented posts to bring you my feelings on this. Maybe after SD and Washington play I will come back and post the other stuff.. like the huge storm we had and the pictures of all the snapped trees, or how awesome it is to go shooting with Cody. Realistically though this is probably the last you will hear of those two momentous events.
__________________

Depressing

School starts in 1 week.
How thoroughly depressing.
It was a pretty lame summer. The only thing salvaging it is the Colorado trip and the fact that E and C and e are coming to visit in a couple of weeks.
There was a definite lack of BBQs this year, although helping watching Tom brew beer was pretty fun and I did host a LAN party. All in all though, this summer felt like a let down. It was my last summer and I feel like I should have gone out in style.
I guess I could consider the 52" TV I am picking up tomorrow "style" but really, it is just "stuff".


Maybe a spontaneous trip to Flagstaff would help.

Another semester DONE

Yesterday I had my last 2 finals. The semester is officially over.
This means I won't be a super mega stress ball. Just a stress ball. It also means I should be able to post more. Not now.. since I have to go to work in about 20 min, and I still need to eat breakfast but soon.
I have no idea how things turned out yet. I stopped caring about a month- month and a half ago. School burnt out my caring fuse. I went into most of my finals with a B, I have no idea if any of the finals where good enough to keep me there. Probably not, given the amount of effort I was putting in at the end there. All that I even pretend to care about is that I pass them so I can start my senior design project. Thats right. I said senior. No longer do I get to claim I will be done with school in "3 years" as I have been for the past 4 years. Now I have to say "1 year." My wife is very happy about that.

I'm turning into Cody

I now have 2 jobs. I am working as a researcher at ASU as well as my GD internship. I am doing RF material characterization and will probably be trying to verify some theories about non-destructive measurements of thin film resistors.

Kristina and I started the South Beach Diet a few weeks ago. Ok.. really Kristina started it and I am being a good supportive husband and doing it with her. My wife is a great cook but damn that was a hell of a lot of fish and vegetables. Don't be fooled by South Beach "mashed potatoes." They aren't really potatoes but pureed cauliflower.
I am happily out of the strict 2 week no carb or sugar (that includes fruit) phase. I hit my "weight goal" and skipped straight to phase 3, so now I pretend to eat like I should have been for the last 3 years. Lots of veggies, natural grains and whole wheat stuff, lowfat milks and cheeses and stuff.

Thats really all I have time to say. I am behind in my homework thanks to my first test gauntlet. I have no life anymore.

I don't know how I feel abou this:

2 phone pic posts.. what is becoming of me? Really though, you can't blame me for finding the need to share this thing with you. It is what happens when you tell some french guy to build you a toilet and "make it a throne". Yes, that is a music box to the left of the bowl. It plays tinkly music while you tinkle.

The pain..

.. is going numb. Thank you Johnnie Walker.
6 tests in 4 weeks. It just isn't right.
I don't know how much more of this I can take.

Ramblings

All aboard the money train. Next stop, Sequel Station!

I pulled up the TV guide this morning to see which games where on which station and I couldn't help but notice that WGN has decided to go out on a limb and put some truly first rate movies up against Sunday Football. (That was sarcasm BTW).
Up first is the never The NeverEnding Story III, a one star doozy from 1994. After that they have chosen Back to the Secret Garden. They didn't even bother to rate this gem from 2000. I understand the never ending story is well.. never ending, but it still revolves around Bastian and apparently he is now struggling through adolescence. The first one was great. The second one was tolerable. The third one.. well I haven't seen it but I am having trouble coming to grips with the fact that it was actually made. There may be one redeeming factor in the mess in that it does star Jack Black. I still don't think that is enough to make me watch it.
As for the Secret Garden, it was found once so its no longer a secret.

In completely unrelated news: Kristina, Lenny, and I went to the Irish Heritage Festival yesterday. We volunteered at the AAGI booth showing off the greyhounds and answering a lot of questions about adoption and the breed in general. Except for the fact that we where across the way from the beer/whiskey tent, and right next to the DeLorean tent, I was pretty disappointed. The whole thing was pretty low key, and the main draw was the 2 stages of performers (there where supposedly some dancers but I only saw musicians). There where only 2 or 3 other cultural/historical booths, everyone else was a vendor hawking the usual bunch of jewlery, non-irish inspired leatherwork, or Guinness apparel. I wasn't able to go into the actual Irish Heritage Foundation Building they have there, so I probably missed out on a core aspect of the festival. My wife has some lovely pictures on her Flicker account if you have access and feel the need to see alot of pictures with dogs. I'm glad we went, but I felt a little disappointed in the whole ordeal. I guess I was expecting more history lessons and less commerce.

Voodoo math

I know logically speaking, any positive number is larger than zero, and when applied to test scores, just about any score is, mathematically speaking, better than no score. However I cannot help but feel that if I had just decided to wander the campus and skip either of my 2 tests (back to back) today I would be better off.
This may be stemming from some innate belief that my well being is derived from my personal happiness instead of the grade I am currently receiving in school. If this is the case my subconscious needs to straighten up and get with the damn program.

Its almost over

Well, this is the last week of summer for me.
I start the new semester on Monday.
Hoorrray for:
EEE 341 - Engineering Electromagnetics
EEE 352 - Properties of Electronic Materials
EEE 350 - Random Signal Analysis
EEE 334 - Circuits II

I will also continue my internship into the semester part time.
15 credit hours (hey look, its a "light" semester) and about 12 hours a week for work. Guess who still won't be blogging much.

I don't think its ever going to happen

You know all those posts I've been promising you? Well, if you haven't figured it out by now, they probably aren't going to happen. I forgot how much time a job can eat up. Its not just the 10 hours a day I am away from home.. its all that stuff I no longer get done now that I am away from home 10 hours a day.
When its all said and done I have no desire to rant into the etherweb and half the time forget I even have one of these blog things. I remember ever other day or so when I check everyone else's blog but actually committing to a post? I am too busy trying to commit to dinner!

I have not been playing alot of video games or watching TV lately (although Kristina might disagree). Instead I have been reading. "What?!?! Summer reading?!?!" you might explain with prodigious amounts of gusto and inquiry. Neh, I say. It is but trashy science fiction books and even worse fantasy books. The literary equivalent of flavored spun sugar (mmm... cotton candy). Just like the fluffy confection they hold absolutely no benefit for you, in fact they can be down right bad for you but they are still satisfying in that sinfully indulgent way.

good lord make it stop

So I'm balls deep into this semester. Boy, it is turning out to be a doozy. Weekends turn into 7 hour long homework marathons, weekdays are full of cramped note taking hands and mild to strong states of panic. February is "test month." This is much much better than "test week." I had 1 test last week (4% better than the mean.. I got a 70), a test this week, 2 tests next week, and a test on the 28th. I am scared of 2 of them. Matrix Algebra I understand but it takes me 3 hours to do one problem (I didn't say I understand it well) and Electro magnetics.. well.. if I could understand my instructor or the book I would be doing much better. Unfortunately the instructor copies the book into a power point presentation the reads it out loud as his "lecture." He skips the same spots the book skips (equation wise) and takes a few more shortcuts, making the "solutions" to example problems about as useful as WIFI to the Amish. To make matters worse he speaks in a rapid fire heavily accented korean english. His dialect consists of only 3 consents and 2 vowels which make differentiating between E, V, D just as impossible as L, R, and T. This makes understanding things like dE/dV (sounds like DD over DD) just as impossible as differentiating scalar and scatter (both pronounced scadrr).
Lets face it.. this shit is hard to begin with and an instructor who has only marginally more control over the english language than whoever wrote the book doesn't help much. (The author has apparently never heard about dangling participles.) Before you make a comment on the lack of grammar in my posts and the irony therein let me point out the fact that my blog is intended as a quasi-semi-personal journal, not a publish work used as instructional aides for advanced mathematical and physics concepts.

Well, I guess I should get back to my homework. I have to calculate that maximum charge the earth could hold before air starts to break down, losing its electrons, and turning into a conductor (basically until lightning starts randomly shooting out peoples asses.) BTW.. I found this to be approx 1.35 x 10^10 C and the capacitance of the earth is approx. 708 uF... not that you cared.

No one is looking

So I made a few discrete inquiries and found out that no one has come looking for an ipod shuffle at the lost and found. I think this is odd but I also have realized my mindset is not the same as 95% of the rest of the world.

Its raining today. It makes me glad I don't have to walk around campus all day like I usually do. Today I only have 2 classes and they are in the same building. I love the rain, but after living in San Diego for a few years I no longer like to walk around in it. Besides, its still pretty damned cold out.

My mind is pretty much wandering right now. I'm waiting for class to come rolling in like some tidal force of time and boredom that sweeps up all ambitious and hopeful students in its path only to grind and soak them into unmotivated, unthinking, office dwelling drones. I can see it sitting there on the horizon, 2 hours away, waiting for its time to come sweep me up in its inescapable path of mundane droning and dry text based destruction.

Shuffled morales

So today was pretty eventful.. and its only 2pm!
It was the first day of school. I have a carpool buddy because we have the exact same school schedule (hooray sweet sweet carpool parking spots). Unfortunately we have the first class is at 7:40 am everyday except Friday. This means getting up at 6 and out of the house by 7. Thanks to a judicious amount of coffee there was no tardiness today :)

I was walking to my second class today (on the opposite side of campus) and as we where passing the memorial union I noticed a brand new ipod shuffle in the graveled landscaping. I picked it up and immediately started to scan the vicinity for someone who could have dropped it or was looking around like they had lost something. It was still pretty damn early in the morning and there wasn't a whole lot of traffic in that particular corner of the campus and I didn't find anyone that fit the description.
Not wanting to be late for class I had to get moving and I wasn't gonna just drop the thing there on the ground for someone else to find. I put it in my pocket and scurried off to class.
After class I had to hurry home so that I could get a visiting friend off to the airport in time for her flight, leaving me no time to find the campus lost and found.
After taking my friend to the airport I came home and jumped on the computer to check my email and try to fix my IPAQ (I will save that little story for later). While I there I decide to try to find the lost and found location and policies for ASU.

It turns out that items turned in to lost and found are held for 60 days then donated to a charity (I assume they mean goodwill or the like). This brings me to a moral dilemma. I would like very much to see this $80 toy returned to the poor kid that lost it. Unfortunately there are really no distinguishing features about these new shuffles, though I guess he could tell the lost and found guys what songs he put on it and they could all listen for those songs. They just happen to be mostly top 40 crap every college kid is going to have. He has everything from the latest rap song to the latest pop, alternative, mexican rap, VH1 pop, hard rock, and emo. I have heard nothing that would really distinguish this guy's shuffle from anyone else just guessing as to what would be on Joe Random college student's ipod.
I also do not trust the lost and found people to be honest. Lets face it, do you think the student worker they hired (and is getting paid minimum wage) is going to let that thing sit for 2 months unclaimed and then send it off to a charity? I think it will end up in the pocket of the student worker.

If the policy was a little different and I would be able to claim the ipod shuffle after its 60 day hold period I would turn it in tomorrow. Lets face it, a free shuffle is a pretty sweet deal.

So do I turn the thing into lost and found hoping that whoever lost it doesn't assume that all college students are materialistic fiends lacking most basic sets of morals who would never pass up a chance like this to acquire a free ipod, even if it is only the shuffle? Do I trust that if I do turn it over and the original owner comes looking it will actually be returned to him, or do I just put the thing in my pocket and with the assumption that the kid has already written the damned thing off?

Clarification

Has our society of spoon fed information and comedy in a box sitcom watching been so detrimental to the ability to think and reason that we no longer see a joke when it is staring us in the face? Perhaps I am just not as obvious or as ironic as I though I was.
After the 5th comment (oddly enough all by private contact, either in person or email) about my blog title being misspelled I feel compelled to explain the joke.
Yes, I know "blissfull" is spelled wrong. It is part of the irony of the title. I did this on purpose.
The tried and true rule for telling jokes is "if you have to explain it then the joke isn't funny".
It actually saddens me that this is the case because I thought the title was quite clever. I understand that small spelling errors like this have become much more common with the advent of online communications but I also thought those around me had more respect for my abilities, especially since Firefox 2.o has a built in spell checker. I will give credit to those who contacted me in that they all did it through some form of discrete communication instead of what they felt would have been a humiliating public one.

So.. to set the record straight "Blissfull Ignorance" is intentional and a comment on itself. However, now that I have commented on it I am no longer ignorant about it and therefore I have lost my bliss. :P