I got nothing done today. This is becoming a depressing pattern.

Well, not nothing. I went to class and paid a marginal amount of attention to the lectures. I went to work and did about two hours' worth. I had bubbletea with Kimberly. Then I dumped on her, sort of.

Came home and had some cookies, then went into my room as always. I've been online for 6 hours almost continuously now. Somewhere in the middle I pried all the keycaps off my keyboard and rearranged them.

What have I done? I've poked around on okcupid, talked on IRC, and checked mail too much. IRC is dead these days, but especially on Friday afternoons. Nobody was really on any IM much, either.

I'm just stuck in a rut.

Class ends in something like three weeks, and I'm not ready for it. I don't have a job, and apparently it's too late to find anything fulfilling.

I think the problem is that I'm letting the guilt from not actually doing schoolwork build up, which is uncharacteristic of me. The guilt, not the not doing schoolwork. I usually don't care.

I need hugs, damnit, not encouragement.

Mood: melancholy

Math final today! 1:30 in KNE 130, and I don't have my notes sheet. Or a calculator. I assume that my notes sheet from the midterm is wrapped around my sliderule, which I can't find. Augh! I'm going to SO fail this test. And it's all my fault ... if I don't pass Math126, though, I can't get into CE (or CS) without being totally awesome. And I don't think I'm awesome enough.

Plus my Qubic Project is due today at 11pm. I've done a lot of work on it (like, more than my share), but my fellow group members are the last-minute type. Come ON. My grade, it's being 'eld 'ostage! I can at least hope for an adjustment during the meeting with our TA. Especially if my (as yet nameless) group members decide to turn it in late. I'll have you know that they turned in the halfway checkpoint a whole ten seconds before the deadline. I had finished my part of the code two days earlier.

On the bright side, today is the end of my freshman year. I have a final on Thursday, but other than that it's over. Hooray!

Today I am 6969 days old.

I wrote a perl script to poll the SDB registration system periodically, check if either of two alternate sections of Physics 121 lab are open, and switch into the first open one. I don't want to have a lab section from 15:30 to 18:30, when I've got space to have the lab from 12:30 to 15:30.

Mood: accomplished

This is pretty neat. I'm posting from within GAIM.

Yay for avoiding actually writing an essay for class by doing extensive research about the topic.

I am reveling in my newfound freedom!

I was complimented by several women at church today, but ... they're all over 60. Good news or bad news?

In other news: math homework due Monday.

Two essays due tomorrowtoday at 1230. Neither even started.

(00:33:25) kristin copeland: if it ain't baroque, don't fix it

Posting from UW HUB, using the LogJam client on my laptop named "eldritch". I would use my web browser, but FireFox 1.0.4 crashes on opening the "post" page when using the new LJ style. I should report it, but I'm too lazy.

At least here I can cut from emacs easily. (LogJam is really small w.r.t. screen space.)

I went to the Facilities building eariler today to pick up a copy of the map I requested a few weeks ago. Actually, I first went to the Communications building to pay at the copy center. But they told me I had to get a card and they would charge me that way. So I went to the Facilities office building and talked to Jeff, who got me the card with "$3.75" written on it. Back up to Communications, where I paid and got a receipt. Then I go back to Facilities, where I hand over both the card and the receipt and get the map in exchange. They then present a bunch of receipts to the copy center staff monthly or so and get money transferred into their budget.

It kind of reminds me of the Kerberos authentication process.

The UW has pervasive wireless network, which is cool. But I can't setup passwordless SSH to the Dante shell account, because sshd wants your IP to be the same all the time. Perhaps there's a way around this.

On Saturday I went with my father to the Fremont Solstice Parade. There were (of course) nude bicyclists, who became boring to me after about four minutes (except for the George Bush with suit painted on, riding a unicycle). And there were also many other things. They pay for the parade by having one group of people with little green cloth bags on long bamboo poles hold them into the crowd for people to deposit money into. It's very pretty. I've got some pictures.

Today is graduation. I went to the practice this morning. Cold. Graduation is at :wqest Field this evening. I have decorated my cap&gown. It's got a 7-segment LED display hanging from the front of the cap, wired to display "06", powered by a 9-volt battery tucked into the back of the cap. Pictures if anyone asks.

Wow---this post langished in a tab for about 15 minutes while I worked on Wikipedia.

Addition---Yesterday evening I bicycled around Capitol Hill for about an hour and a half to work off energy. I find exercise works very well in helping me go to sleep. All those happy couples wandering about Capitol Hill/Volunteer Park ... makes me sad.

Another thing that makes me sad. There's a memorial to Thomas Burke (namesake of the Burke Museum) in Volunteer Park. Some delinquents took an orange crayon to it and wrote messages e.g. extolling the virtues of the particular brand of oppression practiced by "VLAD LENIN" and so forth. But the most disappointing part is that they also wrote "ARS LONGA VITA BREVE". That made me lose all faith in humanity I had retained to this late date. :)

Today I got hall-swept for being two minutes late to math class. So I went to the lunchyroom to serve my LTD. All that happens is you eat your lunch at a table and you can go in 20 minutes. If you don't, then you have to show up for Saturday School. Learning is punishment.

I turned in my Latin textbooks today. I may miss Catullus.

My bladder is full.

Tomorrow I shall go to Yuen Lui for the purpose of being photographed.

Today I switched back to using Window Maker instead of Sawfish for my primary window manager. It's so fast!

So I spent all of today sick. No vomiting, just a terrible headache and fever.

And no, I don't think that I'm going to be ready for the AP US Government test. Ms. Thompson does not seem to have taught us anything. But my mother's paying, so I don't really care.

I'm so nerdy, updating my LJ just hours after returning from JCL convention.

Garfield did rather well. We won Lower and Upper Certamen, and I got two first-places, a second, and two third-place ribbons. More details to come. (Got third out of four on sight reading, behind Hesterberg and rfriel, and ahead of insaneinside.

Ohh I'm so looking forward to the JCL Convention!!!

I intend to succeed in Sight Reading, if nothing else.

So I sent in my acceptance to the UW. Today I logged in to MyUW and guess what I see! I get a shell account on dante.u.washington.edu, and they're willing to store my email for me. Imagine that! They're providing space for my email! And I'm using SSH, of course. Haven't even bothered testing if they accept telnet. (Just did, and they do. /me slaps UW)

My /etc/passwd entry is f:!:247792:30:D. Smith:/da09/d25/f:/usr/local/bin/psh. That's a high UID, isn't it? (Yes. My username is "f", so I make sure that at least the password is hard to guess.) wc -l /etc/passwd gives 53076 accounts, including the usual 60 or so daemons.

The system is AIX. They don't have mutt, preferring their in-house pine. However, there is GNU Emacs installed, so I'll live. ;)

• Universith of Washington: Accepted
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: Accepted
• Caltech: Rejected
• M. I. T.: Rejected
• Carnegie-Mellon University: Rejected

So now you know.

I'll most likely be attending the UW. Strike that. Almost certainly.

Duncan's College Rejection Status List!

• Universith of Washington: Accepted
• Caltech: Rejected
• M. I. T.: Rejected
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: Unknown (pending)
• Carnegie-Mellon University: Unknown (pending)

Today I went to Walgreens after school in order to purchase a box of Dixon Ticonderoga pencils. They didn't have them, so I had to satisfy myself with purchasing some nice blue pens, two Sharpies (Wikipedia, for the insatiably curious), and a set of Gillette razor blades (the Mach 3 Turbo, to be precise). Those razor blades are expensive! The package said "8 cartridges" and was above the sign for "$12.00". Actually, they were in a locked display case (the type usually reserved for cigarettes or guns) and were totally strewn about, so that the cartridges were actually more than $20 for a set of 8, over $2.50 each.

Update: Oh my. The Sharpie web site has a page with the MSDSs (Definition on Wikipedia) for all the Sharpie pens.

stupid npr website wont let me fucnign save audio from shows on my computer. But i can listen all I want.

I figured out it. But there's no good reason to make me jump through all sorts of hoops to listen offline. I would have used up the same amount of their bandwidth either way.

Ohhhh I hate the online physics homework. It gives me four tries to do the problem correctly, but I'm not getting it right before 7:31AM tomorrow. At least it's not on paper.

I don't have a net connection in my room, so I've been sitting in this cold concrete basement cell all afternoon. Dinner soon, perhaps.

My feet are frozen. I'm wearing socks, slippers, a sweatshirt, and various other articles. It doesn't seem to help that much. *undresses to check* *wonders why all the nice Internet people are staring* *puts clothes back on*. Yes, it helps a lot, just not enough.

On Friday I went downtown to register to vote (Thursday the 20th was my birthday). I registered too late to be put on the voter rolls, so they're going to send me an absentee ballot for this election but I'll be voting at my local precinct the next time around. The King County Administration building is a *really* nice place. They've even got a tunnel underground to the penitentiary and the courthouse.

Then I went to the library. They had the Fall 2600 magazine. I then went to Elliott Bay Books to buy it, and they were still selling the Summer issue. That wasn't nice of them.

Why does it seem that there are so many more reeeaaally fat women than men? (Same goes for reeeaaally thin, but it's not quite so noticeable.)

I spent most of yesterday and today writing what the National Merit people want of me: all my names, all my parents' names, all of that two more times, and an essay. The essay turned out OK. I've also got a MIT essay and a Caltech essay cooking. I can't do my applications online for Caltech or Stanford because it seems that my IP is blacklisted; UW's online application is impenetrable. Tomorrow I'm attending an information session for MIT in Renton.

I just noticed that my LJ page shows entries going back to september 27. That is sad and must be fixed. I must update my LJ more.

Someone dropped a paint-bomb in the skylight of the hallway over spring break. Now the hallway has big white paint splatters on it. Someone should take a picture.

Now we are at Collin's house. He hates us for using the first-person plural. Comments, anyone?

Since this is a LJ about *me*, I will now tell you about my wonderful spring break.

Yesterday I went bicycling to collect data with my GPS reciever. I got 22 points. Collin was going to come with me until he got a flat tire.

On Tuesday (?) I went to Rob's house. We saw how lame his neighborhood was (only 3 points in a 4-hour walk!). While walking, we met Alex Martin. He said there were 2 phones at a mini-mart a few blocks away. We only found 1.

Yesterday evening I watched "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" (skycaptain.com) with my delightful family. My dad is on a business trip in China.

I went to JCL convention (wabcjcl.org) from late Friday (08-APR-2005) to late Sunday (10-APR-2005). Garfield brought home all 3 Certamen trophies. Apparently this is only the second time that has happened under the watch of Ms. Judge.