The Astronomy department IM softball team got destroyed 15-3 in another highly imbalanced matchup. And let me tell you, it's not a matter of the other team being good. On the bright side, I had a good game, going 2 for 3 with two solid line drives for base hits and I made a nice catch on a hard hit line drive in left field. However, I may have strained a muscle in my right leg, because it is in pain right now.
I think I'm ready for my 141A midterm tomorrow, but one can never tell until one actually sees the exam. The consequence of all the studying for 141A is that I'm behind on my homework set for 110B, which as per usual is a long one. Combined with my trip to the Oakland Coliseum tomorrow night, and I haven't got a whole lot of time for anything really.
Basically, free time is non-existent for me this week. Of course, critics may point out that I'm playing softball tomorrow night and going to an A's game Wednesday night, but I just consider those activities as part of things that I "have to do", so naturally they don't count as free time. Seriously though, I am really going to be busy for the next couple of months.
Seems like it went by very quickly. My friend Matt Pendleton is in town for the week, as he came for the weekend to be at a friend's wedding and is staying a few extra days to watch the A's battle the Red Sox in one of the AL Division Series. I'm probably going to see one of the games with him, Wednesday night. It ought to be fun. However, the main thing I'm worried about at this point is my midterm on Wednesday in 141A. It looks like it's going to be another hectic week.
The California Golden Bears triumph over the No. 3 ranked team in the nation, USC! What an awesome, incredible game! Yeah!
I was either studying or working on research from 10am to 10pm, with almost no breaks today. One of my homework sets this week is going to take 8 full sheets of paper to complete. Ughh.
For some reason, it seems like everything always happens at once. Last night my grandmother died, marking the end of a long and full life. I posted about this a couple of times, but she was not nearly the same person at the end of her life that she was for the vast majority of it, so if there was ever a good time for her to die, this would have been it. Still, it is never easy to lose a loved one, and this case is no different.
Also, today is my birthday. I am now officially 22. In addition, tonight the Astronomy department is having a "grad school application info" night where a panel of grad students will discuss their experiences with grad school and pass on some wisdom to us undergrads. Another thing is that the professor that I work for talked to me yesterday about the research I'm doing, and he asked me to have some important plots ready by Monday. It shouldn't be too hard, but now I've actually got a hard deadline, so I have to make sure it gets done. And with one of my homework sets looking pretty difficult, free time has been essentially flushed down the toilet. Oh well...
Yesterday I left my window in my apartment open all day because it was so hot. Consequently, bugs were able to enter my room with ease. This meant that I had to deal with a whining noise around my head all night long. I managed to sleep for a couple of hours, but then at 3am I suddenly woke up and once again had to deal with the irritating mosquito. For about half an hour I tossed and turned in my bed, trying to swat it to death in the dark. As this predictably didn't work, I eventually turned the lights on in my room and sat on my bed, waiting for the thing to get close. Finally, it did and I eliminated it. However, I was still unable to go to sleep for another hour. It wasn't until 5am that I finally fell asleep, and I had to wake up around 8am for racquetball class. So I imagine I'll be pretty tired later today.
IM softball season starts tonight at 10pm. Word on the street is that I might be pitching.
As I'm sure all of you are aware, California is holding an election to recall our current governor, Gray Davis, on October 7. Now, one of the leading Republican candidates to replace Mr. Davis is none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger, otherwise known as The Terminator. And he is indeed a serious candidate with (apparently) a significant amount of support behind him. I have my doubts, mainly because he hasn't shown up to the major political debates that all the other serious candidates have attended, presumably because he doesn't want to say something stupid when he's not reading a script. However, there is one side effect of this whole recall thing that does have a rather significant effect on my life: the winner of this election will sign my diploma. That's right, I could have the terminator's signature on my diploma. I think that's reason enough for me to go out and vote against him, which I have every intention of doing. It's not so much that I don't want his signature on my diploma, it's more that if it happens, I have to be able to say that I did everything in my power to prevent it.
I now own a cell phone. I got a plan with my family's pre-existing Verizon setup that allows nation-wide service with free long distance, unlimited night-time and weekend minutes, 400 anytime minutes for me, my sister, and my Mom, and unlimited calling to each other's cell phones. I think it will be very handy to have, and I'm really glad I got it.
I also got a nice screwdriver set, a battery recharger, some music, DVDs, and assorted other stuff. And my birthday hasn't even happened yet! I turn 22 on the 24th...
I'm going home this weekend to celebrate my birthday with my family. Actually, my birthday is the 24th, but this weekend is close enough.
Yesterday I made a big post about a program called TweakUI, but I must not have actually saved it, because it hasn't appeared on the site. So now I'm just going to mention that it's a great utility for windows users that allows you to do things like have "focus-follow" for your mouse, like on unix-based OS. Get it at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/downloads/powertoys.asp along with a bunch of other handy utilities.
I think that since I have moved out of a co-op house and into an apartment I have become much more of a "free food" consumer. For example, the physics department at Berkeley has tea and cookies every day at 4pm, and this semester not only have I attended every day, but I've been eating something like 4-5 cookies each day as well. Also, I'm much more willing to go out of my way to get free food than I used to be. Take, for example, the "Welcome the new people in the Astronomy department" party that occurred yesterday. I was there, and I was pigging out. Yeah, baby!
Simply put, my weblog doesn't have it. I can never think of anything creative to say while I'm staring at my computer screen. I think of plenty of interesting stuff when I'm not at my computer (no, really, I do), but I'll be damned if I can't think of anything to say when it comes to putting it down. So I just list off all the stuff I did. Very exciting.
For example, today, I got a haircut. I'm pleased with the results. Exciting, right?
In case you've ever wanted to meet someone who is extremely obsessed with hurricanes, visit Eric Furst's website.
I'm ahead on my homework sets for 110B and 141A this week. Let's see if I can turn that into more productivity with regard to my research.
Things I did:
1: Visited my grandma. She is very close to the end now. I spent about ten minutes with her, but I don't know if she heard anything I said, and I couldn't understand anything she said. Still, it was good that I was able to see her one more time.
2: Felt what it was actually like for Charlie not to be present in our house. It definitely felt like there was something missing. Especially right after we finished watching a movie, around 10pm, which is exactly when he used to bug Mom about going on a walk. I miss him quite a bit.
3: Helped move furniture around the house. The remodelling is mostly complete at this point, and my Mom was working hard to get things in the best place.
4: Worked on some of my 110B homework set. I did about a quarter of it, but mainly it was good simply to start looking at it.
5: Made a list of grad schools that I want to apply to and figured out basic application requirements for those places, including deadlines. It looks like most places have a deadline around early January, so I'm fine on most of those, except I should really get moving on letters of recommendation. However, the most pressing deadline is November 4, the date by which I must apply for grants from NSF for my first few years in grad school. There are a few benefits from NSF grants:
(a) It is similar to applying to grad schools, so it will motivate me to work on things like my personal statement early and hopefully do a better job on them.
(b) If I get it, I will have financial flexibility in grad school, so a professor having money is not a requirement for me working with that research group.
(c) Getting it looks good on your CV.
6: Won a game of spades against strong computer opponents (with a strong computer partner) despite accidentally clicking the wrong card and ruining my partners nil bid.
Well I must have been pretty tired today, because I actually took a nap from about 3 to 5pm today. I would estimate that I get in about one or two naps a year, so this is big news. I was trying to do my 110B homework when all of a sudden I couldn't manage to stay awake any longer, so I just fell over on my bed and the next thing I knew it was two hours later.
I finished my homework sets for both my classes a couple of hours ago and have been getting a good amount of work done since then, so things have been going well today. I'll probably leave work around 5pm or so, then eat dinner with Tiffany and find some time to relax tonight. Then on Saturday I'm going to go home for the weekend. It will be the first time I've been home since Charlie died, so it will be a very strange and sad time for me. It will be good to be home though.
Last night I was having a hard time with my physics 110B homework when I realized that I really need to get things done faster if I hope to accomplish all that I want to this semester. For example, I wanted to study for the Physics GRE for maybe 5 hours a week or so, but I haven't even come close to that. My research has not been going as well as I had hoped too. But I really have to make sure I get the paper published before I apply to grad school, because I know that showing that you have done solid research is very important to an application. So I have set a personal deadline of early October for having the rough draft of my paper done. That leaves me about two or three weeks to get it done, which probably is a maximum of 30 hours or so. I'm not sure where I'm going to get that time, because I really haven't been wasting much time so far this semester. I think what it means is that I'm going to have to be more focused, to be more efficient with the time that I have. Because I have a lot to do, and not much time to do it.
I played racquetball this morning for an hour in my P.E. class, then played for another hour or so tonight with the racquetball club. It was my first time playing with the club, and I had a good time. I think I have a pretty good foundation, it's just that I really have no idea what I'm doing out there so anyone with experience can beat me easily. However, if I play a lot that will change. I'm not sure how much I can do this twice a day thing though. My right arm especially is pretty tired right now. It looks like IM softball is going to be tuesday nights, so I'll probably do racquetball at night just once a week, which ought to be enough to get me better faster yet not burn me out.
I have to remember to pay my rent tomorrow so I don't have to pay the $20 late fee.
Today my family put Charlie, our golden retriever, to sleep. He lived a full and wonderful life, but we will surely miss him because he was just as much a part of our family as any of us. I am going to go home this weekend, and I think only when I am inside the house will I finally realize how much I'm going to miss him.
Goodbye, Charlie.
I'm basically caught up with my reading for the two classes I'm taking this semester, although I'd prefer to be ahead. Today I did some research related work, watched a lot of football, and went to a meeting regarding the telescope making project that I'm on. The meeting lasted about an hour and a half and we figured out how much money we'd need to complete the telescope. It looks like it'll be about $500-600 for everything, which I think we can get. At least I hope we can.
Yesterday I watched the Cal Bears lose in traditional fashion, getting dominated for three quarters, make a game of it in the fourth, and then lose to a field goal with two minutes left. It was frustrating, but at least they made of a game of it. And they were playing a fairly good team in Colorado State University (although I believe we were favored...), so it's not terrrible. But they really need to improve their play if they want to finish above .500 and prove last season was no fluke.
The cable modem high speed internet has been quite nice so far. As an added bonus, we get free cable tv service with it too! I guess all they have is some sort of scrambler that you can easily unscrew to get the cable tv service too. And we've got a splitter too, so that's no problem. I think I'll get my own splitter though, so that I can get a tv signal in my room.
If you're wondering what the significance of the title is, don't. I thought I would write about that when I started, but then I didn't. And since I can't think of a better title, I'm going to leave it this way.
I have internet access at home now. Yay. Maybe I'll update more regularly. And upload more pictures. It'll happen. I know it will. Trust me, it will.
I should be getting a cable internet connection set up tomorrow with Comcast for $20/month. Maybe then I'll start making updates more regularly. All I want to do now is go home.
For the first time since I started organizing the summer softball games with people in the Astronomy and Physics departments, we didn't play due to a field not being available. The first field we went to was being used by the women's soccer team, so we obviously couldn't use that field. Then we were going to try this other smaller field, but unfortunately it was already taken too. So we didn't get to play. And it's not going to happen next week either, because not enough people are showing up. Even if we had gotten a field, we would have only had 10 or 12 players. It was a good run while it lasted, but I guess all things have to end.
Of course, intramural softball starts up in a couple of weeks, so it's no big deal.
Labor Day. That means a long weekend. But long weekends don't really mean a whole lot to me. After all, my problem sets are still due on Friday, and the research I'm doing still needs to get done. So I guess holidays don't mean a whole lot to me. Well, one day holidays like these anyway.
In other news, the search for high speed internet for my apartment is proceeding. It could be Comcast at $20/month for 6 months (then $50/month after that, but with no commitment at all), or SBC for $30/month for 12 months (with a full year commitment). Since I'm not sure I want to be around next semester, I think Comcast is the way to go. But I'll have to talk with my roommate.
Ok, I'm really hungry and I need to go home and eat dinner.