Explosive Donut

…you are a very sneaky toilet.

…you suck.

Now that I’m back at school, I really appreciate it when the weekend comes. Once again I feel like I only go to bed after I’ve exhausted myself with work (I’ll just start working again when I wake up). So, when the weekend comes, it means that I get to sleep a little later (although I’ll probably start working pretty fast too).

This week was particularly rough. I had a big problem set due for one of my classes. My issue with this set was that I was behind the week before due to a different class’s assignment and spent most of last weekend going to an AJAX talk (webpage design stuff). After finishing that, I had another assignment that was due pretty soon after. On top of that was the stack of papers I had to read now that I’m taking graduate classes.

Sadly, I got even more work yesterday. I have to start planning the end-of-term project for one class (and I have a feeling that another class will bust one out next week as well). Another two problem sets hit me too.

I’m going to try and have at least a partially sane weekend though. The plan is to go apple picking on Saturday and do something fun with Mark today. Hopefully I can clean up my ragged excuse for a room and maybe some of the apartment as well. I have a feeling a lot of that isn’t going to go beyond the planning stage…

I got my first set of grades back from one of my classes and looks like I’m doing okay so far. The best part was one of the comments from my professor:

“Nice test cases!”

We had to write some unit tests for our assignment and I just wrote a couple off without much thought. I think if I tried to pass these off as real tests at my old job they would have fired me very quickly. Maybe even travel back in time so that they could fire me sooner. I did put the ”Expected Result” as a header for all of my cases - the sign of a real tester =D.

If my prof finds a bug in the next problem set, maybe I should just have him file a bug in the database… 

I was flipping through some of the photos I’ve taken lately with my new camera (thanks Melody!). I found that a large number of them are of geese. Here’s the best one:

 
Does it bother geese that they eat and poop in the same place?

I also have all of the leftover bread ends sitting in my fridge for the explicit purpose of being fed to geese.

I wonder why I like geese so much. Here are my guesses:

• They can be pretty goofy when they walk
• They make funny noises
• They are easily amused (see bread, above)

I think the description fits me pretty well too. I was practicing my monkey noises last night (in preparation for watching the Curious George TV show!). The people walking down the other side of the street seemed to think I was kinda strange. I think Melody did too.

Folks in Chinatown certainly know how to make interesting cakes. I wanted to eat it but I would have felt bad cutting them up.

They look pretty shocked though. Then again, I’d be shocked if I was a pink sea urchin cake too.

I thought after I quit at Microsoft, I’d be saying goodbye to free sodas in those orange cups. Well, I don’t get free soda anymore but I still have an orange cup sitting at my desk.

Unlike at Microsoft though, I don’t have a stack of nasty ones from several weeks ago strewn across my desk. Just one unused one I got from a recuiting event.

I’m nearing the end of my third week of grad school. I haven’t died of exhaustion, lack of food, or soul crushing boredom. I’m actually quite happy.

Before my first day of class!

Reading is my new activity of choice. Not my choice exactly, but that of my professors. I probably read 50 pages of academic papers every day or two (today’s read was on the wacky world of data compression). I get to learn about new topics daily, which is a nice change of pace. I just have to work on not passing out while reading about eigenvectors and such.

I am also doing some problem sets. They are a lot like the Underpants Gnomes from South Park. Their rule is:

1. Collect underpants
2. ?
3. Profit

For me, it’s a bit of:

1. Show up to class
2. ?
3. Hand in completed problem set

Columbus day seems big, at least in Boston, so I get Monday off. So at least I have a while until the next problem set is done.

I’m going to a Microsoft talk on Virtualization tonight. It’s a topic I’m very interested in (and they have free food and an XBox360 raffle, which doesn’t hurt). They want people to bring resumes though. This might be a little ackward, as I just quit there less than two months ago. Also, the recruiter might be the same that I had at UPenn. That should be interesting.