Last school year

• For the first 8 hours of November 19th, 2006, I was in the cold in Minnesota, wearing 3 pairs of socks and many other clothing layers, outside of a Target with Richard and Amber's fiance Justin. At 8:00 am, the Target opened, and 160 people filed in to be the first to buy the new Nintendo. So, I bought one. I think we were in the 30s if one were to index all the people who had been in line, but I don't remember. I got home later that morning, saw the very same Nintendo's on sale at JC Penny's website, and bought another one. I figured if my siblings couldn't get a hold of one, they could have that second one, but otherwise I could sell it. They never got a hold of one. So, the second Nintendo ended up being the big ticket Christmas gift :). I wanted to get it home without them noticing that I was bringing home two, so I decided I would be clever and ship the second Nintendo home separate from my plane flight. Of course, I get caught up in the details of things, so, when I was told that to get it there by Christmas I would have to pay 40 dollars, I sighed and did so, not remembering that I could just alter my plans and wrap it in a blanket or something in my duffel bag that I would personally be bringing to Utah the very next day. So, 40 dollars in the hole so far. I fly back to Utah, and a few days later, my box arrives. Excitedly I showed my mom the box and whispered to her what it was, and ran upstairs to go open it. Right then, a pale, sickening feeling came over me as I realized what I just had done. So, I had two Nintendo boxes in my dorm room the week before. One was empty, because my Nintendo was connected to my TV. The other was unopened. As I opened the box that I shipped to myself, I recoiled as my suspicion was realized. The box was a little too light for a reason. I mailed an empty box to myself for 40 dollars. Another 40 dollars and a few frantic calls to my dorm building later, UPS picked up the nonempty box from my dorm room in Minneapolis and got it to Utah the day after Christmas. Endless thanks to the CA who was still on duty there, Liz, for keying into my room and handing it to the UPS guy. I'm such an idiot.


• I don't even have any completely working laptops anymore. Of my last three, I have never seen so many blue sparks in my life than when the first one went out. That will teach me to try and fix a laptop with pliers. The second one looks like someone dropped a train on it. It wasn't me. I don't even have a train. I honestly don't even know what happened to it. The last one I did drop, but it still works mostly. The screen doesn't work, but if you connect it to another screen, it's just fine. So, this last laptop that actually works at all I got in 7th grade, making it my oldest laptop. It's a friggin' dinosaur. It's huge, unsightly, and slow, but it works. So, when I'm running the front desk of my dorm building, I like to stream my music from my dorm room computer to this laptop so I can listen to it. I spent forever trying to get the sound to work on this dinosaur computer. At 6 in the morning on the day of a test, after 8 hours of recompiling kernels, playing with interrupt register addresses, reflashing my BIOS, and a variety of other attempts at getting sound to come out of the speakers, I thought to turn up the volume.


• Two months after I had even been on a plane, I ordered the Spineworx from Skymall. Boy that thing is ridiculous. What was I thinking?


• Apparently, if you try and turn fast in Utah, going up Parley's canyon in a blizzard so you don't miss the last exit before you're stuck going up I-80, you will spin a number of times and slam your car into a ditch on the side of the road. Go figure. Luckily, Saturn brand sedans from 1996 are incredibly resilient and incurred no damage in any of the tests I did. My sample size for testing wasn't very large though. I would like to point out that I had my car inspected. The mechanic said it was in great shape. So yay!


• Something that I had never seen before was remote car engine starters, but apparently they're very common up north, such as in the Dakotas, for when the weather is cold. However, when that is not something you've seen before and one of your friends starts his car from 10 yards away, it's very hard not to exclaim "Whoa!!! Who are you?!? Batman?!?"


• I've developed a tendency to collect free furniture, and I've gotten exceedingly good at it. This last year I had my entire room furnished with free stuff. I had free coffee table for my free 27" monitor. I had a free LCD monitor for my computer and free cardboard everywhere. I even had a free VCR so I could watch free videotapes on my free couch! I was pretty excited about having more movie room, but that usually ended up meaning I just had an empty spot next to me. And so things go. Next year it looks like I'll upgrade from free couch to free futon.


• I was a very big stickler for keeping the bass down in my hallway. Just so you know, if you're reading this and I'm your CA next year, I'm totally laid back about most things, but, deep bass music just goes straight to my bones. Argh. Which is why it was so awful that I was completely hypocritical about noise levels. I got a Mandolin last Christmas, and have since taught myself a number of great accompaniment pieces on it. It's like I actually play a musical instrument now. Not well, but sufficient enough that I can be quite loud. It never even occurred to me that my Mandolin strumming could be louder than bass music, and therefore, once I discovered this I felt like a complete idiot. I will be making good use of music rooms next year.


• I discovered that I can pay much better attention in class if my hands have something to do. I fiddle or bounce my leg all the time, and long ago I decided that taking notes is worthless for me, so just sitting there for 2 hours is admittedly jarring to my sense of focus. So, once I started teaching myself how to solve the Rubik's cube, I found myself much better at remembering what happened in class. I could sit in the back, frustrate myself with a Rubik's cube, listen to the teacher, and comprehend what was going on, making my class attendance useful! So, after a few weeks of this, I finally figured out how to solve the Rubik's cube. Hooray! So, I can do that now. It's a good thing I figured that out before I figured out that my professors could see me fiddling with a Rubik's cube, which is admittedly quite disrespectful, as I probably wouldn't be able to solve it still. So, I don't do that too often anymore, but yeah, I was completely oblivious to being respectful to the professors.


• I also discovered how awesome Google Calendar is. I haven't had any need to use it this summer, but during the school year it has revolutionized my life. I can manage such complicated to-do lists on that now. Dang, best thing ever.

The summer

• I moved out of my dorm room in Minnesota, only to discover that next year I will be in the same room. Even with that knowledge in mind, I still couldn't leave my stuff in there because the room would be occupied by summer programs. So, all my stuff is in what was an empty closet down the hallway from my room.


• I went back to Utah, and really enjoyed being with my family. I was only there for about two weeks, unfortunately, which wasn't nearly as much time as I wanted to spend with them, but I just really like being there. Utah is fun, and my friends and family there are really hard to part with every time I have to leave there.


• I broke my second racquetball racket playing racquetball with Nick. I've since had it fixed here in California, but dang.


• Last Christmas, I installed a new CD player in my car. It's super awesome. It's an MP3 CD player, and so I'm never, ever tied into a situation again where I have to spend that much money to just attach CD audio to my car speakers (it really shouldn't be more than 20 bucks, in my opinion), the CD player has audio input. I'm stoked about it. I've never installed anything with a hammer and a wood burning kit before, but there's a first time for everything. Anyway, while I was in Utah between Minnesota and California, I burned the majority of my music onto a bunch of MP3 CDs, and I still haven't finished going through them. I think I listen to the most music in my car, and what's funny is my voice is always hoarse when I get out.

Next school year

foo:
	pushl %ebp
	movl	%esp, %ebp
	subl	$8, %esp
	movl	$0, -8(%ebp)
	movl	$0, -4($ebp)
.L2:
	movl	-4(%ebp), %eax
	cmpl	8(%ebp), %eax
	jge	.L3
	movl	-4(%ebp), %eax
	leal	-8(%ebp), %edx
	addl	%eax, (%edx)
	leal	-4(%ebp), %eax
	incl	(%eax)
	jmp	.L2
.L3:
	movl	-8(%ebp), %eax
	leave
	ret

int foo(int n) {
	return (n <= 0) ? 0 : n*(n-1)/2;
}

• We figured out how to open the outside portion of the elevator doors in Middlebrook hall while allowing the inner door to shut. This effectively locked people into the elevator temporarily, as the inner door wouldn't open for about a minute. We then developed a game for Middlebrook hall that involved getting your team to its target floor whilst trapping the other team in the elevator. It was great. Here's a picture.


• My roommate discovered that FedEx and USPS would deliver free shipping boxes to customers if they wanted to ship anything. The assumption behind these free boxes is that the customer would use them to ship things. We did not, of course. They also failed to put limits on the amount of free boxes you could request. Something like 900 free cardboard boxes later (involving 2 trips to the post office and a meeting with the residence director), we had built two forts with about a third of the boxes left over. Here's some pictures. Needless to say, all of my stuff was packed in 30 or so little priority mail boxes over the summer.


• I was carrying around WD-40 because there's some squeaky chairs in my classrooms and they drive me nuts. I sit in the swivel chairs and I really like swiveling unhindered. Naturally, WD-40 is a good solution. Of course, I never expected to make the entire back row of the classroom laugh, and I never expected that to cause the professor to stop class until I was finished. I also never expected to be stopped in a metal detector and asked to explain why I had WD-40 with me. My response was "squeaky chairs?"


• There was a lot of excitement and time spent on our build-a-projector project. Of course, though we did succeed in building a projector, it was never any good, and the brightness/contrast in movies was horrible. Really we just wanted to watch movies on projectors. I didn't care where so much.
  Obviously the university has lots of projectors. In fact, one in every classroom. You might see where this is going. There's no way every door to every building is locked every night. Needless to say we had multiple movie nights in different classrooms around campus. I thought it was a pretty brilliant idea, but I'm predisposed to thinking that, as Jeromie and I thought of it. Or so I thought. Apparently this isn't a new idea. One time as we were leaving, the room across the hallway had a bunch of people in pajamas and sleeping bags having a pajama party.


• I don't know if I mentioned the Nerf Gun battles? but those were intense. They spanned multiple floors. Little Nerf darts were being delivered to us by people we didn't know for days after each battles. The forts helped.


• There's a pretty neat sub-sandwich shop in this area. I don't know if it's national but we don't have them in Utah. Anyway, they obviously don't sell pancakes. Here's some coupons. I thought that "2005BassmasterClassic.com" or whatever was sufficiently Surrealist.

• I was thinking to myself this summer, after installing a compositing window manager on my computer with the XGL cube, "you know, wouldn't it be awesome if I could control window placement, workspace switching, and window focus with my feet? Why not get a DDR pad and hook it to my computer to increase productivity? Just keep it under my desk and use my feet?" Great idea.
  Unfortunately my new DDR pad doesn't completely fit under my desk. That hasn't stopped me though; I've folded the pad up so that 4 of the 9 buttons are accessible.
  Anyway, I've already merged the code from wmctrl and joy2key, and now I'm just cleaning it up, adding my own logic, and daemonizing it such that it will run cleanly in the background. I love coding in C, and I already have a working sample going. I plan on improving my code, and since both sources were GPL'd to begin with, I should probably release the source code too. That should be up on my website sometime. Hopefully, I'll get "dugg".


• This DDR pad project has already had unexpected benefits. My Playstation to USB adapter has two input ports, so I connected a normal Playstation controller to my computer as well. Since the Linux kernel joystick interface was fairly trivial to operate, I wrote a quick daemon that controls my music program in C with my Playstation controller. So in my room I have my one computer driving two keyboards, two mice, my 18" LCD desk screen (free) running over DVI, 4 speakers, a 27" monitor (free) I'm using as my TV, my DDR pad, and my Playstation controller. It's pretty much freaking awesome. I expect I'll find ways to improve my system over the course of the year.


• I don't know if you've seen my new schedule page, but it's run by Google Calendar now, and I can update it with my cellphone.

• The Nintendo Wii - Not so much of a project really. I just need to be in line to buy one opening day.


• My cellphone plan expires on Talk Like A Pirate Day (September 19th), so I get to get a new phone and plan! I'm looking for cheap, minimal radiation, maximal text-messaging, and bluetooth enabled. What I'd like to do is get a little blue-tooth keyboard so I can type on my phone with an actual keyboard. Wouldn't that be cool?


Hopefully this isn't the latest sentence on my website for another large multiple of months.
]]> JT Olds 1138170122 Wed, 25 Jan 2006 06:22:02 +0000 It's been nearly two months since the last actual newsletter update.
Consistent with my apparent update-large-quantities-infrequently habit, this entry won't be incredibly short. I'll bullet point stuff to help. Hopefully this won't take me 2 hours to write like last time.


• Website book-keeping
  You may have noticed that I'm phasing out my old newsletter system. In fact, you may have been redirected from my old newsletter. The newsletter system of which I refer is Livejournal. Livejournal's been good to me. I like them. In fact, most of my original complaints no longer exist, as they've made such great improvements recently. All the same, it drives me nuts that I'm not in control of my own content. Furthermore, Livejournal is blogging software, and that is not exactly well-suited to my purposes. I run a newsletter :), not a blog. I'm rather stupidly stubborn on that point. Oh well.
  While I was discussing blogs with my roommate, I rather sardonically suggested that what I should really do is on the closing of my Livejournal account, post the entire works of William Shakespeare so we could end this crazy blogging experiment. I have since decided against such actions. Regardless, I thought it was a good joke. :)
  
  I've made backups of all of my Livejournal entries, and posted them at my Livejournal archival page. That's here: http://www.jtolds.com/newsletter/livejournal.jtp. I have backups of everyone's associated comments for each entry, but they are currently not displayed as I haven't figured out a clean way to parse and show them.
  
  Comments, at least for now, do not exist anywhere on my site as they did before, and this means (again, for now), no visible comment section for my newsletter. However, I would still love your comments. In fact, I'll even respond on the corresponding newsletter entry if you drop me a note. You can contact me via a little comment box at my contact page. Seriously. Do it.
  
  In addition to phasing out my old newsletter system in place of my new one, you may have noticed that I have, in fact, redesigned my entire site. My web presence, if you will, is all reworked. My personal site has moved to jtolds.com and has been given a clean and sparse but functional look. I thoroughly enjoy it. My favorite idea was the accounts page. It's useful in linking all of my online identities together, and helps people keep tabs on me, if they want.
  
  Probably the coolest bit of the entire site is that all of the most commonly updated portions are fed into my RSS feed. Mind you, I don't actually use RSS myself, but if you happen to use a News Aggregator or some such, you can follow along with everything on my site like a piece of cake. Livejournal had an RSS feed, so if you were using that, switch to http://jtolds.com/rss.jtp. If you're still using Livejournal and want my new posts on your friends list, it's possible, but we need to get a paid-user involved. Paying Livejournal users can create syndication accounts, which is what we want. I'll mention something if I ever get syndicated with Livejournal. Concordantly, syndicated users with Livejournal get a comments section, just like a normal user. Again, if I ever get syndicated, you can expect to see me replying to comments there.
  
  If you were following along with Xanga (or using your email or something) and want to continue, then check out Squeet. There's tons of other ways to follow along listed here.
  The feed location or feed URL or whatever is http://jtolds.com/rss.jtp
  
  Otherwise, my newsletter URL to visit/bookmark is http://www.jtolds.com/newsletter/.
  
  
• Break
  Since I haven't updated since before break, I should probably start about there. The trouble with updating so infrequently is that many things I should probably talk about are very blurry, and I'll probably miss some stuff. I'd like to apologize in advance for the stuff I'm probably going to unwittingly leave out.
  I was in Utah from December 21st to January 16th. My previous Livejournal post said the 22nd instead of the 21st, but that's because I got in late on the 21st. Meh.
  Being in Utah was good times, definitely. I didn't see as much of my church friends as I would have liked to, but I saw a tad more of my high school friends than I have in the past during breaks, so that was great. I hung out with Nick () specifically a few times and I realized how much I missed that. That was fun.
  
  Being with my family was great too. I love my family. My brother and sister are awesome people, my mom is awesome, my dad is awesome, my pets are awesome. Woo yeah!
  
  I can't really recall what all I did before Christmas while I was there, most likely because I was shopping. I saved all of it until the last few days. :) I got into a little trouble with it (I still haven't given one friend a gift yet. Ahhh!) but all in all not too big of a deal. Christmas morning was spent at my mom's place, Christmas afternoon was spent at my dad's place, and Christmas evening was spent at a mutual friend of my dad and his girlfriend's place.
  
  I felt a little awkward about Christmas at my dad's. I mean, my sibs and I were pooped already, and most of the sib-to-sib gifts had been exchanged, so it sort of felt like we were all just there to get stuff from my dad or something. I mean, we gave him presents too, but it felt disproportionate. It was good though.
  The other thing I feel bad about is, well, I guess my dad's girlfriend is somewhat worried about what I think of her. I haven't interacted with her a whole ton, but she seems pretty nice, and I feel bad she's all worried about it. I don't think she has anything to worry about.
  I guess I tend to just feel bad about stuff.
  
  I got some super awesome Christmas gifts. For some reason, the one I seem to continually be excited about the most are these halogen lights. I don't know why. Nothing special about them. 2 bucks at Albertsons or something. In fact, incandescent probably would have worked too. They're just normal light bulbs. But I'm super excited. I'm very, very strange.
  I also got a toaster. Let me tell you about this toaster. Oh man. It toasts bread. It's unfortunate that dramatic pauses are difficult to achieve in writing; generally the only replacement is some written distraction. But it doesn't only toast bread. It cooks eggs, and warms ham. It's an automated omelet and muffin cooker. You can make an entire Egg McMuffin in the time it takes to put your shoes on to go to McDonalds.
  Of course, this sort of thing isn't allowed in my dorm building, but neither are halogen lights.
  I got some wireless headphones, which are awesome, but for some reason, don't work right by my computer. I haven't looked into it much. Essentially, they work everywhere except the place I usually sit to listen to music. So I've been using this other wired pair I got. The wireless ones are very useful for falling asleep to though.
  My mom and I went shopping for some clothes as part of Christmas gifts the last day or two I was there or so. I'm super stoked about it. I picked out clothes that I actually wanted. I'm generally too apathetic to shop for clothes myself. Anyway. All I have to say is that I like the pair of jeans I'm wearing right now so much I haven't changed them for over 3 days. Gross, I know, but I haven't gotten over how awesome they are. They fit me.
  
  Yeah, I spent a lot of my time hanging out with my family. It's a shame break is so short. I'd love to have spent more time with everyone in Utah, but I couldn't. I wish I could spend much more time with my siblings. Dang. Dang.
  
  The minute the clock struck 12:00 AM, January 1st, 2006, I was playing ping pong with Nick's little brother. It was sort of surreal. Everyone else was standing around cheering each other, or whatever it's called when you hit two glasses together, and I was all, screw that, ping pong. Besides, I barely stood a chance at beating him anyway.
  I then drove to another party, whilst formulating rules for driving on New Years Eve/Morning.
  1) Heed the weather conditions. Really. Like, if it's snowing, make sure you have plenty of stopping space and drive slower.
  2) Assume everyone else on the road is trying to hit you and will if they can.
  3) With statements 1 and 2 in mind, watch out for intersections. That's where people who want to hit you hide.
  Oh, and I generally forget to mention this one, but it sort of goes without saying.
  4) Don't drink.
  
  Four guys from Minnesota drove out from the first Saturday through the second Wednesday of January, whenever that is for a ski trip. My mom was completely awesome about it. We stayed at her place the whole time and she went out of her way to make us food and take care of us, and even came skiing with us twice. Dave, one of the guys who came, is allergic to dairy like my brother, and at first was hesitant about eating much food, but by the end, he was convinced my mom was the most awesome cook ever, which she is. I called her and she was talking about pizza, and Dave said "if your mom pulls off a dairy free pizza, she's magic." I had the greatest pleasure in following that with "Okay. What do you want on your pizza?"
  The other funny bit is on the way out, apparently John (my roommate) forgot to put the gas cap on while refilling the car. Because Dave was checking to make sure his credit card worked (it didn't work at one pump or something), he bought a 16 cent Blow Pop. He deemed it the Blow Pop of Shame and gave it to John.
  Well, so while we were skiing, I managed to lose a ski while on a lift by not lifting my skis up high enough right as we moved out of the little loading area. Luckily, Matt and John were on the chair behind and grabbed the ski. I received it at the top with the Blow Pop of Shame. John then regained the Blow Pop by managing to put the safety rail down on the chair my mom and I were about to board before we boarded it. This knocked my mom over and stopped the lift for a good minute. Yeah, funny stuff.
  
  I also went skiing with Michael Baker and Nick and my siblings, all at different times, and each time was awesome. The time with Michael in specific was great. We got to the top of a section of Snowbird right as they were opening it. We saw the guy move the closed sign. It had snowed the night before and the whole mountain was trackless and powder. It was phenomenal.
  
  My siblings are also excellent. My sister kept begging my mom to go over moguls, and showed no fear of anything. My brother insisted he wanted to snowboard, and having only gone twice, was dropping down ledges I probably couldn't have even followed him down. He was doing really well.
  
  All in all a great break.
  
  
• How classes are going
  I'm set to enjoy this semester incredibly.
  Take a look at my schedule: http://jtolds.com/schedule/
  Each class's title on my schedule (minus Racquetball) should be a link to the corresponding class page.
  I had Squash on Saturday mornings, but no longer do. In fact, the first Saturday I had Squash my alarm went off early so I could make it to my first class on time, I got out of bed, went to my computer, unregistered for the class, and went to bed. :)
  CSCI 2011 (Discrete Structures) is probably my favorite so far. The professor is great. I got to that class and my response was "Hey, I've found my people! My people!" It's basically a math course. The first discussion we had a pretest, and the questions on it were all involving writing programs to solve problems (like Sudoku) and how to go about doing it. Of course, I was ecstatic as these were the exact problems I had been thinking about the previous semester. I was like, "I get credit for this? Yes!"
  CSCI 2021 (Machine Architecture and Organization) I feel will probably be the most useful class. Currently we're covering processor history, but the first lab was about getting started with programming in C. I'm totally stoked about that class, but it has yet to pick up. The professor is lively and nice, but a little dry. Even so, this will probably end up being my favorite.
  CSCI 2031 (Intro to Numerical Computing) This class is more of a requirement for anything. The first discussion section was how to use Matlab ("so say you want to take a sine of a number, you do that by..."). The professor is very soft spoken, doesn't use a microphone, and writes very small on the board. I don't know what to make of it yet.
  MATH 5651 (Probability and Statistics Theory) This is an awesome class. If my 'favorites' list wasn't dominated by CSCI classes, this would be it. The professor is great, and the subject material is a lot of thinking and arguing. I mean, probability is probably my worst subject in math (last I had it was in middleschool though), so we'll see how it goes, but so far it's been pretty fun. The teacher started off by trying to get everyone to watch that NUMB3RS TV show. If I've managed to keep over the newsletter system switch, I thought she'd appreciate that.
  PE 1036 (Racquetball) So I went into this class thinking, piece of cake. Intro to Racquetball. I'm not bad at Racquetball. First game day I show up in jeans. I mean, that's what I've played my last like, 5 games in anyway.
  We started by grouping into people who've played and people who haven't. I went off with this frat kid who was like "who's played" and got completely schooled. Whoa. We had 5 games in 50 minutes. That's a game in 10 minutes. I got a combined total of 3 points. Holy cow. Arrrghh. So I have my work cut out for me.
  
  
• CA App/housing next year
  I don't really know where I'm living next year. As such, to keep all my bases covered, I put in an application to be a Community Advisor (different colleges call these people different things. I've heard CF, CA, RF, RA, etc etc). I had been contemplating this anyway, but when the deadline came around and I had 5 essays to write the night before, I bit the bullet and turned in an application. I just had my first CA workshop today (as I need to go through like, 8 workshops before they even tell me if I have an offer) and it was okay, but I don't even know if I want to be a CA.
  Part of me really does. It sounds like fun. I mean, I don't always get along with everyone perfectly, but it just seems like something I'd like. The nice people who did my references at the last minute also seem to think I'd do an outstanding job. So I don't know.
  On the other hand, it seems like social suicide for hanging out with people my age. My free time would be with my residents, for the most part, so I don't know. On top of that, living with the people around me right now again would be awesome (John, hopefully Matt if I decide to go that way), living with Biblestudy people would be awesome too.
  Either way is huge savings in cost, but the CA position is free room and board and food, along with a stipend. That's pretty alluring too.
  
  I'm very torn, and need to decide soon. Any suggestions, comments, advice would be welcome.
  
  
• Pancakes
  John and I went to Jimmy John's (a local sub shop) a few days ago, and John requested pancakes. They told him to get out. Once John left, they gave me some bread to go throw at him. It was pretty awesome. So we got back to our room and our neighbors were going somewhere. When we were told Jimmy John's, we got all excited, much to their confusion, and went with them again to encourage them to ask for pancakes. John ordered again after everyone else had, and asked for some pancakes. The guy said he didn't have any pancakes (it's a sub shop for heaven's sake). John requested if they had any g*d d*** pancakes, to which the cashier politely responded "no." So John left again, yelling "I'll be back!"
  Someone behind the cashier yelled "Stay out!"
  So the current plan is the following. Students in the business school here get free printing. We make coupons for free or cheap pancakes at Jimmy John's, and plaster the campus with thousands of copies (with the help of a business student). We win when Jimmy John's has to put up a "We have no pancakes" sign.
  So sophmoric, I know. Which is ironic. I am a sophmore. I promise schoolwork will stay a priority.
  
  
• Websites
  I'm currently being loaded down with website "jobs." Notably the redesign of Campus Crusade's UMN site and the redesign of Jeremiah's Fire's site. Neither of which are done as I write this. I have tons to do for both, so I'm rather busy. Of course, I have yet other websites to work on, such as one for the GSLC youth group, for which I am at least a year late.
  Luckily, I've gathered some graphic design assistance for both of the main two sites, so it won't take quite as much time, but all the same, with the features I have in mind, both could be massive undertakings.
  
  
• Mensa test
  One of the biggest near-wastes of time I've come across in the first week of school (Today is the first week day I've had two of this semester) is this Mensa test. So far, I've completed 30 of the problems (2 had help) and have 3 left. I was completely obsessed last Friday, and was up until 4 last Thursday night working on it. It's a blast.
  Oh, dude. I just checked the site. They have Part 2 up now. Crap. Well, I need to wrap up this entry then.
  
  
• Nerf Guns
  One last point of note. Last Thursday my roommate went to Target and bought 1 of every Nerf gun they sold, along with lots of ammo refills. Needless to say, at 1 last night there were little foam darts all over the floor and couches and chairs standing on their sides to give more adequate protection.
  Apparently this is the inspiration.
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