Unlike the care free celebrations, exciting festivities, and home-room parties of elementary school, the end of the semester in college only brings a suffocatingly large amount of work followed by an relentless battery of exams.

My status? Well, with ¾ of a Red Bull making its way through my guts, I'm continuing to charge ahead into the uncharted territories of compiler code generation and processor pipelining simulation (2 of my 3 final projects).

For the last few days, all I have been able to see has been a sea of C-code, expanding before me like a vast and endless ocean of line after line of absolutely unintelligible shit like:

int GetPointerSize (SYMBOL s)
{
    /* 
        let's hope none of these are null... 
        or we are completely FUCKED 
    */
    return s->datatype->datatype->datatype->size;
}

It's so hard to even care at this point... with the enticing allure of care-free summer days creeping into my mind, the last week of school seems to be waging a losing battle for my attention.

However, if given a small enough time frame, almost anything can have the appearance of being important. Right now, these projects are consuming my life, and are soon to be followed by four mind-blowingly difficult finals, but 5 years down the line... how much will all of this really matter?

Nevertheless, I've got shit to do.

And now that I've finished the Red Bull, it's time to wrap up this post. If Red Bull really gave me wings, I'd fly away from my computer to an island where the only trees are things that grow out of the ground and the only risk for storage leaks comes from old rusty containers.

So I, with my infinite capacity for continued procrastination, have recently added some new features to the site.

If you direct your attention over to the left, you'll notice some new items in the sidebar. Under the "Status" heading, you'll see that there are two sections: The first (very nerdily I might add) displays my current standings on the world-wide ladder for the real-time strategy game Command & Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath. Wow.

More interestingly (maybe) is the next section, which displays my updates from the site Twitter. If you don't know what Twitter is, it's basically the same thing as the "Current Status" feature from Facebook... and that's it. Pretty lame if you ask me, but I guess the appeal is in the simplicity of posting short messages from your cell phone, etc. They also make it easy to post updates like that on blogs and websites.

However, there is practically nobody in my age group on Twitter, so it would be completely pointless except that I found a Facebook application that posts Facebook status updates to Twitter. So... in a very round-about fashion, my Facebook updates are now posted to my site.

The coolest new feature is found under the "Now Playing" heading. A small plugin for Winamp (Brandon Fuller's Now Playing app) pings my website with a basic POST HTTP request containing information about the current song every time I play something. On my end, some basic PHP scripting updates a database with the song info, current date, and play count. The songs under "Now Playing" currently just reflect the most recently played songs.

Eventually I will expand this feature, to display maybe the top songs played this week or something. I also will have a dedicated page that will show more info about what I'm listening to on Winamp.

Last but not least, I now am officially using the AMAZING Flickr API to interact with my photo site. The front page now uses this to display the first 60 or so recent photos instead of bastardizing multiple copies the frail Javascript Flickr provides to show random pictures.

Now that I'm using the real API, the photo page will eventually come back online in a MUCH crunker form that shows my favorite pictures and SHOULD integrate everything into my site.

Fun stuff... and more to come! A real update should follow in the next few days I'm sure, but with my last (3) projects of Junior year due this week and finals approaching... the outlook seems grim.

Of course, whenever there's a shit ton of stuff to do... procrastination becomes even more alluring...

I recently fixed my roomate's old laptop. It's a hefty Compaq Presario 2200, with a 1.3 GHz Celeron M and 480 MB RAM. It's underwhelming power in no way justifies the 5.2 lbs of flimsy plastic, but for working on my C and VHDL programs anywhere, it does the job.

The thing is, it would overheat within minutes after turning it on, so I replaced the fan because it would never spin up.. and it worked! When I first got it from him, however, I was messing around with it and re-installing the OS, and the only way for me to get that to work without it turning off due to the processor overheating was with a very creative use of my floor fan.

Everything was significantly easier once the new fan arrived, obviously.

In a completely unrelated event, I randomly starting bleeding from my forearm the other day. I was talking to my roomate when I felt my arm was really wet, and when I looked down I saw that it was soaked in blood. I ran over to the bathroom and washed it off, while trying to find where it was all coming from.

There was no cut or gash or anything, just a small pin-prick sized hole from which blood was gushing out. And it wouldn't stop for about thirty minutes. It wouldn't bleed if I kept preasure on it, but even after leaving preasure on it for about five minutes, it would continue to bleed. A LOT. Eventually it stopped, and the only reason for it that my roomates and I could come up with was that a bee had stung me (we were around a lot of bees earlier... this isn't entirely random), and the stinger had just come out, and that maybe it hit a large vein.

I am completely aware that that sounds extremely impropable, but there really aren't any other good reasons as to why I would just start gushing blood out of my arm.

In parting I leave you with a YouTube video that'll make you laugh, about buhLOOD! (it's funny, not gross you wimps).

As I'm trying to finish up one of my programming projects, I was scanning through some of the code I had written and found something that was rather... interesting.

Normally, I consider myself a good programmer, but sometimes I have to take shortcuts and cut corners.

Here is a snippet from one of my recent projects in my CS 375 Compilers class:

/* Increment the index and return the next entry 
   we can use as a label. New entry should be 
   validated as well and safe for whomever wants 
   to peek at it. */

int GetNextLabel ()
{
    return 3;
}

The amount of code like this seems to be proportional to the margin of time between the due date and the time I actually finish the assignment.

Hmm...

This semester, four of my five classes are based on programming. A compilers class (hard), a computer architecture class (very difficult), a Python class (moderately time consuming), and a VHDL design class (time consuming... and hard). This translates into me having about 1.8 projects due a week that involve a heavy amount of coding... as well as hours upon hours staring at nothing but a computer screen.

This might seem pretty awful, and sometimes (usually) it is, but personally, I tend to completely zone out and focus only on the task at hand. Its easier for me to do things in large chunks of time and remain focused than it is to break it up over small periods. There happens to be a very serious downside though:

I turn into a computer zombie.

With hours straight of doing nothing but code/compile/debug/repeat, my brain seems to shutdown all other rudimentary functions. Basic conversation skills seem to escape me, and social interactions begin to approach the awkward stage.

It's almost like the feeling of riding a roller coaster and getting off... after you get off, you still feels like your ass is flying around the track. Computer Zombie Mode is very similar... it takes a few moments to re-calibrate my reality. Example:

"I sure worked up an appetite writing all that code! Time to make a sandwich. Shit no bread! I better throw an exception! Time to write an error handler..."

Of course if I had be writing for one my C classes, I would make the sandwich anyway with invalid pointers to my bread slices on accident. My first bite would result in a mouthful of segfaults followed by me vomiting all over the place.

Luckily it doesn't usually take long to get back to the real world. So barring a few semi-awkward initial conversations and distorted thought patterns, it's a relatively painless process.

Now if you will excuse me, I need to go write VHDL for my design lab.