Gearing up for finals, I knew I had four.

Four three-hour slots that would be spent hating my life and wishing I had learned more during the semester, as well as hours and hours of studying and cramming at the last minute... times four. Four finals sounds pretty bad.

My VHDL design class has a policy for exempting the final... but I just narrowly missed the requirements. My test average had to be a B or above (check), I had to be making a B or above in the class with all 3 tests averaged in (check), and had to make a B or better on all the tests (whoops... damn you test #2).

So I played the numbers game of making an Excel spreadsheet that let me plug in numbers for my final to see what my semester grade would be. With my average being what it was, and the final only counting 25%, I would make a B in the class if I made anywhere between a 68 and a 100. GREAT.

Anybody in college has experienced the phenomenon of selectively throttling their effort on the final. Basically... the probability of the last test raising your grade a letter should entirely determine the amount of effort you should put into studying. The situation in my VHDL class is a perfect example... when a C on the final will get me the same final grade as a perfect score would... why study my ass off?

I was continuing to dick around in Excel when I got an email from the professor revising the final exemption policy... and it was like music to my ears.

"You are eligible to skip finals if test average is 80 and no more than one test less than 80%."

SWEET.

And then there were three.

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.

Earlier this week I ran for the first time in months... and the phrase "out of shape" doesn't quite capture my pathetic level (lack) of fitness as well as "fatass lard" does.

So it started out like any other run, and I could only prolong the inevitable so long by stretching and whatnot before it was time to get down to business. Starting out felt great, but I'm sure it always does for anybody. Besides the absolutely shitty humidity.. it wasn't a bad night and there was a nice breeze.

After just the first little bit, the out-of-shapeness hit me hard. How long have I been running? Wow... 80% left to go. It wasn't long before my lungs and legs all hated me. It was a lot easier when all they had to do was keep me upright with the minimum amount of effort... but now they were shouting for a break.

While running, I saw a homeless man almost passed out on a street corner. I must have seemed foolish to him... running for no reason. To him, energy was precious; when you live meal-to-meal... doing something like voluntarily expending large amounts of energy seems pretty unimaginable I'm sure.

I must have looked like that spoiled rich kid... having so much money he could just blow it on so many superfluous amenities without a care in the world.

Anyway: the post-run endorphin-induced euphoria was great... at least my brain was masking the utter contempt the rest of my body had for me... a grievance I would later pay for the next morning.

So basically, I'm a fatass. I've promised myself I will attempt to run as much as possible until May (at least). May 3^rd my friends and I are going cliff jumping at Pace Bend Park (badass). So that will be amazing. More importantly though, I don't want to look like any more of a fuck than I already am as I'm jumping off the rocks.

I've got a way's to go...

I guess you could say I'm a fan of an entropy-driven life.

The concept of entropy for anybody not familiar with it, is that everything in the universe will tend to a disordered state over time, and that any system with a high amount of order is more than likely going to turn into chaos soon. Basically-- order is fragile and unlikely.

An example is a pyramid stack of crystal wine glasses. The system is highly ordered... it takes only a small amount of energy input before the system reaches a state of high entropy (in the form of shattered glass on the floor). Also, we would never expect broken glass to fall into the shape of stacked wine glasses; entropy is a one way street.

In fact, on of the bleakest potential fates of the universe what's known as the "heat death", in which the universe enters state of maximum entry... basically perfectly distributed heat in all space. With no perturbations, there is no potential for information or information processing, so no life of any form. But you'd have to wait around for another 10⁴⁰ years... when all protons will have decayed and all that's left in the universe is black holes.

Anyway-- I say I'm a fan because... order is boring. I also have the 10-year-old-kid tendency of doing my best to help the universe out by adding my own entropy to things. For instance:

I like to knock over, spill, break, destroy, and generally mess up lots of things. I never really grew out of that I guess?

But also-- order is boring in regards to people. I like to stir up people's ideas and long-held ideals by challenging them to think about why they think certain things. I don't like to persuade people to change their minds as much as I like to just poke around their brains a bit.

I also enjoy saying things in conversations purposefully to get people rilled up. All in good fun though... nothing that will deeply offend anybody (usually), but just enough to set about a chain of events that will lead to a slightly more interesting outcome than if I had stuck to the norm.

Why? Because order is boring. So do your part in helping the universe along its destined path and add some entropy to your life!

I'm on the phone in the living room when I hear a tremendous crash from my room, and immediately know exactly what happened. But first...

Backing up a bit further to set the scene: Derek, Anita, and Nate are in my room jacking around, horse playing, etc. on my bed. I get a phone call so I step out to the living room to try and escape from the childish yelling and screaming.

My desk... was a great deal at the time. Twenty dollars via craig's, and it fit exactly in my room and exactly for my equipment. Unfortunately, it had the structural integrity of a straw hut in a category 5 hurricane.

So anyway, I hear a spectacular crash from inside my room, and quickly the three of them fall silent. When I walk in, my worst fears had been realized...

And that would be the aftermath. Actually that's the next morning, in the process of cleaning up... this picture is the real aftermath. My room is supposed to look something like this, but somehow somebody got thrown (?) into my desk hard enough to cause the middle section to collapse, taking my stereo amp, mixer, PodXT, PS2, picture frame, etc. with it.

Luckily, nothing was damaged besides a few scrapes on the equipment and wall. And yes, I was pissed.

But like I said, nothing was really damaged, and I took the opportunity to take all of my crap out of my desk and dust/clean it before reorganizing it.

The moral of the story? The robustness of your desk should be proportional to your friends tendency to be rambunctious.

Lesson learned.