So this has been the longest gap in updates since I started regularly posting again... whoops.

Summer is here! This has been the main cause of my lack of enthusiasm for updating; I've been too busy having nothing to do and enjoying the shit out of my free time before works starts up at Dell to sit and try to come up with something to write about.

Also, Nicolle makes a great point-- without the oppressively dismal and unforgivingly constant pressure of tests, homework, and projects, there's very little reason to partake in typical procrastination activities like blogging. I somehow managed to survive the semester... although my increasingly desperate blog entries might have seemed to indicate that I was heading towards an eminate academic crash and burn.

I'm spending the next 6 days or so in New Orleans... hanging with the aforementioned cutie pie at Tulane University. Besides hitting up Bourbon St. and exercising my newly-aquired legal status, I'm hoping to get into my running routine (some) and hit up the gym if she's able to sneak me in. And though I might have too high of expectations for my lazy ass, I want to get back into photography, so I brought my camera and we'll see if anything magical will happen.

I realize this is nothing more than a filler entry-- but eventually I will write about some more interesting stuff when I have a chance this week. Topics that are floating around in my head include everything from my embarrassing inability to say letters correctly when spelling out loud, to waxing philosophical on my ideas about free will... or maybe just more of the typical horseshit I usually churn out.

Stay tuned.

If today is any indication of what the days of summer are going to be like, I'm in for a real treat. Walking out of my apartment this morning at 11:30, the weather was 80 degrees and sunny, with a light breeze.

To wrap it all up, the new bar in West Campus, Cuatros, was playing some very chill summer music... and then (in the most cliché way imaginable) two midriff-bearing and very cute girls run by listening to their iPods. It was like the beginning scene to some shitty summer movie... where an impossibly high number of interesting things happen in sync along the main character's path for 5 minutes while nothing important occurs so the movie can have the intro credits roll.

Of course, this picturesque scene was rudely interrupted by my own annoyingly acute awareness that I have two finals left to take before I can even remotely pretend it's really summer. The jarring context switch that was falling out of my day-dreaming state was the mental equivalent of getting sucker-punched in the dick.

Anyway... I've got a final in 1.33333333 hours and I'm camped out in an abandoned classroom getting in some last-minute cram time whilst longingly looking out the window at the multi-million-dollar Gregory pool complex. Time to get back to studying...

As this semester is (finally) drawing to a close, I'm anxiously awaiting to rejoin the ranks of humanity any day now. I've developed the bad habit lately of completely and utterly thowing any resemblence of a regular biological cycle out the window... and it's definitely caught up to me.

My sleep schedule will slosh around throughout the week... stretching inevitably towards an unbelievably out-of-phase cycle that might more closely resemble somebody's day in China than it would a person's in Austin. Even for a college engineering student, the last glowing digits I see from my alarm clock as I finally get to sleep mockingly remind me how screwed up my circadian rhythms are.

I also eat like shit the majority of the time... and I feel this is largely due to my impressively unpredictable schedule. When you get hungry at 5:30 AM, 90% of the time you'll end up eating something that exchanges nutritional value for taste and/or ease of preparation. Some days, I'll realize rather indifferently that I haven't eaten anything all day, and then proceed to superficially satiate my hunger with some less-than-healthy meal, or half-assedly eat a small snack only to perpetuate my permafucked eating schedule for a few more hours.

My regularly scheduled workout routine from last semester has all been for not... as my infrequent and irregular visits to the gym serve only to unabashedly remind me that I am a fatass.

Yes... I have a shit ton of work to do. Yes, this is the most work I've ever had to do for school... ever. But there really isn't any real reason as to why everything in my life has to been so shitty.

Regardless of the reason, I can only hope that the summer will bring change. Working a 9-to-5 will help regulate my sleep schedule, and unless I want to emerge at the end of August as a fat, pale, all-too-true-to-an-engineer's-stereotype BITCH... then my fat ass will get in gear at the gym and the pool. With nothing to do besides work, I have no excuse to stand idle and let my life continue to be a chaotic mess of tangled biological absurdities.

The summer (and change) cannot come soon enough.

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.