Journal 2000-03
2000-03-31, Fri (Day 186, temperature at 08:13: 21.6°C, difference: -0.2°C, RC5-64 rank: 42,013, rank change: +47, total blocks tested: 52,557, overall rate: 770 KKeys/sec, rate change: -1 KKeys/sec, odds of finding the key: 1 in 191,012, odds change: +38,647): I dreamed I was in Mertz 250 and I looked out a single large window to a dark and mysterious looking Parrish beach. Then I was in front of this large dark building and there was a white photocopy machine set in front of the building. There was a notice that you may be watched by using this machine. To make a copy, my back was to the building. I made a copy of a few documents.
Today in E6 Faruq paired us off to do the homework problems due on Monday. He said that three person groups wouldn’t work. My partner and I had some fun with the problems.
I finished the engin problems by 14:00 and then went to Beardsley to work with Stephen on the lab report. In the late afternoon I completed the FAFSA and Profile financial aid forms before dinner.
The movie tonight, “Goldfinger,” was a disaster in trying to show. The first reel kept shutting off especially near the beginning and the second reel was printed backwards. The projectionist flipped the second reel around to try and fix the problem but there were only sprockets on one side of the film. As a result the projector wouldn’t catch the film when it was going in the other, right direction. So we skipped the second reel and got totally lost in the plot. Right before this point the about 15 person audience dwindled down to less than 10. The third reel had some initial problems but finished fine. And today wasn’t even April Fools!
2000-03-30, Thu (Day 185, temperature at 08:12: 21.8°C, difference: -0.6°C, RC5-64 rank: 42,060, rank change: +35, total blocks tested: 52,342, overall rate: 771 KKeys/sec, rate change: [N/A] KKeys/sec, odds of finding the key: 1 in 152,365, odds change: [N/A]): Since I didn’t do much work on Tuesday, today felt like a rush since I didn’t get to do my engin problems before doing The Phoenix Online. Instead, I did my part of the engin lab report due tomorrow afternoon. There was a fire drill just after 22:00 in Parrish while the staff meeting for The Phoenix was winding down.
2000-03-29, Wed (Day 184, temperature at 08:09: 22.4°C, difference: -0.2°C, RC5-64 stats didn’t update): I dreamed I was at home. I looked outside and even though this isn’t true, when I looked past the lake, I could see the Sunoco station on Morton Ave as looking from the Acme parking lot. I have had this dream before.
Then I was in a retail store in the hardware section. One worker that I knew was installing sprinklers in an intuitive way by putting the fixtures in and then putting a pipe in and then running a line through a pipe that would automatically connect to the heads through a tape adhesive. The installation was being done this way since before there were no pipes running in the ceiling.
Finally, I was in a supermarket similar to the Woodlyn Acme but this one was bigger. I was on the pasta aisle choosing between two boxes of pasta. The interesting shapes were on the top and the corkscrews that Sharples normally serves were on the bottom. I picked up an interesting shapes box and I also saw a shelf from the bottom a box with my clock radio and thermometer on it right before I was waken up by it.
Today was a rather annoying day. I got the network neighborhood to work today although it took the help of the Computing Center help desk. It turns out that the WINS server addresses should be entered in manually. I then tried to get file sharing to work, but couldn’t. I then installed AOL and after that the network neighborhood didn’t work anymore. I don’t know if the events are related.
Physics lab today went until just past 17:00. My lab partner and I had weird irreconcilable problems with our setup.
2000-03-28, Tue (Day 183, temperature at 08:11: 22.6°C, difference: +0.3°C, RC5-64 rank: 42,162, rank change: +86, total blocks tested: 51,828, overall rate: 770 KKeys/sec, rate change: 0 KKeys/sec, odds of finding the key: 1 in 141,514, odds change: +3,545): Math went really well today with a lecture on determinants. The afternoon however, was much worse.
I found out today that if you always go to the movies with your date, it is a bad sign. Movies allow you to be with your date but not have any conversation, the quintessential example of depersonalization. So by my going to the movies each weekend and walking in after it starts to maximize time, I am depersonalizing if I would sit with someone. I am also isolating by encouraging myself to sit alone since I can’t identify people well when walking into a darkened theater.
I took a nap from 14:00 to 17:00 and worked on various non-academic tasks after dinner.
2000-03-27, Mon (Day 182, temperature at 08:07: 22.3°C, difference: -0.3°C, RC5-64 rank: 42,248, rank change: +39, total blocks tested: 51,530, overall rate: 770 KKeys/sec, rate change: 0 KKeys/sec, odds of finding the key: 1 in 137,969, odds change: -66,407): The E6 labs for the next two weeks are on the two-week rotation.
2000-03-26, Sun (Day 181, temperature at 07:05: 22.6°C, difference: +0.6°C, RC5-64 rank: 42,287, rank change: +36, total blocks tested: 51,277, overall rate: 770 KKeys/sec, rate change: 0 KKeys/sec, odds of finding the key: 1 in 204,376, odds change: +69,474): Today was a day filled with unsubstantiated excitement. I put TheCounter.com on The Phoenix Online this morning and had some problems with it including slowness. I only did this since SCCS can’t do org stats and I feel cheated by just having one page tracker. I thought I was missing referrers, but the preliminary stats show otherwise.
I went to “Damn Yankees” this afternoon at 14:00, which was quite a good musical. Everything about the production just flowed so well and I left feeling good.
At night I worked on engin and had quite some fun with it, believe it or not.
2000-03-25, Sat (Day 180, temperature at 10:43: 22.0°C, difference: +0.6°C, RC5-64 rank: 42,323, rank change: +71, total blocks tested: 51,077, overall rate: 770 KKeys/sec, rate change: +5 KKeys/sec [relatively large change since the 2000-03-22, Wed stats weren’t included yesterday], odds of finding the key: 1 in 134,902, odds change: -14,885): I dreamed that I was in Mertz 2nd north only they repainted it to have extremely blue and purple walls, which looked very nice although the darker walls made the brightness of the hall much less.
My roommate got up before 06:00 and for some reason I did the same, although I soon realized what time it really was, so I went back to bed and slept until 07:00. I got up then and didn’t see the point of getting up at 07:00 when I only got 4 + 1 hours of sleep, so I reset my alarm to 10:00 and continued my day from there.
I worked on reading just enough Netcenter mail so that it is just under the quota warning and then I played SimCity 2000. In the evening, I watched “Army of Darkness,” which had a favorite line of, “Give me some sugar baby.” This was a supernatural movie made silly.
2000-03-24, Fri (Day 179, temperature at 08:08: 21.4°C, difference: 0.0°C, RC5-64 rank: 42,480, rank change: +46, total blocks tested: 50,451, overall rate: 765 KKeys/sec [lower since the 2000-03-22, Wed stats weren’t included], rate change: [N/A] KKeys/sec, odds of finding the key: 1 in 149,787, odds change: [N/A]): Jeremy and I had a lively discussion at lunch about electronic paper, the Ville incubus on the college, and other related topics. I also briefly forgot the word “demonstration,” like how I momentarily forgot the word “censorship” a year or two ago.
In the afternoon I met with my English 5a WA in the Writing Center. I finished my physics lab report before 17:00 in Beardsley and then started doing the images for The Phoenix Online. I went to see “Basic Instinct” in DuPont, which was a movie about hurtful love. The projector only messed up once and it did so on the last few frames of the movie when it showed the ice pick, which was an eerily cool place to fail as the image started rapidly losing focus.
I finished The Phoenix Online after the movie, but I didn’t get to bed until after 01:00.
2000-03-23, Thu (Day 178, temperature at 08:13: 21.4°C, difference: +0.3°C, RC5-64 stats didn’t update): I dreamed I told John in English about the lights going off, on, off, and on in Kohlberg 116, which actually happened on Wednesday as I was heading out for my walk. The alternating-light room was empty and the door was shut.
I also dreamed I went back into Pathmark after food shopping. I was wearing a black uniform and was stopped by a clerk near the bag your own aisles since I tripped the security. I said it was O.K. to search me; they were scanning me and it was active over my right side near my waist over this holed phone receiver-like thing. I had Dad’s keys during this check, which took a long amount of time to get through; Dad had to go home and get this old gray Cadillac.
Tom had us do an in-class essay for English today. The topic was the use of noses in Shandy and we were to write in Shandy style. Most of the class agreed that this was a truly strange essay topic along with the circumstances surrounding it.
I did engin in the early afternoon, Phoenix Online in the late afternoon and early evening, had a last minute meeting for the engin 2004 web site, and then went to the Phoenix staff meeting.
2000-03-22, Wed (Day 177, temperature at 08:14: 21.1°C, difference: -0.8°C, RC5-64 rank: 42,529, rank change: +44, total blocks tested: 50,179, overall rate: 768 KKeys/sec, rate change: 0 KKeys/sec, odds of finding the key: 1 in 181,718, odds change: +28,293): Seth today made a deliberate digression into the display of a painting to help one solve physics problems. I went to see Helene for math help after physics lab and then went to dinner.
2000-03-21, Tue (Day 176, temperature at 08:15: 21.9°C, difference: +0.2°C, RC5-64 rank: 42,573, rank change: +80, total blocks tested: 49,960, overall rate: 768 KKeys/sec, rate change: 0 KKeys/sec, odds of finding the key: 1 in 153,425, odds change: -69,184): I dreamed that I was buying something and I think I handed the cashier around $28 or $31, saying, “out of [whatever the dollar amount was],” like I usually do.
I had some extra time to work on the physics problem set due today. I also still had to revise the E6 free topic paper, write a physics lab report draft, and do lab prep.
2000-03-20, Mon (Day 175, temperature at 08:13: 21.7°C, difference: -0.2°C, RC5-64 rank: 42,653, rank change: +16, total blocks tested: 49,697, overall rate: 768 KKeys/sec, rate change: -2 KKeys/sec, odds of finding the key: 1 in 222,609, odds change: +65,475, first day of spring): The can crusher demo was today in physics. We went downstairs to Doc’s spheromak lab. I was in the second group for the demo and that time, this blue spark came out of the windings, which was unexpected. Today’s E6 lab was more of a discussion about the truss design project.
I went to Cornell after signing up for a tutor and worked on the Shandy study questions. Around dinner, I sent out various e-mails and discovered that the Network Neighborhood only doesn’t work all of time on just my computer, which is not very good. At night I went to Cornell again to read Shandy.
2000-03-19, Sun (Day 174, temperature at 15:32: 21.9°C, difference: +0.1°C, RC5-64 rank: 42,669, rank change: +45, total blocks tested: 49,544, overall rate: 770 KKeys/sec, rate change: 0 KKeys/sec, odds of finding the key: 1 in 157,134, odds change: +20,203): I got up at 10:00 even though the temperature reading is in the middle of the day. The reading was mostly stable for the time in-between.
I finished the link validation early tonight. I then started eating pistachios, but since they are not supposed to be eaten all at once (or even half at once), my left thumb starting bleeding under my nail. So I had to stop and now I don’t like pistachios because they are a high maintenance food. I like food that you can just eat and not hassle with unless if it’s really worth it.
I went to Cornell at 21:00 to do the engin problems for tomorrow and got out at around 23:17, which I thought was fairly good considering how tired I was by then. I then started playing lots of music, at one point playing five songs at the same time, which actually sounded kind of cool. The music coolness lasted for a couple of hours so I got to bed before 02:00.
2000-03-18, Sat (Day 173, temperature at 09:19: 21.8°C, difference: -1.0°C, RC5-64 rank: 42,714, rank change: +95, total blocks tested: 49,322, overall rate: 770 KKeys/sec, rate change: 0 KKeys/sec, odds of finding the key: 1 in 136,931, odds change: -23,603): I dreamed I was walking up a street seeing many tan-colored buildings in a newer city’s urban residential area. A white DOA Harrisburg PA helicopter, with the DOA lettering in aqua blue flies up the street and back as I see some black guys on the street that say to each other, “Muscles is alive,” when they see me. I’m in a seedier area of the street just before this part and one or two cars driving down the street are chanting some slogan out of their passenger side windows (like the movie last night). The porn dealers and prostitutes on the sidewalk misinterpret it as wanting sex or something like that. In real life there is a government organization called the DOA — the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
I started in the morning to take care of the desktop reminders starting with the first one — “backup!” Well, I never even got that one completed over the weekend. Hard drive usage has gone up about half a gig after the Virtual PC installation, which means I need to maximize the Zip disks I have. I got to the Transfer main and backup disks, which I can reuse as long as the transfer data is correctly on my iMac. I got through most of the files, but when I got to the Big Brother link checker, I started testing it on single-issue directories on The Phoenix Online. I met my Engin 6 WA in Willets after doing a second directory.
When I got back, I was prepping to validate the links on the entire Phoenix site. I started the process sometime in the late afternoon and it didn’t finish until at least well after 19:20, but didn’t run far past midnight, which is when I got back tonight.
I did go to the movie tonight, which was “The Best Man” in DuPont 161 since 16 Feet was doing a concert in LPAC tonight. The movie centered on a wedding.
After the movie ended at about 21:30, when I was walking past Kohlberg, I heard some emergency vehicle activity and felt some instability. I got past Parrish and in front of McCabe I saw a large cloud of dark smoke in the Ville behind Michael’s Pharmacy. As I was walking down the hill, I saw fire engines head south on Chester Road. I walked into the business area and eventually got to the scene of the fire. The Ingleneuk Tea House was on fire, which is on Park Ave across from the church adjacent to the borough hall. I later learned that the fire call came at 21:25.
The apartment above the teahouse was where most of the fire damage was. Half of the third floor burned through to the second floor. The fire was out of control for quite some time since when an area would be extinguished and then another area was being worked on, the first area would reignite.
The fire was not out for the most part until about midnight. Action News, News 10, and Eyewitness News were there, as well as The Phoenix. About four companies responded to the fire. The power was cut on the local block for about a half-hour until PECO came and disconnected just the teahouse from the grid.
I left slightly after midnight and didn’t want to go to bed right away, so I started working on the broken links in The Phoenix. This took much longer than expected, and I ended up going to bed after interrupting my work. I got in bed when the sky was no longer black and the birds were chirping, which has happened quite a few times before such as in the first halves of 1997 and 1999. I went to bed between 05:30 and 06:00.
2000-03-17, Fri (Day 172, temperature at 08:09: 22.8°C, difference: +0.9°C, RC5-64 rank: 42,809, rank change: +46, total blocks tested: 49,040, overall rate: 770 KKeys/sec, rate change: +1 KKeys/sec, odds of finding the key: 1 in 160,534, odds change: +15,445, Saint Patrick’s Day): I dreamed I was in my room around break and was near the end of an all-nighter. It was either 06:00 or 07:00 and I heard someone in the quad (probably Ben) pull off Scotch tape, most likely to hang up stuff. I also had on the counter a fork, a rubber band on a spoon, and a blue plate similar to last night’s Phoenix birthday celebration. I was soon going to throw these items away. I cleaned off my plate while working on the computer.
I also closed Internet Explorer windows, but forgot an important link that would be difficult to bring back up again. However this difficulty would only be true with Netscape.
Next, I was at home and Mom saw the back page of some newspaper or large magazine advertising a company that will teach you business and how to use the Internet, such as MP3s. Mom thought I should join the company.
Finally, I was on a Star Trek-like spaceship that was having verbal strife between workers and the administration. A glass wall was separating the two groups. Admin was in geek suits with their pants pulled way up and the workers were dressed in different colored uniforms that looked more casual than a typical uniform. At the end I was outside the spaceship at a distance. I noticed how nice it looked with the ship’s blue accents and then I saw it blow up after the workers were forced to have the ship go somewhere at the command of the admin.
When I was in the Sharples bathroom before breakfast, the power went out for a few seconds. There were no emergency lights in the bathroom, which I found to be a surprise since the bathroom also has no windows. Then when I got off of the staircase and walked towards the serving area, the power flipped off and on again. It was rainy and misty this morning, which is what usually trips the power here.
About midway through the period between engin and physics while I was in Cornell, I realized I didn’t bring my physics book with me since I was studying for the midterm today in a compressed fashion now. I briskly walked back to Mertz in the windy cold to get my book.
I put up the images for articles on The Phoenix Online this afternoon before the E6 problem session and also in the early evening. Afterwards, I went to LPAC, then DuPont, and then LPAC again, unbelieving that the movie “American History X” was actually in LPAC. This powerful movie showed how race can really have a powerful influence in people’s daily lives. I think seeing this movie had something to do with the dream I had this night.
After the movie, I found it necessary to walk in the Crum woods. It just felt right to do something non-routine. The full moon is this coming Sunday, so walking through the woods at night was a lot easier than when I did it before since a near-full moon is actually quite bright.
2000-03-16, Thu (Day 171, temperature at 08:13: 21.9°C, difference: -0.1°C, RC5-64 rank: 42,855, rank change: +79, total blocks tested: 48,789, overall rate: 769 KKeys/sec, rate change: 0 KKeys/sec, odds of finding the key: 1 in 145,089, odds change: +14,791): Today I dreamed I was at a picnic table in a large open air tent outside the Ridley Middle School in the teacher parking lot. I was facing towards the building and the lake.
I also remembered in my dream that I was in the Sharples vegetarian line, which has never happened, and Smokey Robinson’s “Tears of a Clown” was playing.
Today, practically everything was rushed and I was consistently slightly behind schedule. I worked on engin in the early afternoon, Phoenix in the late afternoon and early evening, a brief interlude, and then a Phoenix meeting on a staff member’s birthday. In addition, another staff member’s birthday was on Tuesday so Brendan got a last minute Saint Patrick’s Day cake from Genuardi’s for the occasion. Nathan also showed me how to get the digital color shots off the server and prepare them for the online edition.
I got to bed much later than normal due to all of the time overflows.
2000-03-15, Wed (Day 170, temperature at 08:11: 22.0°C, difference: +0.3°C, RC5-64 rank: 42,934, rank change: +65, total blocks tested: 48,519, overall rate: 769 KKeys/sec, rate change: +1 KKeys/sec, odds of finding the key: 1 in 130,298, odds change: -7,509): Today was an unusually quiet day. I worked on math in the afternoon and wrote the English paper at night. Other than that, not much else happened.
2000-03-14, Tue (Day 169, temperature at 08:11: 21.7°C, difference: -0.3°C, RC5-64 rank: 42,999, rank change: +75, total blocks tested: 48,220, overall rate: 768 KKeys/sec, rate change: +1 KKeys/sec, odds of finding the key: 1 in 137,807, odds change: +17,113): I dreamed in was in my parents’ bedroom and the roof was like a sliding sunroof. As the roof was closing to avoid pests from entering, a rodent encapsulated in fruit, most likely a pear, drops in. The rodent chews itself out and I go to kill it but I am having problems finding something to smash it with (like it’s a bug). I get my Asics blue trimmed sneaker but instead I try to get the rodent out of the apartment.
Now I am riding a train up to the area west of 69th Street in Upper Darby just before sunset, when the sun is illuminating everything including the train tracks in this orange light with a slight yellow tint. At dusk I am at the terminal but I start walking home. I thought about taking a bus, but I had less than $20 on me. I start walking back away from the city but the destination seems so far away, it is dark, and the headlights from cars gave this harsh glare. I saw route 108 or 109 bus stop signs on the utility poles, so I go back to the terminal. In real life, route 108 goes from 69th Street to the airport and route 109 goes from 69th Street and goes by Swarthmore College.
I also remembered that I dreamed I was walking north on the 500 level of Ridley High School and those walking in the hall had the large hall passes that Bill from Ridley mentioned to me. I however did not have a hall pass.
After my SAM meeting, which finished at about 14:00, I took a nap, expecting it to last about an hour or two. I didn’t have any work due tomorrow, so I was under less pressure to get up at a certain time. I ended up waking slightly before 18:00 when I noticed the room was getting dark. I went to dinner and afterwards wrestled with JavaScript to get it to display a pop-up for the letters policy on The Phoenix Online.
After getting the pop-up window to work, it was around 21:00, so I didn’t feel like starting any of my work since I anticipated touching all four classes today. Instead I wrestled with Virtual PC to get it to display the Network Neighborhood. I got it to work once, but then it broke again (this was after reinstalling), so I e-mailed a PC dorm consultant to ask for assistance.
2000-03-13, Mon (Day 168, temperature at 08:10: 22.0°C, difference: -0.3°C, RC5-64 rank: 43,074, rank change: +58, total blocks tested: 47,919, overall rate: 767 KKeys/sec, rate change: 0 KKeys/sec, odds of finding the key: 1 in 120,694, odds change: +14,247): I dreamed I was in the Hicks Mural Room for E6 and I received this red paper that was an advisory that I failed the exam. I was sitting on the extreme left side of the room. After class I was near the auditorium area of the Ridley High School (band hallway), where I realized I missed E6 lab today.
Faruq gave back the E6 exams today. Even though I got an unsatisfactory grade, when I went to see him this afternoon to go over the exam a scoring error was detected, which was enough to correct my grade into the satisfactory range. So my dream this time was wrong in that I didn’t fail the exam. The E6 lab today was a bridge design lecture given by Faruq and assisted by Fred.
2000-03-12, Sun (Day 167, temperature at 09:59: 22.3°C, difference: +0.1°C, RC5-64 rank: 43,132, rank change: +100, total blocks tested: 47,639, overall rate: 767 KKeys/sec, rate change: [N/A] KKeys/sec, odds of finding the key: 1 in 106,447, odds change: [N/A]): I returned to Swat between 09:00 and 10:00. I then vacuumed and listened to my new music: The Go Go’s and Chaka Khan. I went to a KiXX soccer game with Dad and Bill in the late afternoon. I came back after Sharples was done for dinner, so I had a conglomerate dinner instead.
2000-03-06, Mon (Day 166, temperature at 11:42: 22.2°C, difference: -0.3°C, RC5-64 rank: 43,657, rank change: +33, total blocks tested: 45,857, overall rate: 762 KKeys/sec, rate change: -1 KKeys/sec [first time I remember the rate change being negative], odds of finding the key: 1 in 167,902, odds change: +20,045): I was using my iMac heavily yesterday, which explains why the overall rate went down; the sustained rate was 628 KKeys/sec, which is lower than the average.
I dreamed that I was looking out my window at the sunset, which I did yesterday. The sun was a round circle orange and yellow in color. I noticed the light just went past the wall adjacent to the windowsill. I don’t think this happened yet in real life.
I got up at 11:00 today. I continued using Virtual PC and after a fair amount of digging on the Computing Center web site, I was able to mount Windows file servers (at least the college’s NT servers). When I tried to do the same thing on 2000-03-12, Sun, I couldn’t see any machines on Network Neighborhood. After some reconfiguration, my password wouldn’t verify, but some Mac users are having problems with that as well.
I left for home between 20:00 and 21:00.
Over break, I had dentist and orthodontist appointments, got my hair cut, took pictures of the new Ridley High School construction, went food shopping, bought two CDs, and purchased two dream books. I stopped by my room on Wednesday to download IE since it wouldn’t download completely at home. While on campus I also checked my postal mail and picked up financial aid forms.
2000-03-05, Sun (Day 165, temperature at 10:12: 22.5°C, difference: 0.0°C, RC5-64 rank: 43,690, rank change: +64, total blocks tested: 45,655, overall rate: 763 KKeys/sec, rate change: [N/A] KKeys/sec, odds of finding the key: 1 in 147,857, odds change: [N/A]): I planned getting up at 10:00 which would have been about 5.5 hours of sleep but Dad and Bill came back at 09:10 with breakfast from McDonald’s so I got more like 4.5 hours of sleep. It felt just like this time last year when I didn’t get much sleep.
A fairly large number of students seem to be staying over for break.
I spent the early afternoon converting The Phoenix top-level pages (About Us, Advertising, Subscriptions, etc.) over to the fixed table width and image dimension format like I did to the article pages a month ago. Boy does time move fast. I needed to convert the .htm pages to .html since the last modified server side include wouldn’t work with .htm. Also, I didn’t have to press reload to show an updated version of a page when I use an .html file suffix; I can just press return in Mac Navigator 4.7.
In the late afternoon I was going through files greater than 1,023 K so that I could backup without using more than nine Zip disks. There were about 470 files in this category and about half of them were these large Phoenix art images. This pruning took longer than I expected so I called home to let my family know I need to stay an extra day. I backed up slightly after 22:40 since I didn’t think the first pruning was enough.
Around midnight I finally installed Virtual PC. It was really cool seeing Windows actually run on my iMac. Performance was fine for most uses, although memory usage was a little on the high side, so now it seems like 96 MB of RAM is not enough! Reliability wasn’t that good, but my computer was acting up with unexpected quits over the past few days so the cause could be many things.
I found out that if I start up with the space bar held down to bring up Extensions Manager then that startup won’t have any sound and the menus are delayed in dropping down. Restarting fixes the problem. I remembered running into this problem during the “reformat, OS 9, Office 98 installation fiasco,” which occurred around 1999-11-24, Wed. In general the Virtual PC software installation was far more problem free than the Thanksgiving break upgrade. I got to bed at about 05:30, which is an hour later than yesterday.
2000-03-04, Sat (Day 164, temperature at 08:10: 22.5°C, difference: +0.8°C, stats data didn’t update): I still got up at 07:00 even though I didn’t go for my walk since Sharples isn’t serving food during the break. Throughout the day I was working on clearing out the reminder folders on my desktop so I can eventually clear out the e-mail backlog for the year in many cases and install Virtual PC. The oldest folder reminder that I found was almost a full month for my web site stats to be made public.
In the afternoon I made improvements to The Phoenix Online and since I will probably need to stay into Sunday, I went to the Co-op food market at sunset to get some high energy foods such as bagels. Dad and Bill stopped by soon after with a Whopper Jr. from Burger King. At night and into the early morning I worked on my own web site and redid the front page at Swat to have more color, content, and consequently more tables. I stayed up until 04:30 in the morning to do this.
2000-03-03, Fri (Day 163, temperature at 08:12: 21.7°C, difference: +0.8°C, RC5-64 rank: 43,835, rank change: +94, total blocks tested: 45,156, overall rate: 762 KKeys/sec, rate change: 0 KKeys/sec, odds of finding the key: 1 in 126,659, odds change: +3,353, last day of classes before spring break): I dreamed I was at a formal event and I was in this large lobby area. Then I was on Parrish Beach, but the environment was a little different and there still was ice on the ground between Old Tarble and Mertz.
Today was the last day of classes before spring break. I worked on the engin problems some more between E6 and physics and then turned them in, which is the last assignment due for me before break. I put up the images for this week’s edition on The Phoenix Online in the afternoon up to dinner.
I had dinner, which was the last Sharples meal before break, with Jeremy and Kai. We talked about various topics, frequently centering on how good The Daily Gazette is and how bad The Phoenix is, which I think are hollow claims. As the Sharples staff was cleaning up around us, Jeremy, Kai, and I went back to Pitt and watched on Jeremy’s computer “π” and then “Dumb and Dumber,” both of which are DVDs. We also took an extended tour of the Palmer and Pittenger buildings. The Dumb and Dumber DVD kept freezing and messing Windows up until the surface of the CD was made visually worse by cleaning and the movie was played through WinAmp instead of full screen.
2000-03-02, Thu (Day 162, temperature at 08:13: 20.9°C, difference: -1.0°C [building heat turned down for break overnight], RC5-64 rank: 43,929, rank change: +76, total blocks tested: 44,856, overall rate: 762 KKeys/sec, rate change: +1 KKeys/sec, odds of finding the key: 1 in 123,306, odds change: -14,992): I dreamed I was paying for something under $50 and I had few large bills but lots of ones, too numerous to count in fact. They spread all over the counter in my attempt to count them.
After lunch I went to the bookstore to get more quad paper, a multi-colored pen, and Virtual PC. I worked on my engin problems in the early afternoon, but I couldn’t understand how to do the problems. I did what I could by 16:00 and then worked on The Phoenix Online for the rest of the night. When I came back from dinner, the heat in Mertz was about two Fahrenheit degrees warmer than the thermostat setting. In about an hour, the temperatures returned to their original settings.
2000-03-01, Wed (Day 161, temperature at 08:12: 21.9°C, difference: -0.4°C, RC5-64 rank: 44,005, rank change: +93, total blocks tested: 44,550, overall rate: 761 KKeys/sec, rate change: +1 KKeys/sec, odds of finding the key: 1 in 138,298, odds change: +10,269): I dreamed I was in a hallway with old style office doors, i.e. no cubicles, but actual windows, blinds, and walls separating offices with wooden frames. A Phoenix staff member was talking about things getting red taped, such as an instance of one getting put in and a space (as in an insert, not an overwrite, the latter of which is what red tape actually does) in the article develops, in this case two inches. I walked down the hall, towards a window and on the door on my left was this article with a big space in it.
Also I was in Pathmark (not too sure with the sequencing) and I lost my family at the store. I left the supermarket and crossed MacDade Boulevard at a light that doesn’t exist at the south driveway of Pathmark. It was night and no cars were in sight, so I went against the light and walked down the hill towards Morton Avenue and went in a restaurant that I don’t think exists in the row of stores opposite from the Ridley Township Municipal Building. Inside, the groupings of what combinations of people were sitting at tables were similar to what the Sharples small room looked like yesterday. There were different types of groups, some knowing of each other, some unknowing of each other, and a few sitting alone. The guy sitting alone was by the door in front of me.
Today seemed fine until later in the day. The physics lab took longer than I expected since it’s hard to have a home-built motor stay running. I also needed to process the February journal file so that added about two extra hours to the delay. I finally got to get back to work on my linear algebra which I minimally started between engin and physics around 21:00 and finished just before Cornell closed.
The study breaks were about an hour later this week, but I still got back too late to catch the peak of them and by midnight I just wanted to go to bed.
