November 2002

Katie, Michelle and I are right in the middle of preparing a pretty large feast. It looks a lot like Thanksgiving, with a lot of the same food. But you say “Thanksgiving is 12 days away.” Well indeed, we decided to make a 20 lb turkey, mashed potatoes, carrots, cranberry sauce, and for dessert pumpkin pie and apple crisp. Sounds pretty yummy, huh?

On the subject of Thanksgiving, it’s still a week away, but I’m planning on driving with Michelle to her house to spend the holiday with her family. We probably leaving Tuesday, Nov 26 in the mid-afternoon. I’m hoping we can come back on Saturday, leaving Sunday to catch up on work. We’ll see how that works out. Keep watching my LJ for updates!

Here’s a little something from Rachna’s profile… It’s a little nasty, but definitely kinda funny!

Since I spent almost 6 hours at the tire place yesterday, I’ve had to cancel my afternoon meetings and engagements so I can place all emphasis on my DSA project. More entries are forthcoming, but it’ll be a bit later. Watch for procrastination-style posts!

If you remember back to last Saturday/Sunday’s entry, I mentioned my car needing new tires. Well, I actually went back to Wally World’s tire and lube place today and got the new tires installed. They are pretty nice tires, and the reduction in road noise is definitely noticeable. In the next few days, I’m going to make an appointment to get my car aligned. Then I should be all set for several years on the tires, with regular rotations and alignments, of course.

We got at least 2 inches of snow here in Albany. It makes things so much more peaceful, especially since it’s Saturday morning in a college town. Nobody is out, and there is a white blanket covering the dirty streets/sidewalks! If I weren’t so comfortable laying here in bed looking out the window, I might be out throwing snowballs. Maybe during the next snow, and hopefully there will be more snow next time. Besides, snowball wars are the most fun when they take place on a day when school was cancelled!!

I saw the new Austin Powers movie (Goldmember) back in June when I downloaded a nasty copy of it from the net. I was definitely disappointed with the quality of the Divx rip I found, so I only watched about half of it. Last night UPAC Cinema showed the movie in the DCC. Michelle and I went to see it, and I must admit that I’m glad I waited to see it on the big screen!

The only thing I can say is that I think they’ve killed all of their running jokes now. I’m not sure if they could pull off yet another sequel. Actually, I’m not sure I would even invest in seeing another sequel (unless it comes to UPAC… $2.50 baby!!).

I can’t believe it has been 11 months since I registered for my LJ. So I just renewed for another year. I really like this service, and would love to begin developing for it. I have lots of ideas for new features!

So today in COCO we were learning about assembly programming. It’s funny because our prof has obviously studied this stuff at great length, but he was having trouble constructing a simple iterative loop. He kept saying “well, I’ll leave that up to you to think about” and “it’s your job to fill in that part”. Remember, this is the first day we’ve seen assembly in his class, you’d think he’d want to explain it a little bit. Oh well, that was my funny thought for now. Onto my next class!

Right now I’m setting out to work on my next DSA project that deals with suffix trees. Basically we have to take very large strings (like DNA strings, on the order of millions of characters) and compare them. Sounds easy, right? Well, the goal is to use as little memory and processing time as possible. We’ll see how it goes!

I can’t believe it, but the Union’s server crashed again tonight. Actually it has a bad hard drive and will need to be replaced. Luckily the drive was mirrored, so no data was lost and the total downtime was approx. 1.5 hours.

I love Dell, I think my next computer might come from them. They shipped the new hard drive via UPS “Next Day Air”, meaning we’ll have it Thursday morning. The best Gateway could do when my server blew its power supply this summer was 3 business days.