I hadn’t written anything about this yet because I didn’t really know what to say. I’d never had to approach the topic before. So I’ll just go straight from the heart, and hope the details are remembered correctly.

Wednesday, after class, I spent the afternoon finding a florist. I needed daisies; I knew that they were her favorite. The rest of the time before choir was spent in anxious anticipation of seeing her and trying to figure out what I was going to say to her. Those daisies in the refrigerator served as a reminder that I couldn’t turn back. Of course, I didn’t want to.

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And so my second semester at UF starts. It’s nice to see all of my friends down here again, but of course there are courses to deal with as well.

So far, I’ve gone to two of my courses, and I’ll go to the other two tomorrow for the first time. I have a really balanced schedule – the same two periods every day but Tuesday, which has those same two plus a couple more. So my worst day will be Tuesay again, but it’ll only be four hours. Much better than last semester’s six-hour Tuesday.

One of my classes looks like it will involve a lot of coding. We get our first assignment on the 10th of this month. When asked about how much code would be involved in the final project, the professor couldn’t say exactly, but put his ballpark guess at 4,000 or 5,000 lines of code. Which amounts to twice the size of the second project that I did in OS. Of course, I only had three weeks to do that, so it doesn’t look like that much by comparison.

The other class that I went to today will use three tests to determine the final grade. You can’t imagine what the thought of a class with no projects makes me do inside. Already, I’m a leg up on last semester as far as time constraints go.

Academically, my springs have almost always been easier than my fall semesters. I’m not sure if that’s because of the fact that classes tend to be easier, or just that I don’t have college football to distract me on the weekends, but whatever works.

In other news, I’ve been semi-recruited to sing with the praise team on Sunday at my church down here. We’ll see how that goes, I guess. I practiced with them for the first time last night.

Driving the truck is going well, for the most part. I didn’t have to drive it today, but I was on the road a lot going to and from church yesterday. Thankfully, I didn’t ever stall out, but my friend Mike said that it was kind of funny to watch me starting off from the line – I still tend to lurch a lot. But it’s becoming easier each time I do it – I even let myself listen to music while I’m driving in the city now.

The living room looks a lot larger now that the Christmas tree is packed away for another year. Because of that, it looks a lot barer, too. It’s not sterile or anything, but it could stand a few more things on the walls. The two small Jack Deloney prints that I received as a Christmas gift from my grandmother have already found their way onto my “dining room” wall – I quote that only because it’s not really a room so much as a section of my apartment’s living room. They fit in well with the table and chairs that I have there. My walls are still pretty bare, though, I must admit. I’ve got multiple prints that I need to frame, including a couple more Jack Deloneys. I didn’t realize that framing was that expensive. Maybe I need to consider a side business once I start my teaching career.

Going through the four boxes of stuff that I brought back to my apartment with me (and promptly throwing the majority of it away), I came upon something that piqued my curiosity: The Journal Of Brandon German. Was I describing possession of the journal using Spanish form, or just attempting to make the title evoke thoughts of Anne Frank? I didn’t stop to ponder; instead, I opened the light blue folder that contained the thoughts of a tenth-grade boy.

Oh, man. You want to talk about bad writing? This was “Wince and shake your head” bad. This was “Saved By The Bell plotline and dialogue” bad. This was “How in the world did I graduate high school?” bad. Reading the journal, laughing at the sheer inadequacy of it all, a thought struck me: was I the epitome of male teen angst, or what?

I’d give you a sample of this, ahem, literary work, but 1) I wouldn’t be able to find anything in it that wouldn’t embarrass me entirely, and 2) I’ve already thrown it away. It did make for some pretty funny reading for me for about 20 minutes, though.

I’m back in Gainesville, with the first post of the new year! I hope that all of you had a wonderful Christmas, and that the new year has started out well.

My break has been great. I’ve gotten some much-needed downtime, and that’s always a plus. And I was able to see a lot of friends that I hadn’t seen in a while. I drove up to Birmingham and saw Ricky and Tammy for a couple of days. I went to church with them on Sunday. Ricky sat with me so I wouldn’t be all by myself among a couple of thousand (Dawson Memorial Baptist Church is not exactly your small church) while Tammy sang in the choir. It was kind of funny when at the end of the service, a lady sitting in the pew in front of us turned around and said, “I just enjoyed your singing so much; you two should be in choir!” Ricky should have told her about 1122 Productions’ duet career.

I also got to see my friends Chad and Karen one night; we saw The Two Towers. All of us had already seen it, but we wanted to take it in again. We also cajoled Chad into going bowling. I promptly rolled the worst two games I’ve bowled in a while. I’ll mark it up to not having my shoes and my left-handed ball…yeah, that’s it. I had hoped to see my friend Amanda some over the break, but I wasn’t able to get in touch with her other than seeing her at church once. So if you read this, Amanda, e-mail me!

I got to play golf for the first time since May, and found that not only does absence make the heart grow fonder, it also makes the golf swing better. I played better than I ever have before. I even made my first-ever birdie! I’ve updated my golf page accordingly.

Alas, not all was well. My car was sicker than we had originally anticipated, so my parents told me to leave it in Ozark with them. This left me in a tough position; the only other car available was our S-10 pickup. This wouldn’t be bad normally, but it’s a stick shift. We all remember our previous encounter with a stick shift, don’t we? No time like the present to learn again, right? So what did I promptly do? Just used it to drive all the way up to Birmingham when I went to see Ricky and Tammy. I hadn’t realized just how hilly Birmingham is, but being in a stick shift will make you learn a lot of things really quickly. I wonder if they’ve managed to scrape all that rubber I left off of that one hill yet. I told my mom that going through one area that included lots of traffic lights back-to-back, I was praying to God for “green lights, good starts, or nice people”. But now I’ve driven it exclusively for almost a week now, and I have to say that I’m getting pretty used to it. And a good thing too, seeing as it’s going to be my mode of transportation for a while.

But now I’m back. This afternoon has been mainly spent taking down all the Christmas decorations (always kinda sad in a way), unpacking all of the boxes of stuff that my sister and brother-in-law were holding for me at their house, and making a grocery run because I had next-to-nothing in the apartment that was edible. I’m trying to wash all of the clothing that was in those boxes too…it’s like getting a completely new wardrobe!

The break’s been great. Now I’m ready to jump back into the swing of things again and see the friends that I’ve made down here. I just hope that they aren’t all too mad about the Outback Bowl fiasco. 🙂

I went and took my programming language principles test this morning. I’ve never, in my life, worried so much about one test. I was really concerned that I would have to re-take the course, as it’s a core course, and according to the department you can’t use anything lower than a B in core courses.

I don’t mesh well with the professor’s style of tests. I made a C – a low C – on the first test, and this one was pretty rough as well. If it wasn’t for my decent homework average and perfect project score, I wouldn’t have much of a chance at all of making a B in the first place. I didn’t even know what my homework average was until after I took the test. But I needed to make a 70 on the final to get my B, which I’m pretty confident that I did.

So now, I have two options. One is to pack tonight and head out early tomorrow. The other is to take an optional final in operating systems tomorrow, with the hopes of moving a B+ in my other core course to an A. That would be nice, on consideration that it’d help to counterbalance that B in PLP. But I haven’t been able to get myself to study for it yet. I had a test in there only a couple of weeks ago, so a lot of the information is probably still fresh.

I’ve already decided that I’m going to show up and at least take a look at the test. If I feel that I can do well on it, I’ll give it a shot; otherwise, I’ll just walk out immediately.

Okay, so enough about school. I’m tired of talking about it, myself.

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All I wanted for Christmas this year was help in paying for a new computer – a laptop. Well, guess what this entry’s coming from the keyboard of. 🙂 I love it already. I’ll give specs on it later, because I’m going to spend the majority of the rest of the night getting everything immediately necessary set up on it.

Maybe now I’ll be able to update my site often enough for Ricky’s tastes. 🙂

About 5 minutes ago, I turned in my second project for operating systems, 10 minutes ahead of the deadline. Was it complete? I’m sorry…you must have had this confused with an undergraduate project.

We were given two weeks to do this thing. While juggling other projects/tests/homework, I still worked on this thing for who knows how many hours. Total lines of code written: 2,666. Total number of Java classes: 20. And most of it still doesn’t work correctly, even after about 7 hours spent doing nothing but debugging.

I got up this morning at 8:10 a.m., and save the time eating breakfast and attending the one class that I had today, I have spent every second in front of my computer screen today attempting to get this thing done. I succeeded somewhat. It compiles, it even does some of the things it’s supposed to correctly. But it’s not complete.

While at class, a colleague informed me that some of the people in my class had just given up and turned whatever they had in. It was just another reminder that we’re all in the same boat, for the most part.

The professor let us know that he was unsure of the scope of the project and that it was difficult to walk the fine line between interesting and overwhelming. Let’s just say that the line is a dot to him, as far as this project is concerned. If you gave me another week, with absolutely nothing else on my plate, maybe, just maybe, I could have it done by then.

And, of course, the next project builds off of this one. Gales of laughter come from our collective weary souls here. It’s the laughter of the downtrodden.

Yep, EE 480 was hard, when I took it. The MBA coursework was difficult, when I took it. Yet the bar still has the ability to be raised even further, and it has been here. I don’t know if I can take too many more days like this. The scary thing is, this upcoming month looks to be fraught with them.

EE 480 was AA-ball. The MBA was AAA. This, kids, is staring down Randy Johnson.

I realize that this isn’t exactly uplifting news, but please understand. I just spent the past 16 hours either staring at a computer screen or in class. I’m amazed my brain is still functioning properly.

As I write this, I could work on my operating systems project for another 6 minutes and still turn it in on time. But it wouldn’t work any more then than it does now. So it’s turned in, and now I finally have a bit of what you might call free time.

In reality, it’s not really all that free. I have a project due on the 18th, another on the 24th, and midterms on the 21st, 24th, and 29th. But at least the next thing in front of me has a due date that’s a week from now.

So let’s see…where did I leave you off, gentle reader? Beginning of October, I believe. I’d just learned that the aforementioned operating systems project had been moved back a week (and a good thing too; I still only managed to get it mostly done even with the extra week). But I had plenty of other stuff to deal with as well. So here’s a quick rundown of the time since then, not counting class time.

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We all knew that it would come to this at some point.

It was only a matter of time, I knew, that a one-week or two-week period would come along that would just be so loaded with stuff to do that I would feel absolutely inundated. Then I would truly know that Ph.D. does indeed stand for Piled Higher and Deeper.

Those two weeks have come.

In the next two weeks, I have a homework assignment due in one class. I have a project due in three of my classes. I have a midterm in my hardest class. A couple of weeks after that, I have a project due in the fourth class.

This past Friday night, I actually did work on a project. This was a first for me in all my years of school. Beforehand, Friday night was sacred, a time to celebrate the weekend having come. Unfortunately, I knew that I couldn’t do that this particular Friday.

I started working on my CIS 6930 project. Why? Because I’d done everything that I could on my COP 5725 (databases) project, and I didn’t know how to start my COP 5615 (operating systems) project. I actually got it practically complete by the time the night was over, and finished it up Saturday evening after football (which I will not give up no matter what deadlines loom).

This still leaves me with my COP 5615 project, which I started working on this morning and for the most part have worked on all day. Then tonight, I looked on the course announcement page and saw the magic words.

“The deadline for project 1 has been postponed to 10/10.” Woo-hoo!

Now, this doesn’t mean that I stopped working on the project. It just means that I didn’t have to remind myself to breathe every now and then while doing so.

It’s been a while, I realize. At least it has been for me.

Let’s see. So what’s happened since I last posted?

• Got back my first homework grades. It’s nice to know if I completely fail everything else in COP 5615, I’ll have a 1.88.
• Actually read textbooks. What is this? You’re not supposed to have to read the books.
• Solved at least 10 crosswords.
• Played in quite a few boggy-pong games. Realized that this is a game that Alabama’s BCM could have fun with, except that Bill would kill everyone in it.
• Paid huge first bills for power, home phone, and cell phone. Account goes way, way down. Remembered that I’m a college student – having less than $200 in my checking account is a way of life.
• Discovered there’s a cheese that I don’t like – Monterey Jack.
• Car had a radiator go out. Fixed.
• Went to my first Florida football game – a torrential downpour almost the entire game. Wore my rainsuit. Was one of only three in my party with a rainsuit.
• Car had a headlight go out. Fixed.
• The first two tellings of the “cycle of death” story occurred, with predictable results.
• Car had a tire go flat. Fixed.
• Actually been associated with a school that beat Tennessee. Now if it can only happen again on October 26…
• Found what I believe will become my church home here at UF.

Amidst other things. But that’s what comes to mind right now.