thehowe_v7.1

Well, I've been busy.

For the past two weeks and change, I've been traveling with my parents and brother across the country, hitting all kinds of sights. Check Facebook for the photos.

We arrived in the Seattle area yesterday. Today I: bought a car, opened a bank account, got car insurance, and got renter's insurance. It was a busy day.

If all goes according to plan, I'll have an apartment by the end of the week.

For the past week I've been canoeing with friends & family up in Canada. For the most part, the trip was pretty uneventful. With a few minor exceptions.

Like, for example, how on the drive up, at 3:00 in the morning, we hit a horse. Well, actually two horses. They had somehow gotten loose and decided it would be a good idea to cross the road in front of us. Nobody was hurt, but a car was totaled and two canoes were ruined. Good times.

Then there was the hotel we stayed at that night. We're fairly sure the receptionist was high. First she gave us smoking rooms, which was understandable. Then when we tried switching one of the rooms, she gave us keys to a room that was already occupied. Then when we got another new room, the sheets were dirty. Good times.

Then there was the portage we did on a day trip once we were in Quetico. The water was a little high this year. High, as in over half the portage was up to my knees in water and had a current running through it. Good times.

Like I said, and uneventful trip.

(All kidding aside though, we had a great time, modulo a little bad luck here and there).

My parents need a new TV. They've had their current CRT for over 8 years now, and for the last two years or so it's been broken. You can still watch it, but the color is all messed up. It randomly tints the picture a different color (blue, green, yellow, red, etc.) every so often, which often makes the picture unwatchable. The only way to fix it is to turn the TV on and off several times until the color resets itself.

My Dad has wanted a new TV ever since it broke. Of course, he doesn't just want to replace it. He wants to upgrade to a HDTV. After two years, my mom finally relented.

So, of course, it falls to me to do all the research to figure out which HDTV to get.

Right now, I'm debating whether to go plasma or LCD. On the one hand, plasma has a higher viewing angle, which my parents will need if they want to keep their current setup. On the other hand, LCDs are higher resolution, and seem to be cheaper at the lower sizes. Plasmas can handle lots of motion without blurring, but LCDs tend to have crisper images because of the higher resolution. Plasmas display truer blacks, but they also have a tendency to burn-in withing the first 100 hours of use.

Overall, I'm still undecided. For the kinds of shows my parents will be watching (sports, movies, standard-def cable) it seems like plasma has a slight edge. However, I'm getting a Xbox 360 for Christmas, and I want to be able to play it on the new TV, but it's unwise to play video games on a new plasma because of burn-in.

Sigh. Decisions, decisions.

I quietly added a link to the side navigation menu under the "friends" section a couple of weeks ago, but I thought I should probably mention something here, as the event it refers to is rather momentous. My old old friend, Nikki Wendling, whose family has known my family since before we were born, got engaged. Obviously, congratulations are in order.

As the story goes in my family, my parents didn't decide they wanted to have a kid until they babysat Nikki - so, as I've been told many times, I owe my existence to her. Our families didn't see much of her when we were children - her family moved to Ohio, so typically only once a year or so. Then in the summer of '98 our families started an annual tradition: Canoe trips into Quetico Park in Canada, just north of Minnesota. She, her sister Jess, myself and Troy have become much closer in the years since.

As always, news of people in my age group entering the "real world" is a little scary. Nikki's only a little older than I am (1, 2 years? That's horrible that I don't remember.), and the fact that she's engaged is just downright scary. Yeah, sure, people I graduated with are already getting married, but plenty of people I graduated with already had kids when we graduated, so that doesn't mean much. This is Nikki, whom I've known forever, and she's getting married.

Yikes.

Well, seeing as how I'm back at school with some time to spare, I thought I'd to a quick & boring housekeeping update. Break was nice, got to do lots and lots of nothing (as my dad said, I was "decompressing"). Read some good books, watched some good movies, generally just had a good time. Christmas was nice, as always. Got a bunch of DVDs, a few books, and a gargantuan Star Wars lego set. No complaints there. Troy got an mp3 player, but I had to help him pick out which one. We ended up choosing an iPod - it's overpriced and toolish, but it's fairly idiot-proof, so that worked out fairly well.

I thought I should make official mention that I've instituted a new site feature. I like to call it the "Angstblocker." Or maybe "Angstblocker 6000," I haven't really decided yet. Anyways, the way it works is, I mark the entries that I deem too full of angst to unleash upon the general public. From that point on, in order to view said entries, you need to be logged on as a member. Not a big deal, but worth mention.

My class schedule is looking to be quite nasty - my worst semester yet. I've got sixteen credits of upper-level computer science classes, with three separate groups to juggle for group programming assignments. On the plus side, the time-schedule my classes fit into is probably one of my best yet. We'll see, but I suspect I'm not going to have much free time this semester.

It's been awhile; life's been busy. The project cycle has been pretty vicious this semester, and when you add in the stupid busy work from non-engineering classes, I've been kept pretty busy. Deadlines for applying to grad school are coming up in a few months, so I should probably start working on that. I don't think I mentioned it here, but I did get a job offer from Amazon. A very generous offer. So that was nice. Even though I'm doing grad school, the job offer extends into an automatic internship offer, so I'm pretty well set for this summer, which is also nice.

News from home: apparently OE is doing exceptionally well in football this year. I don't really know all the specifics (my eyes kind of glaze over when people try to tell them to me), but apparently this team is the best in at least a decade, which is pretty cool. On a sadder note, apparently some kid in Troy's class commited suicide. I guess Troy sat next to him in classes the day he died, so he had a really tough time with that.

What else... I saw Dahlke a few weeks ago! He was in A² for a checkup, so we caught up over lunch. A big article appeared about him in a medical journal a few months back, which was neat. Apparently his cancer treatments were really experimental, and kind of a big deal, which I wasn't aware of. On a more selfish note, I also learned that I'm even more pathetic than I was previously aware of: apparently Loren Hunt has a girlfriend at Alma. The fact that Loren is now socially more successful than me is really pretty pathetic.

Moving on... work on the new website is progressing nicely, despite my lack of free time. It's currently about two-thirds of the way complete, with only the photoalbum, "about me" page, and some administrative stuff for me to finish. I expect I'll be cycling the links on the thehowe.com front page sometime early next month. At that point I'll also be shutting down the blog replies functionality on v5.0, since some of the changes I'm making for v6.0 have broken the old code.

So, it occurred to me that I hadn't updated in awhile. I'd say I haven't done anything, but that wouldn't be strictly true. Last weekend my parents flew into town for the weekend to visit. On Saturday we drove about two hours north to a little port called Anacortes or something like that, and took a ferry out onto one of the islands off the coast and did a 5-hour sea kayaking excursion. It was a lot of fun - perfect weather, saw lots of wildlife (harbor seals, various starfish and jellyfish, even some orcas in the distance), and it was a hell of a lot easier than canoing.

After we drove back Saturday night, we got up Sunday morning and went on a 4+ hour hike at Tiger Mountain just outside of Seattle. It was a beautiful hike - awesome forest, a pretty damn rough hike. We gained roughly 2500 feet of elevation in about 2.4 miles - but over half of that (1300 feet) was in the last approx. 0.8 miles. Needless to say, it was pretty damn steep. We had some great views of the city and the surrounding mountains at the top, after which we took a slightly easier (but longer) trail down. My legs were sore as hell at the end, but it was worth it.

After the hike we came back to the apartment, showered, went out to dinner, and then went and saw Batman Begins at the local theatre. It was the best Batman movie ever. The villain wasn't the coolest (nobody beats Jack Nicholson as Joker), but it was the best representation of Batman I've ever seen on screen. I may even go see it again this weekend - we'll see.

What else... not too much going on this week. My project at work is progressing nicely, and it's been getting more satisfying as I get deeper into it. We've got an Intern rafting trip this Friday, so that should be fun. In about two weeks, on the 6th, Ashley is flying out to visit for a few days, so that should be a blast. I'll have to figure out what we're going to do, though. Going up in the Space Needle is a given, but beyond that there doesn't seem to be too much to do in Seattle. Ah well, I'm sure I'll think of something.

Oh, and in case you haven't noticed, I added a PhotoAlbum to the site, which is updated with what few pictures I've taken this summer. Enjoy.

I have a dilemma. Currently, my "life plan" is to graduate next year and get a job. However, I've now had two EECS professors tell me that you need a Master's degree to get the good jobs. I would like to get a master's, except for one slight hitch: money. I've already used up all the money I had in savings accounts for college, my Mom is retiring next year, and my little brother will be going to college in a few years. I don't have any income stream to speak of, and I feel like it would be too much of a burden on my parents to make them pay for another couple years of school that I might not really need. On the other hand, I should be able to get a job in the industry with a bachelor's - it'll just be something boring, like debugging. After a few years of that I could go back to college for a master's. Then again, people always say it's harder to come back to school after time off. What to do, what to do.

Sigh... I hate making life-altering decisions. Especially the kind that don't only affect me.

Well, we got back from Canada today. I have to say, it was quite a trip. During the first day we managed to get stuck behind a bus-full of boy scouts, and lose a machete and a good pair of boots. Fortunately, after that the trip improved. We had great weather, with only one really rainy day. After that first day we managed to lose the boy scouts and pretty much had the lakes to ourselves, which is unusual for this time of year. Mosquitos were bad most every night, but that is to be expected. Biting flies were really only bad the last night, when we foolishly decided to camp on a beach. However, we consequently got to see an awesome sight: thousands of huge dragonflies came out of the woods to feed on the biting flies. It was really quite amazing to watch.

Now that I'm back to the real world, things are starting to accelerate. Workers are coming in Friday to start tearing apart our bathrooms, although thank God someone vetoed my parent's decision to do both bathrooms at once (in the process putting the only showers in the house out of commission for over a week)!

Well, it's certainly been an exciting week around here. Exciting for me, anyways. Anyone else would find it extremely dull, I'm sure. I had dinner with Ashley O'Bryant the other day. Her directions were flawed, again. I suppose it wasn't entirely her fault, though. Whoever designed Lansing must have been smoking some pretty potent stuff, that place is a rat warren.

What else... oh, we had an exciting day at Holman Pool Thursday. I was giving swim tests for admission to the deep end, and a parent disagreed with my verdict on his kids. He claimed to be a former Navy Seal, and was very proud that he had taught all his kids how to swim. After seeing him swim, I'm not suprised they did as crappily as they did. If he was a seal, it was a hell of a lot of beers ago. Anyways, he got into a yelling match with one of the other lifeguards, so that was fun.

Anyways, the parents are gone to Vegas for a week, so it's just Troy and I home alone. In any normal household, I'm sure that would spell trouble. Here, it just means we don't have anybody to bother us while we read. Not much else to say, so I think I'll have a cookie and go to bed.