Shouzer

This cartoon taken from www.redmeat.com. You should check this site out, if you don’t already. The cartoons are all really funny. I originally had it at the column width, but I couldn’t read the text so I made it the original size.

Indiana has decided this year to go on daylight savings time (Eastern Time Zone). Each county in Indiana used to decide which time zone it wanted to be in. I never saw this as a problem, but I guess in some areas, neighboring counties would be on different times, causing confusion.

Terre Haute was also in the Eastern time zone, but it did not observe daylight savings. It was basically on eastern time in the winter and central time in the summer. I actually liked it that way. I have never liked daylight savings time, and I thought that was one thing Indiana did right. Alas, they are conforming to peer pressure, just wanting to be like all the other states. Oh well, it’s only going to affect me 2 days of the year so it’s not a big deal.

418 is my computer graphics class.  While the material is actually rather interesting and I enjoy the end result of my projects, I hate doing the work.  Not because I feel the work is stupid or anything–it’s because we don’t learn anything relevant to doing the homework itself.  It’s pretty weak, actually.

Anyhow, our current project is to draw a person on screen based on some hierarchical bone structure information and then animate it.  I got that working this morning around 5am and promptly went to bed.  Now I’ve got to work on lighting a cow or something.  The model is pretty cool, though.  He’s basically shadow boxing.  We have to have two animations going at the same time so I think I’m going to add another boxer and have them sort of fighting each other.  It should be cool when it’s done.

So I’ve been sick for like a week now.  It kind of screwed up my Spring Break, but then I realized if I had to be sick, I’d probably rather it be during break than during school when I might have exams and such.  Well now I’m back at school and I’m still sick.  That just sucks.  It also partially explains why I haven’t been posting much lately.

In other, happier news, I got my laptop yesterday.  I spent a lot of the day just playing around with it and setting stuff up.  I’ll be sure to take and post some pics later tonight for your perusal.

My electromagnetics professor was making excuses today about why his lecture was so bad. He explained that his wife was up late last night working on a paper for her PhD which was due at midnight. It seems that she needed his help because she wanted someone to bounce ideas off.

Then he starts stammering about how they just didn’t want to go to bed after that. “You know…when your work on something…you just don’t want to go to bed…” They were apparently up until 2:30 “doing other stuff.” He never did specify what it was they were doing, but I thought it was pretty obvious.

I found out this week that I can graduate at the end of next February. It will mean taking a night class this summer while I work full time, and taking 20 credits in the fall. If I don’t do it, I’ll have to average 14 credits a term next year to finish on time. The major part of the senior year at Rose is the senior project which is supposed to span 25 weeks, and I would be cramming that into about 15.

So that begs the question, do I want to jam it in a little bit and finish early or spread it out and finish normally? Right now, I’m thinking graduate early. Here’s why: 14 credits/term would be a very light load which would induce lots of downtime. Downtime creates boredom and boredom+being in Terre Haute=sadness. If I have a full schedule, I won’t have time to be bored because I’ll have so much work to do. Therfore, time will fly by, and I’ll be done before I know it. On top of that, I will save a considerable amount of money by skipping a quarter at Rose.

One of the major downsides is this summer will be tiring. Working full time and then taking a class at night could be exhausting, but I hear Detroit sucks pretty hard so I might appreciate the distraction.

As you can see, I’m leaning towards the early graduation option. The biggest downside to it is my workload being too heavy, and I’m not sure that would be such a bad thing. Anyone have thoughts on this? Nick, I know you’ve worked and taken classes over the summer. How hard is that really?

im looking for some sort of program/plugin/extension/whatever to record streaming windows media content. can anybody help me?

yeah, so, i found the allan ray video. i’m not posting the link because you probably don’t want to see it. i just want you to know i found it. and i have it.

I had 2 pictures left from the Empire State Building so I decided to clump them together in one day.

This is a courtyard in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This is just outside of our hotel. We were on the corner of 77th and Broadway which is in midtown on the upper west side. We were about 30 blocks from the famous part of Broadway btw. I thought the neighborhood was pretty nice actually.

THANK GOODNESS IT’S SPRING BREAK!!!

I’ve been on break now since last Friday at 3 p.m. after my final midterm. Needless to say it’s been amazing! I was able to sleep in, not have to get up at any certain time, and, best of all, I haven’t had to go to class!!!

Monday was great, as I spent time with my sister and nephew. He’s gotten so big. He’s only 3 months old and already weighs 20 pounds…and he’s wearing clothes for 9-12 month olds. He is so cute though!!!! And he’s a really good baby….he’s just ALWAYS hungry! Didn’t really do anything Tuesday, just relaxed and did some stuff around the house…same on Wednesday as well.

Yesterday I came back to STL for a conference…it was on various topics ranging from Trauma Case Studies by the chief trauma surgeon at SLU, to toxicology of various party/date rape drugs, and my personal favorite, forensic death investigation by the chief medical officer of St. Louis (also a SLU doc)

After the conference I drove up to Chicagoland, which is where I am now. Spendin’ some time with the boy while I can. He’s tryin’ to get my to buy a 360 so he can kick my ass in COD2 from 300 miles away….LOL.

Other than that not a whole lot has been happening….same ‘ol stuff….class, study, and work. 

Work has been exciting lately. With the weather turning nicer, more people have been getting out.  And when some people get out, things tend to go crashing….and then we get a trauma.  Exciting for us, bad for the patient.  For instance, last weekend, Level 1 trauma, guy crashed his car into a tree.  He was a freakin’ mess…got the whole works: 3 IVs, labs, xray, CT scans, 4 units of blood, and a chest tube all before goin’ up to the ICU.

Once we got him up to the ICU, he started crashing…he ended up getting a lot more blood and two more chest tubes.  He coded and they called it.  They shut everything off, took him off the monitor and vent…then he started spontaneously breathing on his own.  So they had to put him back on and everything and resume working on him.  I think they finally stabilized him….after 3 hours.

I’m taking this weekend off from work since I’m up here visiting Scott.  We’re just gonna be hanging out and relaxing…he’ll probably kick my ass in Call of Duty 2 some more….he likes to do that…LOL.

In other news, I have to have surgery sometime this summer.  It’s nothing major, I’ve actually had this particular operation three times before.  It’s an operation on my left ear, to replace the implant that serves to connect my incus bone to the cochlea. More than likely, the implant in my ear has either been displaced or simply stopped working, which has effectively made me deaf in my left ear. After my last hearing examination, my hearing was less than 50 percent…so apparently i only use my right ear to hear stuff.  Prolly why Ii’m constantly asking people to repeat stuff.

Well, that’s pretty much all that’s new with me….time for lunch!

But still very cool.