Saturday, May 3, 2008

Back In Black And White

Good evening everyone,

I know it’s been a while since my last post. School and work have kept me sufficiently busy, and the days that I have had off, I have taken the opportunity to do absolutely nothing. And let me tell you, it was fantastic. So now that I know that you are all dying to know where the checklist is at, here we go: Checklist: Finals Edition

Quantum Mechanics and Relativity- Well, the dust has settled and the bad news: I think that I am going to have to take this one again. There. I said it…

Thermodynamics- The final here was either incredibly easy, or I have 0 understanding of the material. And here is an example of how easy the final was: one of the problems was completely solved in the lecture notes. And here’s the kicker- it was open note and open book. Go figure.

Theoretical Electromagnetism- We had a take home final in this class. We had 4 questions, and 5 days to do them. To say the least, this test was a monster. I thought I had them all solved on Sunday night. The test was not due until 7pm on Monday. Being that I had Monday off, I thought “I think that I will just take an hour and organize my work to hand in (I had about 5 to 8 pages of scratch paper for each question).” Upon re writing my solutions, I realized that I had done 3 out of the 4 wrong. So what I thought was going to be an hour or so worth of work turned out to be 7+ hours of a ‘panic session’. Good times.

Other things have been well. From Russia with Love is working on the 48 Hour film Competition, so she has the weekend cut out for her. Me, well, I just plan on working for the time being. We will see what else happens.

Work is good. The morale around the place has been much improved since we finally moved into our new space, with flat screens and all. It’s a nice looking area, and free time runs rampant. The only problem is that my headset seems to be picking up a radio station. I can hear mumbling and noise when all is quiet. It makes me wonder sometimes whether I really am going crazy or not.

Many nights this week I have had those times when I wished I could just go to sleep, but my brain won’t stop working. I had studied to the point that my brain would not stop working. “What could I possibly be thinking?” you might ask. Well here is an example:

"If you were able to run a zebra through a checkout at a super market, how much would it be?"

I kid you not, that was the question I was pondering in the wee hours of the morning one day. I even went as far to try and figure out how to determine this. The first thing you would need is a clear picture of the side of the zebra. The next thing you would have to do is go through Photoshop or another such program to try and ‘straighten’ the stripes. Once you have that, you have the UPC code.

The next problem lies in the fact that each product has a unique UPC code. You would need to figure out which product the ‘zebra UPC code’ corresponds to. Then walla! You know how much a zebra would be if you were to run it through a scanner. There are a few challenges in this method, the first and foremost being that the stripes may not add up to a UPC code at all, and just be gibberish to the scanner. Also, the stripes that you use will vary on different parts of the zebra, so that I a bit of a variable.

I think that will do it for me this evening folks. Have a good night everyone. I know I will. With no studying to do, I have brought a book of poetry and prose by Walt Whitman. That always makes for a fantastic evening.

T

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