Worst habit ever?

I was in a slightly irritable mood today and I was sitting in my Greek Mythology class trying to follow my professor jump around (figuratively and literally) in her lecture, but the guy in front and to the left of me was driving me completely bonkers. He sat there for a good 30 minutes of the class chomping away at his nails, I mean just digging right in. Mmmmm a feast of undigestible keratin protein. That has to be one of the worst habits you can have privately, but come on in college? Also, asking really stupid questions in the middle of class that don’t make sense or aren’t complete sentences is up there too. /end venting

What habits, your own or others’, just drive you up the wall?

Professor Andrew?

Not really, more like teacher assistant Andrew. I’ve got a project going at school right now to further develop our Microsoft infrastructure for use in various classes, primarily for teaching ASP.NET. Since I’ve actually been using it in my internship I guess that makes me qualified to give 3 lectures on the subject in the upper division Web class. I’m actually taking the other class that will be using the technology so I’m sure I will be contributing there as well. I need to make a point of posting more often to keep myself off of Nathan’s Dead Blarg Friends list.

Merry Christmas to myself

Being a geek and having a website where I supposedly write posts about geeky things means I must give proof of my geekiness. As Sarah, my parents, siblings, and anybody who tried to shop for me for Christmas knows, I’m particular about the things I buy. Well as a gift to myself I decided to upgrade the core components of my computer because we all know money serves zero purpose sitting in a bank account. My upgrade included:

  • AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ CPU – Dual core 2ghz processor, very nice
  • 1GB (2x512MB) Corsair Value PC3200 (DDR 400) RAM
  • GeForce 6800 GS PCI-E x16 – Blows the pants off of all but the most uber expensive video cards
  • MSI K8n Neo4 nForce4 Ultra motherboard – decent board but nothing too special
  • Zalman CNPS7000B-AlCu CPU cooler – very quiet and very good, nearly same one I had for past 2 years but it is compatible with my new 939 cpu socket

I’ll probably be overclocking and tweaking things for the next year because it’s not like I have anything better to do. The CPU was a majority of the cost but it will last me for a good while since the trend will be toward multiple cores and multi-threaded applications. When I have some free time I’ll probably stick in a spare hard drive and dual boot with Windows XP 64-bit to really take advantage of my new hardware.

If you understand anything I am talking about then you get a gold star on your geek progress chart.

My Goals for Winter Break

With one final left tomorrow (I would categorize the two from yesterday as “almost easy”) I’m looking forward to getting some stuff done over the break. In no particular order here we go:

  • Overhaul computer to dual core Athlon 64
  • Finish Christmas shopping
  • Help finish off kitchen remodel
  • Watch Kung Fu DVDs I have not yet viewed
  • Get down and dirty with ASP.NET 2.0
  • Start planning what I will be doing after graduation
  • Start looking for possible employment opportunities
  • Spend more time with Sarah who has been slightly neglected this semester
  • Spend more time with Nikon D70 who has been slightly neglected this semester
  • Prepare for my last semester in the comfy world of academia
  • Get Christmas tree before Christmas
  • Maybe put up some Christmas light before Christmas
  • Get resume up to date in XML format using standardized DTD

If I accomplish anything, I really want to get some more programming and dotNet knowledge. It won’t be long until I’m interviewing for jobs and I want to make sure my skillset is up to date and competitive.

So what are you going to be doing with any vacation time you get?

Defiant return from the black hole called school

Well I’m not completely free yet but I’m getting closer. Thanks to Denise and Amy for noticing my absence. Finishing up my labs and papers this week with 3 finals next week. They shouldn’t be too hard and I probably won’t study like crazy, who knows I might pull of another 4.0 semester (I’m a quarter of the way there for sure). When winter break rolls around and I have nothing to do I will definitely be posting here and on other sites more. Who knows I might actually create a post that is somewhat geeky and …weekly.