chriskarcher.net

I’m usually not a fan of country music, but I’ve taken a particular liking to this song.

In other news, I’ve got a doctor’s appointment tomorrow morning for them to look at my possibly broken hand. More on that later…

Prepare for a mish mash of recent goings-on in my life:

My final semester at UT is now officially underway. I thought my last semester would be stressful but so far, I’ve felt a strange sense of calm. This is perhaps because I realized that the grades I make this final semester don’t really mean squat. Potential employers I’ll be interviewing with will only see my GPA calculated as of last semester, and all that matters is that I pass my current classes and graduate. I’ll probably just stay with the company I’m at now anyways.. Nothing matters! Who am I kidding though, I’m going to try just as hard as I have in past semesters. It’s just nice knowing that if I do a little worse this time around, it’s not the end of the world. For the interested, here’s a look at my schedule:

About 3 weeks ago I was working out with Justin at the gym, and we were going real hard on bicep exercises doing curls and such. My arms felt fine at the time, but after we got done my forearms were killing me (not the muscles, but the bones). Picking up even light things would send pain from my wrist up to my elbow. The pain got better over time, but returned the other day when we concentrated on biceps again. After some research online, I found that my problem was most likely forearms splints (similar to shin splints). The cause was probably having weak forearm muscles, and when I tried to do curls with heavy weights it put too much pressure on the bone resulting in splints. For now, I’ve just got to lay off putting pressure on those bones and they’ll heal on their own, says the internet. I’m not sure why I went so in depth on what’s going on with my arms, but maybe someone will read this that has forearm splints and doesn’t know it.

Going back to the subject of school, I’ve got a bone to pick with the CS department. In my Operating Systems course, we’ve got several projects throughout the semester, and for each project we’re required to use something called the “Pair Programming” model. In this model, you get paired up with someone you possibly know, but most likely don’t, and one person (the “driver”) sits at the terminal writing code while the other person observes and helps the “driver” reason their way through the code. For a more in depth explanation, look at http://www.pairprogramming.com. This model supposedly works well in the real world, but from my personal experience in academia, it sucks. I’ve had some bad experiences in the past and we’ll just leave it at that. On the first day of class when the professor announced we’d be using pair programming, most people weren’t too happy about it. One student asked the professor if he would be willing to make pair programming optional, mainly because it’s so hard for students to find 30+ hours when both partners are available to sit in Taylor basement hacking out these programs. The professor said that he agreed with the student, but he wouldn’t be able to make it optional. The main reason? “I think that it is unfair to ask the TA to grade 60 programs instead instead of 30.” Wait a second, aren’t the TA’s paid to grade these programs? Even easier, why can’t the department just hire a student proctor to grade the programs like I’ve seen them do in so many other classes? I’m sure this isn’t the entire reason, there is probably a lot of pressure from the department to force this pair programming BS on us. I just think it’s ridiculous for them to require it in some of our final upper division courses where almost everyone is working at least part-time. Make it required in the lower-division courses for the newbies, but shit, give us seniors a break, haven’t we paid our dues already?

Who knows, maybe I’ll end up with a good partner who makes my final pair programming experience pleasant. Here’s to hoping…

Cheerleading, tumbling lessons and camps since age 3: $30,000
Annual cost of attending USC: $ 50,000
Annual cost for staying just the right shade of blonde: $10,000
Cheering when the other team scores: Priceless!

Ok, I was able to get Ryan’s pictures from him and now they’re all online at http://www.chriskarcher.net/RoseBowl

I was finally able to get some pictures from Justin of the trip, so you can see them online by clicking this incredibly long link. I should have about twice as many pictures up once I get Wind’s from him, but that may take a while seeing as he’s in Houston.

I was originally planning to do an in-depth recap of the entire trip but now that we’ve been back for over a week, I don’t really feel like doing that anymore. I’ll just summarize our trip by saying that it was one of the best trips I’ve ever been on. I’ve never had so much fun just giving away hundreds of dollars like I did in the casinos. Las Vegas is one city that looks exactly the same as it does in movies. If you’ve ever seen Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, we stayed in the Circus Circus and did most of our gambling there. All of the good Vegas pictures are on Ryan’s camera, I’ll try to get them from him ASAP.

And the game, wow, not much can be said about that, just look at the pictures. If you don’t have a ticket to a huge game such as the National Championship and you really wanted to go, don’t fret. Just slip the ticket taker $100 in cash and walk right in. HOOK ‘EM

The only bad thing about the trip is that I lost Denicia’s digital camera somewhere in Vegas. She loaned it to me out of the goodness of her heart, and I lost the damn thing. I blame it on the fact that I don’t own one myself, so I’m not used to carrying one around and remembering it when I leave places. I made it all the way back to Texas before remembering that I didn’t have it. We got some good pictures on her camera too, we’ll have to head back to Vegas soon so we can take the same pictures again! Watch for some more pictures over the next couple days.