UW Daily Update Thursday Nov. 13

1.     UW Daily Update Thursday Nov. 13

a.     Woke at 5:50 am to register for classes.

b.    Although my registration date was early because I have junior status, and I didn't have to worry about getting into my classes since I wasn’t taking classes in high demand, but I still used the method recommended by my peer instructor—armed with my prebuilt schedule from yesterday, I hit the study room with my computer. I hit the refresh button on my registration tab like 300 times until the powers that be opened registration (they were actually about on schedule, and registration came online at 6:00 am), then switched tabs like a ninja to my schedule builder and hit register. And true to my peer educator's word, the website crashed a couple minutes after successfully registering me. Apparently, there's a big difference between 6 sharp and 6:03 :)

c.      I went back to sleep and reawakened at 9:30. I hustled out to get breakfast at the Motosurf food truck before breakfast closed at 10:30.

                                                 i.     This idea is another perk of having too much money on my dining card J

                                               ii.     Unfortunately, they were out of everything but fried rice and bacon.

d.     Fortunately, this was pretty dang good, enjoyed at one of the tables on the terrace outside the physics building overlooking pretty trees and some water.

e.     Went in to tutorial, where we argued about how tension worked in a rope and didn’t get the tutorial done.

f.      Went to CS section. We did some interesting recursive binary tree problems. I got my actual midterm back. I already knew my score (I’m happy with it J ) but I got to see how I did on each problem. I had been sure the points I lost were over an actual mistake in how my recursive method passed information from one level of the process to the next, but I realized when I looked at the midterm that I had actually fixed this problem in the few minutes I had before time was called to check my answers. My only mistakes were some stupid blunders in tracing method calls in an inheritance tree, and calling the .size() method where I should be asking for the attribute .length, and vice versa. (Due to historical reasons, in Java if you want the length of an Array of items, you ask it .length, but if you want the length of a String of characters, you ask it .length(), and if you want the length of  a list of items, you ask it .size(). )

g.     Walked back towards dorm and decided to sit out in the sun and answer email. As I sat in thoughtful contentment, a Frisbee crashed into the bush next to me. I used this as an excuse to join a game of catch, which was relaxing.

h.     Afterwards, ate lunch in the HUB and read physics.

i.       Returned to the dorm and finished CS homework.

j.       Worked on ed post. Got caught up in side tangent relating to a book of short stories about the Vietnam war, The Things They Carried, I’d read for an English class at Whatcom.

k.     After doing a lot of homework and answering some email, I finally met with Jamie for dinner at the 8.

l.       We went to Film club for “Best Worst Movie Night” and watched one of the worst movies of all time, Birdemic. It was so bad, it was almost impossible to believe it wasn’t a parody, but apparently it was made by an earnest director paying for its $10, 000 budget from his day job. It had ridiculously overt environmental overtones, completely flat characters that interacted in completely obvious ways, and an absurd plot involving terrible animated birds and explosions that reminded me of Trogdor the Burninator, AND AK-47s. Man. It was BAD.

m.   Did more work on ed post.

n.     Got ice cream at Ricks, hung out in lounge.

o.     Talked to my floormate Issa Rice (guy) for the first time. Realized I’d mistook him for someone who wore the exact same hat that Issa usually wears.

p.     Finished ed post, wrote log. Went to bed.