Today . . .

So today my last final was due. It was a take-home final. I got it done last night, submitted it on-line, got a response back from the prof saying it went through, and I was really happy that was done.

So today I had a meeting with my adviser. He's heading to Honduras all break. You see, he heads up an "Engineers Without Borders" type group (ECOS) that has put together a number of computers and is heading down to an HIV clinic there for children (all the way up to something like 21 year olds). Now, some of the newest treatments have greatly reduced the number of deaths there, so their morgue hasn't been getting as much use, so the clinic has decided to turn some of it into a computer lab. ECOS is going to install that computer lab. ECOS is also going to bring electricity into the whole clinic building. It's going to be a busy week. Now, Sunday (the first full day they get there) they get some time off and the whole group goes to a nearby village to watch some reenactment of something eastery. (apparently Easter is soon? And Sunday is "Palm Sunday," or something? I don't know what all this stuff means...)

Anyway, the point is that he'll be gone all week. We start ECE 858 next quarter. I'll be taking the class, but my research is one of the second topics we want to cover in it, so he's asked me to lecture the class. I just hope my peers take me seriously.

Now, I've done plenty of lectures and teaching before, and I usually do best in front of my peers. However, I nearly always do it in front of PowerPoint slides. He doesn't want to do that in this class. He wants us to give the lectures at the board, step by step, so that they take notes. This is completely unnatural to me. You see, I come from a background where I really care about things like "quarter turns" and I very rarely write on the board. ... As a consequence, I worry that it's going to be awkward for me to talk with my back turned, and I am worried that I'm going to write (hopefully leigibly!!) tiny and at a slant (diagonally down the board). It'll be really bad if I trip over myself.

So that'll be my break. I need to get that task type choice (i.e, prey choice) chapter done and prepare lecture notes for this very different type of lecture.

So after the meeting today, I was really bored, because I have a week to do all of this, so I went and saw a movie. It's been SO LONG since I've done that. I saw Hostage. It was okay. I didn't like the end... I should have saw BeCool or something else, but Hostage was at the perfect time.

I also got my 512MB SanDisk Cruzer Micro and my Creative MuVo 1 GB TX FM MP3 player/voice recorder. They both serve a very similar function for me, but they're really just toys. I've been storing lots of stuff on-line, but some things are just too large to practically put on-line... So I figured I'd get something like this.

So I played with these a little bit.

Tomorrow, Tom and I are going shopping for some things of his. It'll be nice to shop again.

MAN, it's GREAT that this quarter is over. I'm seeing movies. I'm playing with toys. I'm RESEARCHING. And I'm SHOPPING. We'll probably go to Easton. HOPEFULLY it will be nice (though a storm (rain) is supposed to come in toward the end of the day...)... So I'm excited.

So that's my day.