Well-Rested

I think I am, right now, the most well-rested I’ve been in months. Possibly years, although that’s probably exaggerating a bit. I got 12 hours of sleep last night that I desperately needed. I pulled an all-nighter Wed-Thurs to finish as much Graphics as Dan and I possibly could before the poster session yesterday afternoon.

We ironed out several really bad bugs, and got illumination and Bézier surfaces, including arbitrary-order (greater than cubic) surfaces randomly generated by my noise and turbulence code, more-or-less working, but we did not have time to integrate these features into neat models; all we had was the output of our test programs. Dan and I will be working among finals next week to finish up as much as we can before turning in the last two lab reports to Bruce. We also intend to do further clean-up work over Winter Break, in preparation for Advance Graphics next semester. We may include some optimizations in there as well.

Last night we celebrated Dan’s birthday to the best of our exhausted ability. Joanna and Sasha planned an excellent surprise party. Sasha’s cover of going to play pool was greatly enhanced by “forgetting” her pool cue in her room. Good times. I finally got to bed at around 11:30 pm. It seemed really late, considering.

I did not break my personal record of staying awake for 36 hours, because I took short naps after breakfast and before dinner. I think I was effectively awake for more time, but it doesn’t really count. Maybe next semester I can break that…

This afternoon, I took the easiest final exam of my life, in Philosophy 12: Logic. I didn’t study for it, and it took me about an hour to complete. Tonight, after the exam, over dinner, standing in the rain by her car, and sitting on the couch in the hall outside of my room, my friend Emily and I had a 6-hour conversation. This is always a refreshing activity. I think we ran the gamut of topics, although as usually we eventually ended up discussing religion. I think I now have 4 messages queued up for the Theology list that I realistically won’t be able to compose and send until after Christmas. ::sigh::

Tomorrow is the CS GRE. I am going to take a practice test right now, but I think the exam is going to be whatever it is. Unfortunately, I failed to sign up in time for the test date that was scheduled at Swarthmore last month, so I have to take it at Temple University. This means I hop on an R3 at 6:30 am tomorrow morning, which gets me to Temple by 7:15. This wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for that fact that I am not likely to get much sleep tonight, because of the aforementioned schedule wackiness. Ah well. As I said, I’m not too worried about the exam, because I’ll take it to the best of my ability.

I can say that this test is geared towards a very different CS education than the one I have received at Swat. I think 6 courses I’ve taken, plus my two summers of work with Bruce, fall into the 5% “other” category on the exam, whereas the one required CS course I haven’t taken yet, Theory of Algorithms, which I won’t take until next semester, covers 40% of the exam. I win :o).

“The Big Medley” from A Very Veggie Christmas by VeggieTales