Being Amber Rhea

There is a wasp in the house. He’s buzzing around behind the mini-blinds in the living room. This is the third wasp that’s been in there in the past 2 weeks or so. I don’t know what’s up.

So, there was an earthquake Monday night/Tuesday morning! I think they said it happened around 5:00 AM. (Although I have also heard 3:00 AM from some people.) It woke Chris up, but I don’t remember anything about it. I do remember waking up in the middle of the night, but I don’t know what woke me up, and I didn’t feel any shaking or anything. But I’ve talked to a lot of people who were awakened by it and felt all the shaking and everything. Apparently it was a 4.9 on the Richter Scale and the epicenter was near Rome, Georgia. (Fortunately I haven’t heard of anyone being hurt because of it.) Craziness!!

Anyway, other than the earth moving… I’m just going through the motions of the lat week of classes, finishing up all the stuff I have to finish up. I have 2 exams next Monday, and a take-home exam that’s due May 9th. Of course, the MIT Graduation ceremony is this Saturday! I’m very excited. I can’t believe it’s already coming to an end though… it doesn’t seem like very long ago that I was writing in my blog about being excited about my *undergrad* graduation. (And the archives are still there if you want to read about the past: May 2002.) How time flies… [sigh]… I feel old sometimes.

Also, there was a camel outside the Tate Center today.

I’ve resisted the temptation to use “blog” as a verb, but here goes: I need to catch up on my blogging now that our project has been presented. What to say about Thursday’s finale event? Well, it was in Atlanta, at UPS headquarters (one of the other teams did a project for UPS) – a very Dilbert-esque place, as Chris put it. It went well, but I really can’t think of much else to say beyond that. We demo’ed the site, etc… and now we’re just working out the final kinks. Thursday night Dr. Brohman treated all of us at The Globe. It was a good time. And now, graduation is less than a week away. (Yes, I still have to take that one class in Maymester – but even though I won’t *officially* get my degree until August, next Saturday is the MIT Graduation.)

It feels kind of weird that it’s almost over. All this intensity and then… bam, all of a sudden it’s over. I’m definitely feeling a huge sense of relief. But it’s still just weird. And, I’m getting more and more nervous about the whole job thing. I’ve been applying to so many places… I just hope something pans out. I think my resume and cover letter are good, and I’ve been sending MIT brochures with any applications that I send thru snail mail… not sure what else to do. I’m still hopeful about Katapultz, although I know they’re not going to be able to hire as many people as they’d hoped to, due to so many schools being in budget crises.

Both Jenny and Niki have jobs now. :-) Hopefully I will follow suit soon. I miss them. I hope we can still manage to do a road trip or something this summer.

I guess I just feel like I’m really in a state of flux right now. Things are good but… it’s just weird that I don’t know where I’ll be (geographically and otherwise) three months from now.

And here’s a weird thought: five years ago I was 18. When I was 18, I had been 13 five years before that. Currently, I don’t feel significantly different than I did when I was 18. But when I was 18, I felt like an entirely different person than when I was 13. 13-18 seemed like a huge expanse of time. 18-23… not so much.

(I know that’s kind of ridiculous to even compare, because obviously a person goes through many more changes from the age of 13 to 18 than from 18 to 23, but still… it’s just weird how the span of five years can feel so different. Time is relative, yeah yeah… all that stuff…)

Oh yeah, I should post this: the press release from the finale event. :-) [For the record: our project consisted of 1600 hours of development time, not a mere 1200. Boo-yah!]

Want to see what I’ve been slaving over for the past few months? Here it is in all its glory: http://www.athensplays.org. (Technically, it is still only [only - ha!] 99% done, but most of what’s left to be done is back-end stuff that you can’t see anyway.) Keep in mind that this is only half of the entire thing: there’s a whole back-end administrative area that took just as much time, if not more, than the public site. Pretty much everything on the site is dynamic. Ah, good ol’ PHP and MySQL.

I’ll write more about the finale event and subsequent celebration tomorrow. Right now, I’m off to get some much-deserved (and much-needed) sleep!

My strawberry plant is blooming.

No time to talk! Off to the MIT Project Finale Event in Atlanta!!! :D

So, I got sick and threw up last night. I still don’t feel all that great but I feel better than I did prior to the throwing up. I think it may have been due to fatigue. In the past 48 hours I had only had about 6 hours of sleep overall. Wednesday morning was our “Workig Prototype Presentation” to the MIS Advisory Board at 9:30 AM. The night/morning before that, Mary and I had been in Sanford Hall from 9:30 PM – 5:15 AM working on the site and whatnot. (And before *that* had been the Beta Gamma Sigma induction from 6:00-9:00, and class from 12:30-4:45 before that.) So I was able to get a little less than 2 hours of sleep before the presentation. We got out of the presentation at around 11:30, so I got home a little after noon. I fell asleep around 12:45 and slept for about 4 hours. Then at 6:00 last night was the MIS Advisory Board banquet. I had to go because I’d applied for a scholarship, and if someone won a scholarship but wasn’t at the dinner, they wouldn’t give them the scholarship. I felt sick most of the time but tried to pretend I was okay; at one point I went and sat out in the hall for about 10 minutes even though I was supposed to be mingling and “networking” in the crowded room with people “from the industry”. Dinner was nothing special. (Although Dr. Brohman had a little too much wine, which was pretty funny.) Finally at around 8:30 they started announcing scholarship winners. Fortunately my suffering paid off because I did end up winning a scholarship! $300 from Teradata (a “data warehousing” company) and the MIS Dept. After that I came home and had to make slides for my HCI presentation, which I gave today at 2:00. I finally got in bed around 12:30, and had really screwed up dreams, and at some point during the night awoke and threw up. This morning I slept until 11:15, and I’m still a little tired. I’m stressing out because our project will be done a week from today, and there’s a lot more that we need to do between now and then. I would like to take tonight off (at least partially), but I think I’m going to end up having to do at least *some* coding.

In other good news, I made it to the final applicant pool with Katapultz! I am really, really excited about that, but lack the energy to convey my excitement at the moment. Anyway, I’m going to write them a “thank you” email. Hopefully I should hear about whether or not I’m hired within the next couple of weeks.

If you want, you can take a look at my perpetually-under-construction browsers page. I started over spring break, but once spring break ended, I no longer had any time to work on it. I’d avoided putting it up on the web for all to see since it’s nowhere near done, but what the hell, I don’t know when I *will* finish it, so just go ahead and have a look-see. Basically, it’s gonna be a page of reviews of browsers other than IE. If you want to write a review of a browser, email me and let me know!! The more contributors I have, the better. I can’t write it all myself! So far, the only review that’s up is of Safari. I’ll probably write about iCab and maybe OmniWeb, and Chris said he’d write about Opera… everything else is up for grabs!

Sorry for the dearth of entries. There’s a lot that I’ve *wanted* to write about (war related and other) but with our project finale less than 2 weeks away, I’ve pretty much had no time for anything else. Sitting in a room in Sanford Hall, coding and drinking caffeine into the wee hours of the morning, has become a regular – daily! – occurence. I’ll be glad when the 24th gets here!!

This is really funny at 1:00 AM after having spent hours sitting in a room coding and drinking coffee: http://www.stanback.net/images/flash/bang.swf

We Get Signal [490k PDF -- OS X screen shot]

It’s spring. Absolutely gorgeous weather. Low/mid 70’s, sunny, with an occassional breeze… the dogwoods are in bloom, there are birds singing and carpenter bees buzzing everywhere… if it could stay like this instead of degenerating into 100+ degree heat with 95% humidity during the summer, it would be perfect.

And my crocuses are actually coming up out of the ground! (I planted the bulbs in mid January.) No flowers yet, but lots of green stalks. Soon it’ll be time to plant spring annuals again – begonias, petunias, marigolds, vincas, and so on. This is one of my favorite times of year. :-) Now, enough rambling, I’m gonna go outside and enjoy the weather instead of just typing about it on my computer!