Checksum Arcanius

This morning at 9:30 I had my first lab meeting with the Rubinstein lab group. I didn’t know quite what to expect, because I’ve never been in a lab group before. I ended up enjoying myself and leaving a little bit giddy about the skills I’m going to acquire and the information I’m going to learn during my capstone project. These guys truly are at the cutting edge; the state of the art. It is truly exciting to finally be here.

I also had a good meeting with my CREE project mentors — I finally have a pretty good idea of what exactly I will be doing and why it is exciting. I think this is going to be a great summer.

Today was the first day of summer classes. It was also the first day of trying out my last-minute schedule change. I started the day out at work, leaving at noon to head to school. However, I left my house keys at work, so I had to rely on my roommate Doug to get back into the house. Fortunately, I have an extra room key in my backpack, so I still had access to my room. That would soon change.

I left again to go to my 4:30 Capstone class, which went well enough although Christine didn’t show and has decided to drop the class because she enjoys her CREE activities more than she anticipates enjoying her Capstone activities. Then Dennis treated me and Teresa to dinner before I headed back home. Good thing too, because once again I was locked out, but this time I had to wait for Enpei to get back, about an hour later, to get into the house. I spent the time reading a journal article for my CREE project and catching some accidental sleep.

Not long after this, Hoyin came over to pick up a network cable, and I ended up dropping him off at his new condo on First Hill to avoid wallowing in deep thought about the way things might have been. After dropping Hoyin off and checking out his new pad, I decided to scurry on over to Bellevue to pick up the just-delivered new laptop of wonderfulness from my Mom’s office where it was delivered. More on the laptop (a Dell Latitude D630) another day.

Returning home, I let myself in to the house with just-departed roommate Daniel’s old key. Unfortunately, I had failed to bring along the extra room key, which was still in my backpack, locked securely inside the room. I tried carding the door and forcing it open without breaking anything with no success. Enlisting Enpei’s help yet again, we were about to climb up on his megavan to attempt to gain access to my room, but then I spotted a ladder. Finally, I climbed into the thankfully cracked open second story window to my room while Enpei stabilized the ladder below me.

So, there is a happy ending, to this day at least. Now I get to wish again for a happy ending to some other chapters of my life.

After dinner at a Mongolian Grill with Maria, we decided to rent and watch a movie. I had recently visited IMDB, where I saw again that the Shawshank Redemption was rated as the second best movie ever (The Godfather edges it slightly). Curious, I have always wanted to see the movie, and last night was the perfect opportunity. After eating, we stopped by Scarecrow, rented the movie, and headed back to my place to enjoy it on my recently acquired 22 inch widescreen LCD monitor.

The movie was very good, certainly a 5/5 on my scale. Score one for IMDB.

I went to see the second Fantastic Four today with Kunlun, Alex, Alice, Jeremy, and Ian (I think). Although Kunlun and Alex liked it fairly well, the movie didn’t really work for me. Indeed, I have found that most movies where the whole world needs to be saved at the last minute don’t work as well for me as the smaller-scale, yet deeper struggles of similarly-themed, but almost always more successful movies.

— An Aside —

Take, for example, Star Trek: First Contact versus Star Trek: Nemesis. In the first, the earth is saved early in the movie, and the rest of the time they are trying to convince a drunkard to fly a rocket. Yet that movie, in my opinion, is far more compelling than Nemesis, where the world has to be saved at the last minute. Its just so trite that most movies that attempt it can’t help but to fail.

— Back —

Anyway, I would give FF: TRotSS (haha, trotss) a 2 out of 5. Don’t go out of your way to watch it unless you need mindless, predictable action and you tend to like this sort of cheesy action movie.

Recently, I have been thoroughly reevaluating my current summer plan. For a variety of reasons, including the hardware capstone topic & length, I am leaning more and more towards the software emphasis for my Computer Engineering degree. That would mean no more requirement for EE 233 (although I could still sign up for it if I wanted to). That would free up my summer mornings, possible for work. I could then sign up for my Bioengineering capstone and start it early with just a couple of credits — 6 in all I believe. The working hours would be better (early morning to noon or so), the school less intense (just one “real” class), and I would have my afternoons free to do CREE stuff, capstone stuff, and fun stuff. Plus my weekends would still be mine.

The more I think about it, the more it sounds like what I should do.

Thursday afternoon, my mom called me at work with a wonderful proposition: An evening afloat in a kayak on Lake Washington. I couldn’t say no, so we headed out to Kirkland and put the kayaks in around 7:30 until just after 9:00. Then I picked up Maria in Redmond and we dropped her off at her frat-turned-summer-house residence in the U-District.

This afternoon, I enjoyed a leisurely bike trip with Alice around Greenlake, through Ravena park, to Gasworks Park, and back. I just fixed up her bike (all it needed was a tube patch and air), so we thought we’d take it for a spin. It was a lot of fun, hopefully I’ll get the chance to do it again soon.

Better than I thought, but still probably not Dean’s list material. Oh well, the GPA is still on the up ‘n up.