Ran by the Bobby Dodd Stadium to grab a ticket for the upcoming Georgia Tech vs. Wake Forest football game. Tickets to home games are free if you’re a student. Tried to update my Debian system today, but was thwarted due to the release of Redhat 8.0 which clogged up all the local FTP servers. Luck was on my side today in Statistics. It turns out that there was an error on the first of the two questions on the quiz. Thus, everyone was given credit for that problem. As a result, I ended up with a grade of 50% on a blank quiz. Deal!

Nicky made some chicken stir-fry for lunch. Last night’s events left with me a desire to go look for some euro dance and club music online, which led me to eventually discover some interesting music from Nina and The Cynic Project on mp3.com. I also watched the movie High Crimes tonight. The movie was somewhat formulaic, but nevertheless enjoyable. That’s about it. Hey, like they say, sometimes you have to take time to waste time.

A group of us (about 15) left around 7:30 PM from Georgia Tech for dinner at Doc Chey’s Noodle House, a Thai restaurant having a very crowded but casual atmosphere, located in North Highland. While there, I enjoyed shrimp rolls, coconut chicken soup, and a generous bowl of chicken friend rice all for under $10. Later at home, I watched the season premiere of CSI: Miami (1:1 Golden Parachute).

We had a surprise quiz in Statistics today. I turned in a blank quiz with only my name on it.

The day began like normal, except for the rain. In ECE2031 lab, the students had to design a basic state machine in VHDL and in hardware, and then obtain its simulation waveform using a logic analyzer. I had a TA meeting at 11. For lunch, a group of of us went out to a smallish mexican restaurant called El Myr Burrito Lounge, located in Little Five Points. They make amazing, grande burritos at a very reasonable price - I had a steak burrito myself. We stayed there a few hours before heading back to Georgia Tech.

Most of the day was spent in class. In Health class, we discussed the Briggs-Myers Personality Test. I was classified as ESFJ (Extroverted Sensing Feeling Judging). Later in the evening, the CS1322 students had a test in recitation. After recitation, the TAs and I headed off to Arby’s to have an inexpensive TA dinner. When I got home, I graded assignments using our broken autograding utility. It took a very long time. It rained pretty much all day.

I got a haircut today. I stayed late at school in order to go to our college libertarian meeting. Quite a few people were present, and a student gave an interesting presentation about Rock n’ Roll and its influence on the demise of communism. At least that’s what I think he was talking about.

On the way home, Nicky and I ate dinner at a chinese buffet. We are becoming regulars there, it seems.

I had my Health test today.

After unsuccessfully finding a free and working VHDL simulator for Linux, I finally settled on and installed VHDL Simili. The command-line tools for VHDL Simili are free, and the graphical frontend (Sonata) is available as a trial version. The installation was slightly complicated because it uses the flexlm license manager. But I eventually got it working. Using Sonata, I then wrote a small VHDL program from a sample quiz in ECE3055 class and successfully compiled it. Unfortunately, I was not able to get the simulation waveform working. I have no doubt that I’ll figure it out eventually - I’m almost 90% of the way there already. The final goal will be to create a VHDL environment independent of Sonata. It’s on my things-to-do list.

I started playing Max 300 Maniac-mode in DDR today. I lost horribly, but I’m getting more exercise than ever! I feel great.

Today was only marginally more productive than yesterday - not much to write about. Weekends are just not long enough.

I completed my Statistics and Applications take-home quiz. It was on exponential and gamma distributions. I finally got an opportunity to mess around with the LaTeX Karnaugh map package. I also installed Open Office in order to read the Powerpoint slides for my Health test tomorrow.

talked to Tracy on the phone today. She said something very sweet, and it made me smile.

Today was a day of spring cleaning. Washing my clothes, doing the laundry, and vacuuming, and just generally cleaning up and organizating my room. I spent the night watching the season premiere of Firefly, a new sci-fi television series. It was okay, but nothing special. Next, I concluded the night by watching the season finale of Smallville (1:21 Tempest) - the new season starts this Tuesday - how exciting! Okay, so I’ve been a complete slacker today. I think I watch too much TV. Maybe tomorrow will be more productive.

I went to the Georgia Tech post office today and mailed my bad RAM. I also went over to the Rich building to re-activate my faculty and staff account. This lets me login to the machines in the classrooms for teaching purposes. I also had my Circuit Analysis test today. I spent most of tonight doing basic maintenance on my computer. I updated the NVIDIA drivers, downloaded the latest nightly build of Mozilla, and re-compiled and installed the latest version of MPlayer.

At night, I watched Smallville (1:20 Obscura), followed immediately by The Count of Monte Cristo. And then I went to bed.