I dropped by the Hands on Atlanta office to meet with Sam and deliver the Windows 2000 CD. Unfortunately, they’ve been pretty busy over there these past few weeks, with a recent hacker break-in on a poorly configured server and even a small fire. Since the last time I’ve been there, all the office machines have been upgraded with Microsoft Office XP. Also, it also looks like we’ll be using Microsoft SharePoint to power their Intranet, ideally by this summer. Tony will look into getting licenses for it. In exchange for working with them, they’ve also given me an IBM Thinkpad laptop. How cool is that?

We had a relatively short ProgDev meeting in the evening. It’s nearing the end of the term, and the work, with respect to CS1322, is slowly waning. As a result, I had some time at night to wire a cross-over ethernet cable to connect my laptop to my four-port ethernet card on my PC, which now acts a router (thanks, iptables!) with minimal setup.

I had to give Michael a ride to school because he locked his keys in his car. Go figure.

Worked on the Project 4 autograder. Sent an e-mail out to the Debian developer mailing list. Adam and I ate a pleasant lunch at Pizza Hut, where we discussed the discovery of DNA and the life of Buddha, an interesting conversation resulting from my recent viewing of two television documentaries. Adam also somehow managed to get me hooked to Love Hina, a 25 episode Romance/Comedy shounen anime series, and I spent a large portion of my weekend religiously watching it.

Seems like my schedule has made me neglect my journal entry writing. Oops. I spent all day studying for my biology exam tomorrow. Went to Georgia Tech in the evening for lab hours. I studied biology in the library before returning to the apartment. Pull!

The Embedded Microcontroller exam went well. I’m not so sure about Circuit Analysis, however. After office hours, I expeditiously returned to the apartment, where I took a short nap and spent the remainder of the day studying for my upcoming biology exam on Friday. Though this week so far been largely a disaster, I’m looking forward to an auspicious weekend.

The International Cultural Festival is a week long, yearly event held at Georgia Tech, and includes activities such as food fair, film festival, and performance night. I learned about this event from Rawin, an Embedded Microcontroller Lab TA, and eagerly joined him for lunch at the food fair, the cultural activity for today. There, we enjoyed an array of foods from over ten different nations, hosted by their respective cultural organizations. Though we waited close to an hour in line, the wait was well worth it! The International Cultural Festival allows us, if only for a momemt, to forget the often harsh religious and political intolerance in our world today and instead embrace our cultural diversity together.

I had a TA meeting in the afternoon. Project 4 is due tonight for the students, and Project 5 will be released promptly afterwards.

I updated the journal software picture viewer to support picture navigation. You can now sequentially browse all the images for a day of photographs. I held a review session in the College of Computing for students who need assistance on Project 4. A significant number of people showed up.

Pull! I shot a gun. Sanjay invited me to shoot skeet with him and the other members of the Georgia Tech Skeet Club at a local shooting range; I gladly accepted the offer. It was my first time shooting, and everyone, including the pullers, was really helpful in teaching me the basics of firing a gun and gun safety.

I participated in two shooting activities: skeet and trap. In both shooting games, the player must shoot plates that are fired in a random direction by the puller. I quickly learned, as expected, that firing a gun in real life bears no resemble to the everyday images seen in flashy action flicks on television or first-person shooter video game favorites.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And Newton wasn’t kidding. When firing a gun, a kickback force is generated from the recoil of the shot. For an untrained marksmen such as myself, this makes a deceptively simple shot quite difficult. I scored 6/25 in trap and 0/25 in skeet.

Finally, Adam and I went out to International House of Pancakes for dinner.

Upgraded Debian packages. Installed the stock version of PHP iCalendar. Consequently, the schedule link on my website now does something useful. Downloaded quite a few useful programs to my HP 49G, among them, CSim, a SPICE-like circuit simulator by Roberto Perez-Franco. Finally, I read a few chapters of the HP 49G textbook that I purchased yesterday. It’s amazing what one can do with good documentation.

I caught up on my sleep. Nicky, Adam, and I ate lunch at Ruby Tuesday. After lunch, I left for Georgia Tech to study circuits, but was quickly sidetracked when I realized that I’d need to be more proficient with my calculator before attempting AC analysis. I therefore spent the evening learning how to calculate complex phasors in polar and rectangular form. I also purchased Science and Engineering Mathematics with the HP 49 G by Gilbert E. Urroz. Hopefully, it will prove to be a valuable investment.

I submitted grades for Test 4 after lab hours. What a horrible way to spend my day off.

In Embedded Microcontrollers, we were introduced to some of the neat, often overlooked features of the PIC18F452 microcontroller. Josh and I got checked off on Project 10 in Embedded Microcontroller Lab. I studied AC Circuits with Maryam in the library. In the evening, I created an Office XP administrative install point.

Finally, I fixed the CVS tree for Project 4. I also released a revised version of Project 4, correcting typos and other errors found in the past few days.