To specifically list those down: MTH 440, BA 352, and me. I got a total of three hours of sleep after doing my damndest not to just give up on the 440 paper. I then got up and took my final for Organizational Behavior, where I pulled some crazy talk out of an alternative-dimension brain and tried to incorporate personal “honor” (a better word, I now realize, might have been integrity) into my own homespun theory of leadership.

Whether or not my professor will think I was smoking something when I wrote that is irrelevant, though, because (as it turns out, now that I know the rest of my grade in the class) I really only need something around a 40% on this test.

Now if I could just say that about my non-math math paper. I’m going to have to adopt a wait-and-see attitude with that one.

After the exam I had a surprising amount of energy for having had so little sleep, so I wandered in to work and scanned like a mofo.

Two more finals to go. Two more. Dammit.

If there’s one lesson that’s been beaten into me repeatedly this term, it’s been that I would do well to not put off my damn papers. Have I learned that lesson?

Hell no!

I just spent the last five hours in the Milne computer lab writing one (1) program for the code section of my hashing function paper. (The paper, as it stands right now, is one one-and-a-half page piece of introductory prose.) My program doesn’t even do anything all that spiffy, when I look back at it.

The paper is due by noon on Tuesday. I also have my O.B. final at 7:30 AM on Tuesday. At this rate, I’ll only have half a paper, and I won’t have gotten any sleep before my test. That’s even skipping studying for the test.

I’ve also determined that hashing functions, though they are usually based off of modular arithmetic, have very little actual math behind them. That’s a shame, since I’m writing this paper for a math class.

I’m so toast.

Dad got a cheap PC today (2.0 GHz Athalon, blah blah), for some investing doohickeys that won’t run on a Macintosh. Soon I’ll be able to compare and contrast Mac OS X with Windows XP based entirely on first-hand experience, which’ll be interesting. For the out-of-box experience, the Mac wins hands down…at the very least, the Mac included a DVD that allowed you to reinstall the OS and assorted applications should the computer head south. (If we had a CD burner, we could have burned similar restore discs for the PC—but we went for cheap, so we have no burner…we eventually ended up calling customer support, who hooked us up.)

On the bright side, though, the PC will let me play doujinshi games, such as Chiyoruga (Azumanga Daioh crossed with Ikaruga). I’m looking forward to that, actually. Next up: Azu Race Daioh!

Now, for your periodic dose of bash.org humor, two enjoyable ones: manga and Snake.

I swear that my life will get more interesting once finals are done. Really!

Last night I read Great Teacher Onizuka manga #13, which had been on eternal backorder. I haven’t laughed that hard in a long, long time…of course, I was reading it late at night, so I had to do my best to keep my laughter from waking everybody else up. One of the highlights was the “human torch” Kunio armed with a large number of lit sparklers evenly divided between his hands and his mouth. Underneath the picture there was a note: “Warning: Kunio is a professional. Do not try this at home” It’s so incredibly stupid that it ended up being hilarious. Especially late at night.

Today was the last day of classes for this term. Yay! I found myself counting my classes (“two down, one to go”), which were all pretty quiet. Got lunch at the Pita Pit with Renee and Bryan, which was a tasty change of pace.

This evening I took advantage of my no-energy mood by finishing the setup of the G4 for Marin, and watching an episode of (Ground Defense Force) Mao-Chan. Ugh…the first episode of that show is as sickeningly sweet as the first episode of Sugar (the anime show, not the carbohydrate), and I just wasn’t in a sickeningly-sweet mood.

In other news, the weather has been especially inclement this evening. I mistook thunder for someone dropping something upstairs, which tells you how out of it I am.

I’m now recovering, yet again, from another period of far too little sleep. Got 10 hours last night, which means I’m only down four over the last two nights. I had lunch with (UHC) Tammy today, and found myself in a Good Mood (I used to have Good Moods much more frequently, a few years ago) this afternoon…but otherwise the day was pretty unremarkable. My last dance class was today; I’ll miss that during winter break, but that’s about all I’ll miss.

Here’s a convenient checklist of the perils that await me in the next week:

[  ] BA 352: O.B. Final, 7:30 AM Tuesday

[  ] MTH 440: Hashing Paper, noon Tuesday

[  ] MTH 451: Linear Algebra Final, 6:00 PM Thursday

[  ] BA 325: Tax Final, 9:30 AM Friday

Yes, I have one of the crappiest finals schedules you could ask for. A week from tomorrow, though, I’ll be free! Free as a bird! Free to call Eric and see if he’s still alive! Free to visit Andy in his new (currently internet-free) apartment! Free to (maybe) pick up Brian and Miwa from the airport! Free to watch anime, sleep in, and laze about!

It’s just getting to the end of next week that I don’t look forward to.

I’ll now join the ranks of the zombie bloggers, temporarily, to see if I can. (No, these won’t be a common feature of my blog.) Aside from my curiosity, I also found the description entertaining.

Your integrity and sense of morals are as strong as a steel wall. Your honesty and pride give you honour, and your haste to defend the honour of good people make you worthy of being called a friend. But you harbour deep feelings of unworthiness, and hide them beneath layers of outward strength and discipline. Because of this, you have a hard time allowing others to call you a friend, and find much of your discontentment turn into frustration. Try to understand that by letting others in, you eliminate much of your frustration and improve your true self-image. Which Love Hina Girl Are You?

Wow. Hacking that code to look decent here was annoying.

After writing my OB paper (which apparently was coherent, if nothing else) and trying to come up with written peer evaluations for my OB group members, I got a big fat two hours of sleep last night.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I’m going crazy!

In an effort to further delay the tax homework I’ve successfully delayed all weekend, I checked out my blog’s Google status (the proper search phrase? “brent blog”). Tonight, for the first time ever, I found myself at the top of that list. I was even more delighted to find that the sites related to my site are actually related, and not just Other Generic Comcast Junk.

Emboldened, I tried to see if Google had found anyone who actually linked to me. There I learned that Jeff Lawson’s splendid nowhere – anime blog (a site I check regularly) actually has me as a link on the sidebar. Sweet! My blog is slowly making its way into the world.

Okay, that’s out of my system. Please forgive me my moment of internet-related glee.

Now I feel like I should actually mention anime every once in a while on my blog…and maybe finish my //anime page, and update my //links page (Jeff’s official blog, nowhere, was already slated to be added)… All will happen, once I finish this school term. Stupid school.

In actual me-related news, I’ve spent today halfheartedly working on the various tax assignments I have due this coming week. Right now I’m officially working on a recreation of Schedule A (Itemized Deductions) in Excel. If I ever finish that (ha), I can move on to writing a withering commentary about why my job sucks, using organizational behavior terms.

On a work-related note, a random quote (found in an Ars Technica thread posting by RhoSinePhi) in closing:

When I was little, I wanted to grow up to be a Jet Fighter Pilot. Now I just hope everyday that my coworkers don’t talk to me.

So I started doing my homework today by continuing my quest to save the world from Sin. I am currently poised to battle That Bastard, Seymour, on top of Mount Gagazet. I followed that up with a failed attempt at a nap, and some poking around on the web. I then calculated that, under certain circumstances that arise in a problem in my tax book, a Roth IRA can kick the crap out of a traditional IRA even when one’s expected marginal tax rate decreases upon retirement. (The traditional wisdom is that Roth IRAs are good when you expect your marginal tax rate to increase in the future, since you pay your tax up front, and traditional IRAs are better when your marginal rate will decrease, since you pay taxes when you remove money, later.) It totally screwed up the tax letter I was outlining in my head.

I then had the opportunity to see Final Fantasy X-2 firsthand. The girls all wear fairly revealing clothing, and even strike a pose the first time they appear together. Oh my. This is what happens when Final Fantasy X channels the spirit of Charlie’s Angels—the Charlie’s Angels of recent movie memory.

This is the Clueless of the Final Fantasy series.

It’s nothing like Final Fantasy X. It’s so infused with Spunky Girl Power that I’m going to have to build up my tolerance over time. I’ll have to distance it from FFX in my head, too—i.e. by beating FFX, and then waiting a while (and until I’m in an extremely lighthearted mood) before picking X-2 up.

Damn.

Today I made the mistake of heading to Fred Meyer’s during their early-bird Black Friday sale. It actually was fun to see so many smiling people, and the guy ringing the Salvation Army bell was doing a nice subdued job of it. Of course, Fred’s didn’t have the CD I was looking for. As I was leaving the electronics area, I noticed motion out of the corner of my eye. I turned, to see an older man (early sixties, I’d guess) flat on his back in front of the customer service desk. Another man who had been standing nearby was dropping to his knees and asking the customer service representative to call 911.

People around were helping out, so I figured that I would best serve the process by getting out of the way. What a shitty time to have something happen to you, though. I hope he’s OK.

The juxtaposition of this with Thanksgiving made it especially sobering for me. I have everything in the world to be thankful for…but…Aw, hell. I don’t even know what I’m thinking right now.

Yes, those crazy Japanese have done it again. This time it’s Moetan, a “WORDBOOK” (designed for Japanese students studying English) containing the “1000 most frequently used [English] words and phrases!!” One such helpful phrase is the new title-for-the-time-being of my blog. Others include “lie face down” and “Dahhhhhhh! Don’t launch lots of expensive missiles too quickly.”

I used that one twice today, myself.

Well, today was anything but the go-through-the-motions day I thought it would be. As Renee and I made our way to Monroe to eat lunch, we ran into Eileen (!). I invited her to join us for lunch, and she accepted—t’was a fun hour. She doesn’t seem to hate me for being a damn slacker, which is good.

Of course, today was also the day I didn’t have time to shave before running off to class. That wasn’t so good.

We got our papers back in organizational behavior—179/180, baby! Boo and Yah. We also spent some time discussing tips for being successful in our job hunts…which eventually led to the gal sitting in front of me turning around and giving me the business card of the CEO of PacificSource (headquarters in Eugene, branch in Portland). Apparently he’ll be teaching two courses at OSU next term, and is a bright guy in charge of a good company. Might be ideal for the budding actuary who wants to remain in Oregon.