Well I studied until 2AM getting ready for my 8AM Philosophy final and woke up at 6 to study some more. (Okay, sidetrack: What is it? 2am, 2AM, 2a.m., 2 am, 2 a.m. 2 A.M. 2 AM, what??) Anyhow, the final went as well as could be expected, better actually. I had an A going in to the final (3 papers equalling 60% of our grade) so considering that I think I got an A or more likely a B on the final, I may still get an A in the class (or an A- (grumblegrumble)).

I don't know whether it's a testament to how well I'm acclimating to having contacts, or how tired I was, but I was in bed, eyes shut, welcoming sleep's embrace when I realized I forgot to take my contacts out (and I'm someone who has a (quasi-)irrational fear that falling asleep with contacts in might mean I'll wake up with my eyes goopy and sealed shut which, as we know, doesn't mix well with taking an early final exam.

Anyhow, contacts out, slept, woke, crammed more, went to the student store to get a blue book before my test to see that they had literally 25 people in line and one clerk. Grabbed three bluebooks, walked to the front, apologized to the clerk (who looked at me mutely saying 'for what?' dropped two dollars on the counter and left. (Blue books are about 30 cents, so I more than covered it.) I'd have felt guilty if I wasn't insuch a rush. I wonder how many of the blue-book-weilding students in line followed my lead after I left. I mean, exact change isn't quite worth being late for a final.

So now I wait. It's a good thing I have two more finals to go, otherwise I'd be stuck fretting about getting grades back for the next week. Now I really have to fret about getting recommendations out first thing Monday, even if they're hand delivered, because I need them to be returned to the university's letter service, then sent to UCB:SIMS and CMU:HCII as soon as possible.

I should probably be working on a statement of purpose right now. You know, it's probably a huge oversight, but I didn't really notice until a couple days ago that I don't mention my personal weblog at all on my resume. now that I get about 150,000 impressions a month (that is a scary number) I should probably mention it.

Well, it turns out that yesterday's 90 minute blackout wasn't an intentional one, which probably makes it worse, but at least they managed to avert blackouts for million sof customers, and settled for a blackout of only about 20,000 people.

Anyhow, I'm in the home stretch of finals for thenext five days, starting with a final in Philosophy of the Mind with Searle at 8am tomorrow. Studying like a banshee which is why I haven't posted today, responded to email, or even touched a net-attached computer until now.

Hopefully the final will go well, and I'll get enough studying for my next two finals done tomorrow afternoon that I'll still be able to go to Dickens Fair on saturday, but time will tell.

Have a great Thursday night, and I hope my fellow West Wing fans will look on the bright side and see that last night's elkection-coverage-induced rerun just means one more new episode once everything else is in reruns this Spring. Maybe if we're lucky at least one of the plotlines on ER tonight won't be tragic...

Okay, Kev. Eye back on the ball... Study, study, study!

There's a sort of public shame inheirent in walking down the sidewalk with a gas can. Everyone who sees you knows that your car is out of gas, it's nobody's fault but your own, and now you're late to wherever you wanted to be because you have to walk to the gas station and spill gasolene all over your hands just to make your pinnacle hunk of mechanical engineering work again.

It's the modern equivalent of a scarlet letter.

What gets to me is that if my car had enough gas to get home, it should have enough gas to at least start the next day.

PS: Thanks Karen, for rescuing me!

Got a fiddy burning a hole in your credit card? Looking for something to get me for Christmas? Just want to see what kinds of stuff I like to read/play-with/covet? Check out my Amazon wish list and get a window into my intellectual desires.

On deck for this week:

• Studying for Friday's Philosophy Final
• Studying for Monday's User Interface Final
• Studying for Tuesday's Cognitive Science Final

and

• Sending out letters of recommendation forms for SIMS and CMU
• Completing AOLiza redesign, hopefully before the Dallas Morning News story prints
• Putting up the results of the first two Cameo cameras (long story)
• Adding Photo of the Day and View by Subject to the daily weblog (here)
• Investigating one or two companies that sounded intriguing from the project fair
• Getting enough studying done to go to Dickens Fair again on Saturday
• Going to Gaskells Ball on Saturday night, regradless of studying load
• Various campus administrivia
• Write up interface concepts for QUIP (a research project in the GUIR)

and, of course:

• Sleep
• Eat
• Read

and

• As Karen reminds me, I need to update my DNS and Apache config to support their upcoming site: lifeamgood.com

I also need to figure the best way to hook into the net while I'm in Carmel for Christmas. I don't want to go without updating the blog with both words and pictures, especially since spending time with family tends to make me write more than ever (and you can take that however you like).

So the Dallas Morning News is running a story (print and web) on AOLiza tomorrow morning. I've even got a picture on the front page of the Personal Technology section!

I've been putting a fair bit of work into revamping the AOLiza home page. The layout was cute and innovative when there were just 13 conversations, but now that there are 43, and more to come, it's getting unweildly. Plus, its reliance on Javascript isn't anybody's friend except my server's (a little client-side HTML generation knocks the page size from 101K down to 20K). the new desing should be a little more informative, and browser-friendly. hopefully I'll be able to finish it up and put it online this afternoon.

Looks like the online story came out a day early. Hello Texas!

Today was the project fair for CS160. Tim and I got to present our project, peer.com (not the actual URL), to assembled masses of about 60 usability folk, industry specialists, and venture capitalists, as well as other students and teachers in the department.

All in all it was a great time! Our presentation went very well, with only a small hiccup with the CueCat demo, and we all got to meet some interesting people at the project fair which immediately followed the presentations.

I'm starting to notice a dissassociation between hard work and attention. Several people who came up to me were intrigued by the Tellme integration demo I tacked on to the end of the project, though it only represented a few hours work compared to a few hundred hours for the rest of the project.

Similarly, the biggest draw to my site for the past few months has been AOLiza, though it too was a bout of inspiration and an afternoon's work (to start out, anyhow).

I suppose it goes back to Edison's comment that invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. The keys to using this effectively are recognizing which 1% is truly the inspiration, and doing whatever you can to make sure it's the first 1% and not the last.

My friend Bob turned me on to Adcritic.com. They take pretty much all of the national commercials, and a bunch of local commercials, and put them online in quicktime format.

He thought I'd get a kick out of this cybersex commercial. I showed him when commercials go to far.

If you have a broadband connection, go check out the site. I'm sure you'll find something that will make you laugh.

California has instituted rolling blackouts tonight, because they've run out of electricity. If the site goes down (as it was for about an hour and a half this afternoon) now you know why!

Funny thing. You'd think the richest metropolitan area in the richest state in the richest country in the world would be able to buy its own power, but apparently not...