MarkPNeyer.com

I had to turn off the comments for the blog because I was getting way too much spam. It’s unfortunate, because I enjoyed the occaisional comments and such. If you want to reply or something, feel free to send me an email: mneyer[at]gmail.com.

I find myself really missing california, in a lot of ways. One thing I didn’t expect to miss was the trip out there and the trip back. There’s something about driving through the desert, with hundreds of miles to go and only your music and your thoughts to keep you company that appeals to me. There was so much beautiful scenery out there, and it was great to spend a few days ‘getting to know myself better’ as they say.

I took the CS GRE yesterday. I kinda wish I would have studied a little for it, but I really hate studying so I just don’t do it. I’m such a terrible student. My thing is just that I find learning things interesting. What I don’t find interesting is taking tests or doing homework or doing any of the other crap that you have to do when you learn in the academic setting. Sometimes I think I’d be happiest if I made a ton of money in industry (cliche, i know) and then just funded my own studies for my own interests; I would pursue knowledge for its own sake and for my own edification without the need to justify to some board why I needed their funding or why i was right or blah blah blah. On that note, I really want to go to Stanford or Berkeley – some place where I am really challenged by peers, and also that is warm, too. If i got into Carnegie Mellon and not Stanford or Berkeley, I’m sure I’d go there; I’d just rather go someplace that doesn’t know.

Although really, snow isn’t so bad.

I do really love python. I keep track of my finances in quicken, and getting the quicken balance to match the online credit card statement balance is always a pain for me. Today i downloaded a QIF file parser object for python. I’m going to use to parse my credit card statements from the internet and compre that to the QIF file quicken will export, and see exactly what transactions are missing. I just love doing such things.

I’d better get back to number theory…

I just finished a huge Operating Systems Project. My partner and I thought we were done monday at 4, more than a day before our deadline, but he noticed that our program went into an infinite loop after printing the last line of output, which was difficult to track down. That, and my insistence that the pseudoclock timer go off exactly every 5 ms meant that we had to deal with some rather pernicious cases.

It’s done now, though, and I’m feeling rather burnt out. I can’t bring myself to work on much of anything except for applying to graduate programs – that is appealing. Thanksgiving break is a couple of weeks away, and I’m going to need it. Hopefully, I’ll have some sense and allow myself to relax on this one.