65 Hours Without Sleep

Don’t ever stay up for 65 hours. You start to see your computer screen warp every time you hit Ctrl+V.

I was working on editing Horstmann’s Violet framework to draw circuit diagrams for my CS class for the better part of last night. (Somebody needs to put an electronic version of his book on the web. There are broke college students who could have used it :P .. He also needs to bring his website into the twenty-first century :-/ )

The night before, I was working on my Networking project. I used nslookup to find all live hosts. Yeah, that was a stupid move. I didn’t find out that it showed me ALL HOSTS THAT WERE EVER PRESENT ON THE NETWORK until ten minutes before the project was due. The network admin was the one to inform me. Stupid dumb*ss teacher.

And the night before that, I was working on a religion paper that asked us to outline our own gospel. It was supposed to use the canonical gospels to target a specific audience of our choice. I wasn’t original — I chose angsty, drama-filled teenagers in the year 2008. So I “included” stories like the Cleansing of the Temple and Picking Grain on the Sabbath, leaving out stories like Similes of Salt and Light, and the Temptation of Jesus (honestly, do you think most teenagers would stand up to that kind of temptation?).

And now I’m working on a bioinformatics project that calcuates the G+C% and the dinucleotide counts, which can be used to compare the similarity of two species (please correct me if that statement is wrong, I’m majoring in CS, not Biology). Actually, I’m working on the GUI for it; my partner programmed the business layer.

I might put up the code. I still haven’t decided. At any rate, it’s been one hell of a week, with all these projects and exams coming up. I still haven’t even started my C++ project; we’re programming Nim.

I know we need to do projects to help us understand fully the material covered in class, but why must they ALL assign them at the end of the year? Don’t they remember that we are taking four to five other classes as well? All of whom are going to require projects? Maybe it’s just my procrastinating tendencies. After all, we knew about the religion paper since the beginning of the year, and we knew about the bioinformatics project at spring break. But I shouldn’t throw logic into this. We’re college students, we have no logic.

On a less depressing note, my favorite operating system looks like it’s going to be awesome when it hits version 5.