Jeshua's Life

It seems that the only way to get people to comment on my blog is to stop posting :)

I think that I've only gotten 1 or 2 comments at all before these last few posts where I said I wasn't going to post much for a while. Weird.

Anyway, seeing as there seems to be a bit of a crowd visiting my blog, I feel a bit more obligated to put something new here for you to read. Hopefully this won't mean that people stop commenting again.

So, someone asked how I'm doing and how Kingdom Hearts is going. The short of it is, I'm really, really tired, but strangely not stressed out, and it's not going (Kingdom Hearts, that is).

In more detail:

The workload for my classes this semester has surprised me. I knew it was going to be bad, having come from Japan where it was fairly minimal (except for some demands from my lab, but I digress), but even taking that into account I'm still much busier than I had any reason to expect. The primary culprit is the "Professional Expression" class that all seniors in ECE are required to take. Technically, you're supposed to take it your last semester, but I'm taking it a semester early because they had room and it fit my schedule. This class fulfills the second part of the University's Communications requirement. I'd heard from other people that the class was fairly easy, with nothing other than an occasional reading and then a 40-page group paper or something like that at the end. I don't know if the curriculum or the professor has changed, but that's not what I've got. The professor is determined to make us as prepared to get and keep a job as he can. This means that we have reading assignments and homework assignments for every class. And these are nothing to laugh at. As the course syllabus says, "Expect to spend two to three hours of work outside the classroom for every hour you spend in it." I've found myself spending about 3-5 hours of work for each class, which means 9-15 hours a week of homework. This has resulted in me going to bed after 3:00 AM Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday nights (since the class is MWF). And since I'm living off campus, and have math class at 8:50 AM MWF mornings, that results in a very tired Jeshua. I haven't completely lost consciousness (ie. gone to sleep) in any of my classes yet, but I've gotten dangerously close many times already. Even in my AI class, which I find fairly interesting (the class, not the phenomenon).

Culprit two is my Microprocessor Laboratory. This thing, by my calculations, has been taking up about 20 hours a week of my time (and keep in mind that half of the work is being done by my lab partner). It's a 1 credit, 3 hour lab. This lab I expected to take a lot of time, so this isn't surprising, but it's not meshing well with the demands of my other classes. At least this one is only for the first half of the semester (I pity those who take it the second half).

My other engineering classes and my math class are taking about the expected time, and since I haven't started working on the first project for my AI class that has been taking less time than expected (I'm not sure whether I'll have time to sleep at all once that deadline nears though).

The last factor, which I hadn't counted for correctly, is that this year I'm living at home. It's nice to be back in my own room, to see my family, to have someone do my laundry and cooking, and not to have to pay rent. Unfortunately, it takes a minimum of 15 minutes to get to campus or back from campus, and that's only if I get my parents to drive me. If I take the bus (which runs only once an hour), it takes about 45 minutes of travel time, plus the time needed to wait for the bus. I've been riding my bike when I can, which takes about 25-30 minutes. The biggest time sink, though, is that I end up spending hours talking with the people in my family and doing things with them. Living with people who don't have such a demanding schedule doesn't work well, since it makes you more inefficient with your own time management. Meals can turn into an hour long venture (when at the dorms on campus I could do them in about 10 minutes). Getting something to drink can result in me watching my brother play World of Warcraft for an hour or two, or helping someone do something on their computer.

The strange thing is that I used to get quite stressed out when my life got this busy in previous semesters. Now I don't really feel stressed at all. I just don't get any sleep either.

ところで(by the way), to answer the question about Kingdom Hearts, I played it quite a bit until classes started, and haven't really played since. I'm a perfectionist, so I've only beaten the first 3 levels, but have built my gummy ship up into a giant tank (I don't see why you guys didn't figure out how it worked, it seemed fairly simple to me), I've beaten the Phil Cup single player in time-trial mode, IIRC I'm about level 37 (and I chose the "level up slowly until level 40, then go quickly" option), I've gotten every treasure chest and item and trinity mark that I can possibly get (there's a treasure chest with a gummy in Agrabah that I can't get because I have too many of that gummy already, and there's a chest in the Deep Jungle that I for the life of me can't jump to). I've bought one of every gummy part and armor and weapon and item that's for sale at this point, and have a pile of money left over (those girl monkeys in the Deep Jungle give quite a bundle if you can hit them).

I think I'm getting close to having put 30 hours onto that game clock, which means I've spent about 10 hours per level on it. Wow. Wish I could have some of that time now so that I would be able to sleep a bit more.

On a completely unrelated note, I've been leaning more and more towards getting a job instead of going to grad. school for a masters, so if any of you hear about any positions in VLSI or logic design or anything remotely related to those, drop me a line in case I might be interested. Thanks.