Friday, December 24, 2004
Merry Christmas!
First of all, I want to wish all of you a very merry Christmas! Also, a big thank you everyone who sent me a card. That was very thoughtful. I apologize for not having sent you cards as well, but I've been so busy with school that I haven't had the time to think about that sort of thing. Sorry!
So, here's an update on what's happening in my life.
I currently have 2 job offers, one from Intel and one from National Instruments. The deadline for NI is mid-January, and the deadline for Intel was a week or two ago. I told Intel that at that time I couldn't say yes, but that I would continue to consider them if they extended my deadline. The said that they could wait until mid-January as well. The people I worked for for my internship say that they expect to find out if they are allowed to hire more people in early January, and if they do get their request approved they will give me an offer. So I'll have a lot to think about really soon.
Finals week ended today (yes, they have finals on Christmas Eve!) at the UW, but I was done on Tuesday. In fact, I had all three of my finals on Tuesday, which was probably not a good thing. I think it worked out fairly well, but trying to study for them all on Monday didn't work too well. I ended up staying up way to late and not feeling as prepared as I would have liked. Thankfully, all three seemed easier than I expected, and I think I did fairly well. I left all of them early, having spend as much time as I wanted double checking my answers. One more semester to go, and then I'm done with classes for the foreseeable future.
I finished talking to all the professors and filling out all the forms I needed to to get transfer credit for all the classes I took at Tohoku. I ended up being given a lot more than I expected, but it doesn't really matter, since the only class that I can actually use is the numerical methods class. That was the last class I needed to take in order to get my second major in Computer Science. Now all I have left are 2 advanced elective classes and the Senior Design Project class, and I'll have fulfilled all of the requirements for Computer Engineering as well.
Up until last week, the weather here was quite unseasonably warm. Sometime last week it dropped below 0 (degrees Fahrenheit), and has stayed really cold. We got a tiny bit of snow once, but that's mostly gone by now. Even when it did snow that little bit, it wasn't enough to cover anything completely. It was really more like a light dusting of snow. Very disappointing, since we won't have a White Christmas like usual. I think someone said that on average Madison has about 9 inches of snow by Dec. 10. We've had about 0.5mm (a number I'm making up, but it should portray the idea fairly well) of snow so far. Wisconsin seems to be in sort of a hole or something, since there have been huge snow storms in the surrounding parts of the country, and we haven't really had any snow yet.
I took the GRE Computer Science subject test in November, and got the scores back this week. I got an 810, which puts me in the 82nd percentile. I'm not sure how good that is, but since I'm not going to go to grad. school after all (at least not right away), it doesn't really matter how good it was. I'm sure I could have done quite a bit better had I taken two more Computer Science classes at the UW, since there were some subjects covered on the test that I have never studied. I was talking with someone before one of my finals, and he said that he's in a class that covers those topics. Oh well. I didn't study for the test at all, so I didn't even know what topics would be on it until the night before.
On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night I have spent time with some friends I've know since elementary school. We spent quite a bit of time playing board games, which is what we usually do together. It's something that I missed doing when I was in Japan (and have missed doing due to lack of time since college started, really), so that was fun.
We picked up my grandmother from West Bend (Wisconsin, which is about 2 hours away) on Thursday, and today my Uncle and Aunt arrived from Tennessee. It took them two days to drive here because of all the snow storms. They said they probably averaged about 20 mph on the freeway for most of the trip, and several times they were sitting still for more than an hour. Evidently lots of people got tired of waiting and got out of cars to build snowmen and write things in the snow, since my relatives saw those things along the side of the freeway.
This year it has been tough for my family to buy me Christmas presents. The problem is that all the things I want are things that I wanted to get in Japan, but didn't. There are a few volumes of manga that have been released since I left, as well as some volumes that were missing from the sets I bought at Book-Off. There are also a number of CDs that I would like but was unable to find at Book-Off. This is somewhat of a problem, since I've had little success in finding these things for sale online. I've found a few places that import CDs, but at $30 + shipping for each that's a bit too much for my family members to pay for a CD.
So, here's an update on what's happening in my life.
I currently have 2 job offers, one from Intel and one from National Instruments. The deadline for NI is mid-January, and the deadline for Intel was a week or two ago. I told Intel that at that time I couldn't say yes, but that I would continue to consider them if they extended my deadline. The said that they could wait until mid-January as well. The people I worked for for my internship say that they expect to find out if they are allowed to hire more people in early January, and if they do get their request approved they will give me an offer. So I'll have a lot to think about really soon.
Finals week ended today (yes, they have finals on Christmas Eve!) at the UW, but I was done on Tuesday. In fact, I had all three of my finals on Tuesday, which was probably not a good thing. I think it worked out fairly well, but trying to study for them all on Monday didn't work too well. I ended up staying up way to late and not feeling as prepared as I would have liked. Thankfully, all three seemed easier than I expected, and I think I did fairly well. I left all of them early, having spend as much time as I wanted double checking my answers. One more semester to go, and then I'm done with classes for the foreseeable future.
I finished talking to all the professors and filling out all the forms I needed to to get transfer credit for all the classes I took at Tohoku. I ended up being given a lot more than I expected, but it doesn't really matter, since the only class that I can actually use is the numerical methods class. That was the last class I needed to take in order to get my second major in Computer Science. Now all I have left are 2 advanced elective classes and the Senior Design Project class, and I'll have fulfilled all of the requirements for Computer Engineering as well.
Up until last week, the weather here was quite unseasonably warm. Sometime last week it dropped below 0 (degrees Fahrenheit), and has stayed really cold. We got a tiny bit of snow once, but that's mostly gone by now. Even when it did snow that little bit, it wasn't enough to cover anything completely. It was really more like a light dusting of snow. Very disappointing, since we won't have a White Christmas like usual. I think someone said that on average Madison has about 9 inches of snow by Dec. 10. We've had about 0.5mm (a number I'm making up, but it should portray the idea fairly well) of snow so far. Wisconsin seems to be in sort of a hole or something, since there have been huge snow storms in the surrounding parts of the country, and we haven't really had any snow yet.
I took the GRE Computer Science subject test in November, and got the scores back this week. I got an 810, which puts me in the 82nd percentile. I'm not sure how good that is, but since I'm not going to go to grad. school after all (at least not right away), it doesn't really matter how good it was. I'm sure I could have done quite a bit better had I taken two more Computer Science classes at the UW, since there were some subjects covered on the test that I have never studied. I was talking with someone before one of my finals, and he said that he's in a class that covers those topics. Oh well. I didn't study for the test at all, so I didn't even know what topics would be on it until the night before.
On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night I have spent time with some friends I've know since elementary school. We spent quite a bit of time playing board games, which is what we usually do together. It's something that I missed doing when I was in Japan (and have missed doing due to lack of time since college started, really), so that was fun.
We picked up my grandmother from West Bend (Wisconsin, which is about 2 hours away) on Thursday, and today my Uncle and Aunt arrived from Tennessee. It took them two days to drive here because of all the snow storms. They said they probably averaged about 20 mph on the freeway for most of the trip, and several times they were sitting still for more than an hour. Evidently lots of people got tired of waiting and got out of cars to build snowmen and write things in the snow, since my relatives saw those things along the side of the freeway.
This year it has been tough for my family to buy me Christmas presents. The problem is that all the things I want are things that I wanted to get in Japan, but didn't. There are a few volumes of manga that have been released since I left, as well as some volumes that were missing from the sets I bought at Book-Off. There are also a number of CDs that I would like but was unable to find at Book-Off. This is somewhat of a problem, since I've had little success in finding these things for sale online. I've found a few places that import CDs, but at $30 + shipping for each that's a bit too much for my family members to pay for a CD.
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