March 20, 2003
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This term has been a fairly uneventful one. I've gotten a lot of jackets lately, but no more shirts or pants. Given the situation, I've considered switching from a tie-based fashion towards a more jacket-based style. It would be a disappointment in some ways, but I really need to come up with a solution to the problem of warm weather.

In order:
David, Zak, Michelle,
Bobby, Patrick

In other concerns, most of the new friends I made this term to replace those that left last term are leaving at the end of the term. The school has been having retention problems. David, who grew up in China and got Linux running on my computer, was considering withdrawing on Tuesday, and either hanging around for a while or taking off immediately. I'm not sure which. Either way, he hasn't done it quite yet.

Zak has aspirations to live in a dome, or a house of his own construction. Or a dome house of his own construction. He started a little gardening project recently behind our dorm. It's more yardwork than gardening, I guess, but it's something for him to do. He's headed off to some school on the east coast, where he is from, unless he manages to take a term or more off to build that house.

Early in the year, I taught Michelle how to solve a Rubick's cube. She is one of the few people that have successfully learned from me how to solve a Rubick's cube. These days, she works on Zak's gardening project with him, and David does too, and lately she plays a lot of video games. It's been interfering a bit with my video game plans, in fact. When the term is over, she's headed the same direction as Zak, more or less.

I've been reading a lot of books lately. I have a good amount of free time for at work, and easy access to books, of course. I'm working in the campus library this term. It's a good job. My co-worker reccomended a good book about all kinds of outlandish stuff - alien intelligences, drug-induced conciousness expansion, etc - and it was all very interesting. I started reading through books in the bibliograpy, though, and it was less interesting as well as a bit less convincing. I guess the author was just more appealing than his source material.

Another high point in my reading has been the stuff about computer intelligence. Mostly, it's only been in books from the sixties or seventies, so it's a little outdated, but still good to read. Semantic analysis is next on the stack.

Bobby, the one with curly hair, is another graduating fourth-year. He entered with Jaffer and Amanda, and is one of the board-gamers that I so often hang out with. He is almost the only other person left in our group who goes to parties. He is a very likeable person, and in fact I have never know anyone who does not explicitly like Bobby. We will play a game of Axis & Allies eventually, I think, but it will probably be after he finishes his senior project, if at all.

Patrick entered with my class. He might have gone to Japan with me this summer, but if he makes the cut for this soccer team he's trying out for, then he plans to stick around and play for them. He says he would come in the fall instead of the summer, but by that time I hope to be working. He is on a co-op term right now, in Columbus. He plays in the college soccer games every Wednesday, but now the team has finished their season and he plans not to come back.

Also, I found a record player. It was sitting outdoors, beside a dumpster when I was walking to town with Jaffer and Amanda. It's portable, so I ported it home with me. The needle seems pretty far gone, but I hear of a store nearby that might sell the right kind of stylus. I just have to find out where the place is.