Back Into the Routine

Well I've been in classes two weeks now, and I haven't been completely overwhelmed so far, but it's still very early. For the most part, the content is still very bland. However, the homework is not, especially physics. Both problems so far have been extremely difficult derivations that I would have no clue how to do if I didn't seek help. We just got our first dynamics homework, which is straight out of Holton... I HATE book assignments; NCSU professors really spoiled me. And it also gave me my first taste of MATLAB, although there was no programming, just plugging in values to some prewritten code. Classes at 9am still suck and are hard to stay awake in. Jim (my adviser) called me into his office last week to gauge my research interests and said he would try to "dream up" a project I could work on in my spare time to get my feet wet with datasets and programming. Anyway, I was still very glad to have this 3-day weekend.

Side story: Best Buy screwed me over by selling me a broken TV that wasn't even supposed to be put back on the shelf. So they gave me a sweet deal on a sweet 32" LCD... which I didn't even realize was 32" until I got out to my car and it would barely fit in my back seat. When I got home, I went into man mode and promptly tore apart my entertainment center so it would fit. It looks pretty ghetto, but the TV makes up for it. Contact me if you want to see a picture of it.

To add to the list below, I miss:

• Having a reliable, massive homework buddy system... knowing I could contact any number of people at any given time, and if they didn't know how to solve the problem, they could find someone else who could. I'm sure this will improve with time.
• Living on campus and knowing that it would take me 10 minutes to get to class no matter what. Rush hour traffic really sucks here, especially when you're trying to get to class by 9:00. And it's causing me to get really bad gas mileage! It also means I have to get up at 7:15 when I'd get up at 7:55 for the same time class last year.

One positive, though. As bad as the drivers are here, they're very good about stopping at crosswalks. It's nothing like risking your life at NCSU trying to cross Dan Allen. However, this is generally a very pedestrian and bicycle friendly city.