First day of class, last class of degree

I really need to get off of my butt and update this thing more frequently. I actually have people who stop by and read it now, like Carlos.

There has been much activity over the past few days, which deserves proper blog coverage, so this post may get quite long. Hopefully they won’t always be this long. One of the most notable things is that today I’m attending the first day of my last class in my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, which is very exciting. I only have one class left, and I’ll be done with my degree. Unfortunately, it’s one of the toughest classes there is, but at least I can truly focus on it. I might have taken it last semester, but that’d have killed me, plus I just couldn’t fit it in, so I chose to keep it for the last course. It works out decently. I know that at least my friend Mark should be in there, so that’s a nice little motivator. Competition keeps me going, let me tell you.

Let’s jump back a few days. On Saturday, Lisa and I went down to the Fall Crawl 2003 downtown. For those who don’t live in the area and don’t want to bother with the link, it’s like a giant concert with 22 different stages and more than 100 local groups, performing any and every type of music that one could imagine. While there are some outdoor stages, most of them are usually within the establishments between 2^nd and 7^th streets on Central, the majority of which are bars. As Carlos commented on my prior entry, going to an event such as this is very atypical of me and my wife. We’re fairly conservative people by nature, and have never exactly been partiers, although apparently my wife remembered going to a club in the area of Fall Crawl while she was there with her friend (who joined us, and was text messaging Carlos at the time, who was out in DC going to, well, I don’t know what, but he was with the friend’s sister - what a small world we live in).

Our main purpose for going down to the Fall Crawl, aside from doing something different from the norm, was to see our friend’s group perform. The group is Dirty Baby Dolls, aka DBD, and they classify their music in their artists profile on mp3.com as Nu-metal. Once again, this isn’t exactly something we normally listen to. It was very interesting though, and the time was enjoyable. As for the group members, I know three of the current four of them in some capacity or another, and their manager is a good friend of mine. He’s actually the guy who encouraged me to ask my wife out on our first date, so in some sense I owe him quite a lot.

Overall, the time was really enjoyable. We had a lot of fun, seeing the different areas and listening to various sorts of music. I got to listen to this one really interesting group playing on a string bass and trap set while the women were using a restroom.

On Sunday, after church we went to a friend of my in-laws, to help her learn how to use her new computer. She doesn’t exactly have a lot of computing experience (her last computer is about eight years old), and they bought the best machine that money could buy apparently. Very, very nice computer that I wish I owned. However, that’s an aside. We spent about three hours there, going through a rather comprehensive list that she had put together. It was actually really fun, because I enjoy teaching people how to use their computer, and she knew what she wanted to know. She had composed quite a thorough and comprehensive list, and so that made things a lot easier. She paid quite a bit more than I had anticipated too, so tonight I’m going to pick up a copy of F-Zero GX. That ought to be a lot of fun.

Now, I’m trying to get my wireless adapter to work in the Student Union Building at the university. There are access points everywhere, and my card sees the network, and it connects but is given a weird IP address and doesn’t function at all. I’ve got everything set up properly, so it’s time to call for support and see what’s going on. Maybe once I’ve registered my MAC address it takes a few hours. I’m not sure, but it gave no warnings as such. I’ve also got my normal NIC with me, thank goodness, or I wouldn’t be able to get online at all.