Last term's final marks:

CIVE 313 - Structural Concrete Design 1 - 0.50 - 96 (had about a 90 before exam)
CIVE 332 - Civil Engineering Systems - 0.50 - 100 (helped by +6 tutorial attendance bonus)
CIVE 343 - Traffic Engineering - 0.50 - 93 (literally self-taught this course: completely comprised of "student lectures")
CIVE 354 - Geotechnical Engineering 2 - 0.50 - 94 (had a 99 going into the exam)
HIST 210 - History of Ancient Law - 0.50 - 95 (proudest of this one)
WKRPT 300 Work-term Report - 0.13 - 95 (not included in average)

Average - 95.6!

Needless to say, I'm very happy with what I did. I credit my relative success this term to my boyfriend cooking a lot of my meals, and finally having the connections to work in non-shitty lab groups.

What I could do after graduation

1. Go directly to jail work.
2. Work on a Masters of Applied Sciences (traditional grad studies, with thesis)
3. Work on a Masters of Engineering (coursework based degree, project is optional)

Current order of preference: 3, 1, 2.

I'd actually like to leave school immediately and forever, but unfortunately, UW Civil has few transportation courses, so I want to bolster that area of knowledge before I forget how to study. Luckily option 2 costs only about 7-8k and can be completed within a year. 

Dream --
On my first day of work in Hamilton, I went to the coordinator, was redirected to a supervisor, and was sent to the music department to tune maracas. Shouldn't be too hard, I thought. If my piano teacher was right, I have perfect pitch. Except. Not with maracas and wooden blocks and rainsticks and stuff like that. I was like, WTF how am I going to spin this on my resume? Especially when I realized that the contract had a... blowjob clause. For salary bonuses. Anyways in the dream I ended up struggling with the dilemma for so long that the music department transformed and I was working at a crappy thrift store sorting merchandise like outdated Royal Wedding souvenirs. Then something something something woodlot raining something.

( and three more )

And you know what? It was all DOWNHILL from there. Nothing else was remotely as interesting that still. I didn't even get my full five songs worth because Tina broke down halfway through her performance, AGAIN.

The Glee club should just abandon the pretense of being a high school extracurricular activity and shift to a bunch of twenty-something starving artists in Ohio. At least then there would be an explanation as to why they're all starving.

I can't believe I was even hoping for a bit more from Hollie and Will.

93 in psych! This is good.

I dreamed I was a guy superhero in an acting school and that my little sister killed my cat and triggered a sequence of events that led to me breaking up with my girlfriend. Then someone got savaged by a Canada goose on the Hong Kong waterfront. There was a showdown inside a superhero nightclub. I still have no idea what my alleged superpowers were, which sucks.

I think the worst thing about being home is hiding stuff from my parents, including, an extensive array of cosmetics, four free condoms, lighter, a candle, and a jam jar. I'd think my mom'd be glad that I'd be very safety-minded. Alas, she was not, so I am currently hiding everything behind a cabinet.

And my mom tried to take my official wrench-shaped university bottle opening key chain, and a poster of New Zealand lemon and paeroa.

WE INTERRUPT THIS SESSION OF NAVEL GAZING FOR MARKS UPDATE

Digital computation (matlab) - 95
Statics and solid mechanics - 100 - I LOVE THE MIDTERM BONI
Calculus 2 - 100 - AND BELL CURVES I THINK I LOVE THOSE TOO

FUCK YEAHHHHH (Incidentally these were my first three exams and everything after this should be significantly lower. Not springing for a goat just yet.) Update - stuffed with peek freans fruit centre cookies.

1. Several of us realized that a girl on the floor was having sex at 4AM. She was rather loud. The dude was uncannily quiet. If there is anything I have learned from living in res, NOBODY is really actually asleep. All those times my roommate was talking when I was sleeping in? I was awake.

2. I finished my ECE exam. It was awful. I went through the first two questions thinking, "hey, this is pretty easy." This was followed by making equations for capacitor and inductor charge and discharge up in the next two. The final two questions... could not multiply complex numbers to save my life. And power factors. Ugh. Power factors. We hardly got any examples in class, and covered none of it in the tutorials.

3. I'm finished. I leave campus in about six hours. My term grades will be up around next week, not that I'm keeping track or anything. My tenuously held 4.0 is dead. The DHL is still a possible, but it has more syllables and is much less clean than a 4.0. All the best things in life have fewer syllables. Expensive ice cream has a shorter list of ingredients than cheap ice cream. The Oscars are more prestigious than the Golden Globes. Not to mention how Madonna Louise Ciccone is on a first name basis with everyone. And  Pelé! I don't even know his last name.

If I get a 4.0 I will do as Ivan did and sacrifice a goat. Actually maybe not, it might be messy. Um. I will sacrifice a carton of soy milk to a local river deity. By that I mean a sewer, because I'm not biking to the damn Rouge River.

Psych was ok. 

One of the social phenomena studied was the "foot-in-door" effect. The exam featured the phrase "door-in-face effect" several times. I loled. I don't think that the ECE exam will be that much fun.

[23:39:01] <jazzman.27> can anyone tell me why i am not able to grab any of the file lists
[23:40:39] <Stig> if u are on wireless maybe thats issue
[23:40:50] <jazzman.27> no i'm plugged in
[23:41:13] <jazzman.27> i can view all the names in the hub and can search but i cant view any of the file lists
[23:44:36] <DanK> are you plugged in through ethernet
[23:45:04] <jazzman.27> yea
[23:48:18] <jazzman.27> uw-wireless
[23:49:00] <[UWDC]Security> [su]root sets the topic to : FACEPALM 

No, the ECE exam for non-ECE-etc programs will not be not nearly as fun. Based on the several hours taken to do a practice exam, I'm alright with thevenin/ norton and basic AC analysis, mediocre on transient and steady-state analysis (more of a problem of having a billion equations floating around everywhere, and probably incorrect answers... I hope), and very, very crappy with power factor analysis. :P Guess I'll be attending the review session after all.

 Today, I fixed the cracked nosepiece on my four-year-old pair of glasses. These babies have been scratched to hell and back. The anti-scratch coating looks like a dorm room window and the paint job would look right at home on a rustbucket with vitiligo. 

Anyways I was cleaning the mud off the glasses until I snapped the plastic nosepiece off. They'd already been replaced once, but with insurance a hundred kilometres away and my spares still too strong there was no option but to fix them again.

Using a knife, I removed the screw holding down the remnants of the nosepiece and used a wooden splinter from my desk to clean out the gunk trapped inside, which was green. Initially I tried filling the void with clear nail polish but it wasn't as quick to dry as the bottle advertised, so I switched to the last few drops of a tube of superglue I bought in the fall. 

 I watched The Social Network last night -- this time in better quality, with subtitles. Loved it, surprisingly. The fleece wardrobe, JT (I was reminded of NPH in Harold & Kumar...), the intellectual as a tragic hero. I have to constantly remind myself that it's only very, very loosely based on real life. And does Social Network fanfiction go under the RPF banner? Probably not, or I'd feel much more of a guilty lurch in my stomach about this movie than I already do.

Then I woke up and watched Spirited Away. I think the last time I watched it, I was... I don't really remember. But it's a very sweet movie. I wasn't overwhelmed with WTF as much as d'awww. Still not sure what Haku's deal is, but Spirited Away could stand a third go for my failure of comprehension. 

Still downloading Eight Legged Freaks.

My roommate is out for the next few days... 

Studying skills: through the floor. Because I haven't tried more than one practice exam for statics, haven't even drawn up the 8.5*11 reference sheet, or thought about my other subjects. 

I did the practical rock/mineral identification lab exam this morning. I feel dizzy even though I slept at 11:30.

The exam. My partner and I identified rhyolite at least a dozen times yesterday night, but I still IDed it as some kind of quartzite because of the sugary sides and because I always thought rhyolite was a little bit paler. Well it's not and I should have taken the hardness kit to it to confirm that it was softer than 7. Not to mention the scoria/vesicular basalt. I'm still not sure how to spell calcaereous, and spelling counts.

We spent three hours yesterday in the rock lab identifying samples for practice.

Why.

 I'm only about two decades late to start watching the X Files from the pilot which first aired when I was, like, eight (months). There was one time I watched the second season on DVD from the library. It was good. Then the first movie. That was good too. Then there was the second movie. It was complete shit. Mulder has been living in Scully's house for the past six years, under his REAL NAME, growing a beard. Scully has become a doctor with faith issues which I think should have been solved a couple seasons before. There are no aliens. And since Mulder and Scully got together, there is no UST which makes the world go round.

Reportedly, the first six seasons are all solid classic sci fi tv.

Midterms are being returned. Despite having been asleep for the majority of reading week, I am not a follower of Emile Querada's do-nothing-until-results-lest-you-tip-the-balance-of-the-universe-against-you methodology. So far, a 94 in Calculus and 40/30 in Statics (bonus! :D ). ECE is out at 4PM. The Programming TA is out until tomorrow.

And last week on Glee:

Kurt: Bisexual is a term that gay guys in high school use when they wanna hold hands with girls and feel normal.

Great job, Ian Brennan. Great job.
And, Rachel, you're not helping.

Update: 9:30pm
My wiki syntax is horrible. To be honest, I haven't been active since 2007. They changed the layout around then, so I stopped editing. On the plus, it's an excuse to not help Dee with his CS assignment. 
100 in ECE.

Update: 10:30am
92 in programming - very shaky grip on simulations.
89.47 in psych - someone out there hates me.