Light at the end of the tunnel?

I haven't posted all weekend for a couple of reasons:

1) Vinney came to town :)
2) School

It always happens, every semester, there's a period of 1 - 2 weeks where everything that could possibly be due is due. I'm not just talking about homework, I'm talking projects, tests, taxes, you name it - it's due whenever these weeks crop up. For whatever reason, regardless of what classes you're taking, what department they are in, during these 1 - 2 weeks all classes seem to abide by the same policy of making everything possible due.

I've known it was coming for a while, and I did my best to prepare for it - getting work done early all in preparation for the weeks that are just now upon me. There is one dreaded day this week - Tuesday - where everything is due, and then I've got some aftershocks hitting next week. I'm working on mini-compiler for one class right now and I was lucky enough to finish a hardware design for my ASIC class early, now I just have to do some timing calculations and I'll be done with that homework. Needless to say, you won't really hear from me on the blog until after Tuesday (I do have another project due Wednesday but hopefully I'll be done with that before Wednesday morning).

I did manage to see Barbershop 2 over the weekend with Vinney and friends. The movie was entertaining at parts, although I liked the original better. The movie started out fairly slow in my opinion and didn't really pick up until the end; in order for me to truly like a comedy I can't be sitting there for 30 minutes wondering why I haven't laughed yet. The camerawork and style of the film changed dramatically since the original Barbershop in the usual "bigger, better, faster" style of sequels - in this case it just felt out of place to me at least. I guess the sequel cliché exists for a reason.

It started snowing in Raleigh tonight; driving through the hardest snowfall was interesting, some of the snowflakes falling were downright massive (I'm talking Willamette die size massive...ok that was a bad joke). It doesn't look like the snow is going to make the morning drive to school too difficult though, just messy. It's times like these when I do think it would be handy to have a set of winter tires now, but I think I'm going to wait until it's closer to when I move up to CT (read: Fall).

Speaking of tires - why do so many people find it unnecessary to check tire pressures? It is quite possibly one of the best preventative maintenance tasks you could do for your own safety and it is so very simple yet I know very few people that do it. I know over in Europe it's much bigger of a deal but why not over here? Granted we're not running at 150mph+ speeds but I've seen enough blowouts and ruined tires because of dangerously low pressures to know that it's something that needs to be paid attention to. Is it just because we're not teaching this stuff in driver's ed? Do the vast majority of people not know why it's important? Maybe it's a lazy thing, I know I usually find some excuse to put it off until altered handling characteristics remind me of why I need to in the first place :)

So let's see: Vinney, school, weather and cars - check - looks like I've hit all the highlights so I can head to bed :)

IDF is this week, Derek will be covering it as I'm stuck here trying to finish up this last semester. He's the best man for the job so I'm sure you'll see some interesting coverage from him starting Tuesday. I think we're all very interested to see if this big 64-bit announcement will be coming from Intel this week; I'm highly skeptical but that doesn't mean that it won't happen.

There, I even talked some tech too :)

Take care and goodnight.