Names

My aunt Rosie is pregnant. I think it's going to be a girl, and I like the name Olivia. Mom dislikes that name, and I didn't get a favorable vibe when I asked Rosie if she liked it. Oh well.

If I would have been a girl, my name would have been either Amanda or Heidi, oddly enough names of two of my older cousins.

I can't think of too many guys off the top of my head who laugh in falsetto. Tom for one. That's about it. Except for me, I've started to.

So I was on the phone with some dude trying to extract a wild guess for a cost to implement a project, and since I was going to ask him to guess about the project, I laughed while I was starting my conversation with him.

He called it a giggle.

I don't think I like my laugh being called a giggle.

The favorite part of my job at the IAC is when I'm by myself, crunching numbers and making verifiable progress on a report.

I don't like chasing down information, calling people on the phone. Blehh.

I was wondering today if I'm conditioning myself to not be passionate about my job because of its technicality. I don't want to bore people with my geekishness (which I am unashamed of, by the way; really, to make it sound less geekish I should say "technical acuity" instead of "geekishness", you think?), so I'm not very excitable when talking about my job, even the one I really enjoy.

So we were programming/testing/whatever away and I look over to the next row of computers and see this guy perusing Match.com. He'd look through pictures (paragraphs too?), find a pretty face (I guess), and click on it to see more pictures and find more out about this particular woman.

I was fascinated, kept stealing glances.

But you won't see me doing that, ever.

I don't like to make blanket statements, but quote me on that.

Well...maybe eHarmony.com, if I get really desperate. But Match.com? Never!

Hahaha!

Another thing I need to do this summer is gather and compose materials for my Marshal Scholarship application.

That should be fun.

We're progressing in our coding to the point where we're ready to start testing. What we've done is taken a sample problems with sample numbers and coded a couple programs, including a "tabu search" program, that crunches this particular problem without any errors. Then we wrote another program that randomly generates additional problems.

Problem is, when we generated a random problem and tried to feed it into our other programs, we got (and are still getting) errors. Figures.

Anyway, so we're debugging away, and I was looking back over some notes I had taken when we were having a similar problem earlier. To show you what debugging can be like, here's what I wrote, with [inserted comments].

"Traced problem from possible_jobs [an array of numbers] not updating correctly to realizing that it's [the computer code/program] not picking [the] right jobs (when we reinitialze to zero) to realizing that the reason it picked [the] wrong job (job 1 always) was because the solo_WT array [another array] for job 1 was always zero which led us to wander [sic] if processing times were being updated."

Now, ignore all the cryptic names and nonsense, but realize that debugging can be sort of like when you scrunch up a straw-paper-thing (can't think of what it's called) up in your nose and start pulling. Either that or it's like delving into the emotions of a woman, where it's sort of like spaghetti--grab one string and get the whole thing. Or maybe it's just like a mystery. Once clue leads to the next.

It's probably most like a mystery.

Things to do this summer:

-Decide if I'm going to grad school for statistics, operations research, or industrial engineering
-Research graduate schools
-Gather material needed to apply to graduate schools
-Figure out possible ways to spend my time between graduation and graduate school (SMBI, service somewhere, ?)
-See if I can minor in Statistics here at OSU
-Take/Schedule a Graduate Record Examination (including the Math part--scary!)

To post a good entry into the by-log, I need some time to decompress and think. If I rush, I'll post something like this.

I'm home safe and sound.

I've had the chance to listen to the newest album, "Resting in His Grace", by Voice of Praise, and folks, you need to get this recording! Sparkling harmonies, magnificent arrangements, excellent production--my first and second impressions are that this is a great album. Their rendition of Joshua Fit the Battle is Kingsingers-esque.

It's a really, really impressive piece of work.

It's a shame, really, because I remember throughout the last day or two that there were different things that I wanted to comment on, but since I didn't write them down they are lost to me now.

Oh, here was one.

Yea for life! Yea for love!

I want to get a bumper sticker or t-shirt that says, "Life is good." I saw that on one of the buses at the concert on Sunday. Personally, I love the testimony that projects to the world.

Sunday was one of the more eventful days of my life. AHQ sings at a huge Southern Gospel event and is then officially inactivated.

I guess we were good enough to be invited back next year to the Singing in the Smokies, because we were. We must decide within a month whether we will do it or not.

One thing I like about David is how much his family and friends mean to him. It's easy to see that he cares a lot more for them than for schmoozing with big-wigs, though he likes to do that too. It's just that he had lots of family around at the concert Sunday and he was just with them for a whole lot of the time, introducing them to our music friends and stuff.