Happy New Year

Happy New Year everyone! (I probably won’t post for a while.) I’ve got a week left before heading back to school, back to the grind.

My family just moved to a new house in another part of town. We spent most of the last week hauling stuff from our old house to the new one. Today, some family friends came by to help. The 年轻力壮 among us made several round trips hauling hundred-pound potted plants. Guess going to the gym last quarter wasn’t a waste after all (though I’m sure I’m gonna feel sore tomorrow; I haven’t exercised much since school ended). Our new house currently has no plants around it. It’s got a large front yard and a relatively small (though still sizable) backyard, with some large boulders scattered around. We’re going to have to start anew, and transform the semi-wilderness into a garden again. (I hope I get the chance to do that when I have my own family; I enjoy starting from scratch, turning a blank slate into a piece of art).

One cool thing about this house is the in-room Ethernet jacks. I never thought I’d see these things in residential areas, but apparently the whole neighborhood has them. The service costs about the same as DSL, and the speed is about the same too, but it’s more complicated to set up. I haven’t tried playing with the control panel, but I rather not lose the Internet connection for now.

Rocks is coming along fine. I spent a little more than a week on it, and have pretty much hammered out the architecture. Now it’s just the little things. After refactoring, the code was much easier to manage, and there weren’t as many bugs as the previous versions, either. Debugging became much easier: when I encounter a bug, I usually guessed (correctly) what the problem was. Since I’ve surmounted the most difficult parts of the program, I decided to give it a rest, and spend some time doing other stuff, like help sort stuff in the new house (our minivan made at least ten round trips, each time carrying box after box of random junk). Just last night, I tossed out dozens of old floppies and CDs, and shrunk the size of my CD-ROM library in half. On a tangent, it always strikes me as strange how such a round, smooth piece of high-quality plastic cannot be put to any other use besides holding data. Same with used tennis balls.