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Finals and Such (Blogging from 30000 feet)

I am sitting in an airplane at cruising altitude on my way from Memphis to Orlando while writing this.  Pretty cool, eh?  I'm also on Facebook and my e-mail at the same time.  In-flight (free) wifi is where it's at!  (Another reason to love Google Chrome: they are offering free wifi on Delta flights for Christmas!)

Well, finals have been in full swing at BYU this week.  It's a cool atmosphere, I think.  Finals usually ends up being a pretty relaxed time for me (which may or may not be a good thing...).  I finished all my finals yesterday which was such a relief.  I managed to pull off decent grades, too.  And now I get to go home for the break!  Awesome!

Just a few pictures of what I've been up to the last few days.  (And, I just really, REALLY wanted to write a blog post while flying in an airplane.)

The trees all decked-out on campus

The library packed with people = not normal.  Must be finals week.

(you can kind of see if you click to make it larger)

Last night my friend, Alicia, and I made a Wendy's run just after midnight.

Since she couldn't park at my apt complex, we took a trip down memory lane to the Wyview laundromat. (She and I met while living at Wyview).

There was a party going on in the laundromat.  A bunch of freshman playing ukeleles and singing.

Sometimes I miss being a freshman.

The tomato from my burger, and Alicia dying of laughter in the background.

That's it for me, for now.  I will be landing in wonderful Orlando in approximately 45 minutes!!

Class Assignments

Over the last few weeks, I've had some pretty cool assignments in my classes, and I wanted to share a few links with you.

This is a website I wrote for my IT class from scratch:

www.et.byu.edu/~slaughta

This is a website for my Computer Science 100 class, where we put links to our assignments. 

students.cs.byu.edu/~slaughta

For my IT class we do a lot of labs building cool things.

Like, a ethernet cable, for instance:

I made that.  Neat, huh?  (Actually, it's not as difficult as it may look.)

Also, we did circuit boards.  We had to solder all the little bits onto the board.

It plays 4 different songs and the little LED light blinks.  Check out the vid!

(Songs are the BYU Fight Song, Happy Birthday, The Star-Spangled Banner, and Come, Come Ye Saints.)

Sorry for the bad quality.  My camera refused to focus, darn it all!

Also, I've been writing a lot of programs, at least one every week.  They're tiny little things really, but they take me usually 10 hours or more.  

Like, I had to write programs to do these things:

- Convert decimal numbers to Roman Numerals

- Translate sentences into Pig Latin

- Read in strings of DNA and determine if they might be a gene

- Read in a file with banking information and calculate the total value of the portfolio (including compounding interest on bonds and looking up stock values from a website)

- Sort a list of names alphabetically (and write the results out to a new file)

- Compute the steady state temperature distribution over a piece of metal (what the heck??), then export the results to Excel and create a graph from the data.

Pretty crazy stuff, eh?  Haha, turns out that most of those are a lot easier than they sound, too.  Well, at least once I know what I'm doing.  :)

Let's hope I can keep up the rest of the semester!

This Semster

First off, let me tell you that this semester has caught me by surprise.

Firstly,  it literally snuck up on me, and it took me a good couple of weeks to get my head in the game and realize I was actually in school again.

Secondly,  my classes are hard this semester. Real hard.  I don't think I've ever had to work this hard in my life for anything.  Talk about a wake-up call!  It's stressing me out pretty good.

I'm having to learn:
-how to get enough sleep,
-how to get enough hours at work to make enough money to pay rent and buy food,
-how to manage stress and not just bottle it up,
-how to be social with my new ward,
-how to fulfill my church calling,
-how to exercise effectively,
-and how to make time for existing friends.

Somehow, there's hardly even enough time to get sleep, work, go to classes, and finish my homework, let alone all those other things.

I think it's just going to be one of those semesters.

But, I really don't have anything to complain about, since there are plenty of others with much tougher lives than me.

Besides, I have great roommates, supportive friends, an awesome ward.  And I'm learning about stuff I really like.  And I'm going to BYU for crying out loud!

Sometimes I think I'm spoiled.  :)