blueswede

billiards and scholarships

Well, this week has had its ups and downs. It was mostly
downs, so needless to say, this post will contain its fair
share of griping. Brace yourself, here it comes!

The President's Day holiday ended up working against me, as
it led to the rescheduling of our Quiz Bowl match. Instead
of Monday, we played Tuesday, and so I was about 15 minutes
late to computer science. More about CS later. Wednesday,
we once again played our arch-nemesis, the Catholic school
that is currently highest ranked. This was the tournament,
and once again we lost to them. We were close going into
the last round, but then things went nuts. Now the thing
that really gripes my ass is this: one guy scored close to
one half of their total points. On the plus side, we had a
question about the color of the Pope's shoes, they got it
wrong, we got it right. That was probably worth it, acing
snooty Catholics on a question about the Pope.

I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. A friend of
mine is on that school's team, and while I'm happy for him,
I'd just really like to have beaten them even once. Also,
the brother of one of our team members plays for the enemy,
making for one weird-ass sibling showdown. The brother on
our team answered more questions, giving us all some degree
of satisfaction, however vicarious.

Thursday we had an exam in computer science. That wasn't
too difficult. When I got home, I found that I'd gotten 30
out of 40 points on the last assignment. The point loss
was mostly due to a misunderstanding of the assignment on
my part. Let me say this, though: the phrasing of those
things is not always clear, especially with the professor's
English the way it is. Fortunately, I did pick up a little
extra credit, so I'm only down a net of 3 points out of 200
for the assignments we've had so far. The college is going
on spring break next week, which will give me a much-needed
break on Tuesday and Thursday nights.

Thursday night I found a major problem: I'd forgotten to do
a big scholarship application, and it's due on the 25th of
February. Fortunately, I managed to get everything taken
care of, including getting letters of recommendation. The
punks want everything in duplicate, too, so I had the fun
of paying four bucks for transcripts. Also, nothing can be
folded, meaning we need one big-ass envelope to put it all
in. Except for the envelope, everything seems to be proper
with it, so we'll have the fun of dropping it off at the
scholarship office on Monday. Local things like this are
always unbelievably inconvenient.

Rehearsal for the musical went surprisingly well this week:
we worked with the choreographer and managed to run through
some scenes decently. The director (who is also my English
teacher) doesn't like some of the choreography and is hell-
bent on changing it to something equally insane. Also, she
now says we have to have Act One memorized, even though we
haven't even gone through all of the scenes in any detail.
A few we haven't even touched on.

On a side note, after talking with a fellow cast member who
saw the movie, I've concluded that the film editing, with
respect to the story, was better than in the original. The
movie removes the last scene, ending on a much better line
than the original. It also removes a conflict, painting a
much better picture of relations between the characters.
The resolution of said conflict is never depicted in the
musical, so wouldn't it make sense to leave it out?

Tonight was good, however. I solved the problem concerning
my video card and my games; I'd accidentally turned off all
hardware acceleration. Now I am able to see the true power
of my new processor: running games really fast.

From about 8:00 until 11:15, I hung out with a friend from
school (the aforementioned fellow from Quiz Bowl and the
musical). Neither of us had anything worth doing, so we
went to shoot some pool, then got some food at the burrito
joint. The whole time, we exchanged stories about hardcore
sleeping in class, road trips, and soldering. Good times.

So a down week ended on an up note. Perhaps this weekend
will rock. Most likely not, but we shall see.

This is Dave, signing off.