Totally stressed out

So, it is looking increasingly unlikely that I will graduate on time. This is not for lack of trying, mind you. I have been working my poor little brain all day and all night since January. I am on track, making good progress, but, mostly thanks to DCGS, I am a month behind schedule, and I can't think of a way to recover the time that doesn't involve me losing my mind.

The thesis is due, signed, sealed, and delivered, by May 12. To do this, I need a draft by no later than May 1. That is approximately six weeks from now. It will probably take me three weeks to a month to actually write the thesis (Hell, it took three months to get the thesis proposal approved...). That leaves me two weeks to work, and I have WAY more work to do than that.

In related news, last week I accomplised a pretty cool set of goals... First, the tiles know to ask their neighbors for help when they can't see the ball. The "asking for help" mechanism is very non-trivial and took many weeks to get working properly. Now, I have a little paint program running on the tiles. So, you hold the ball, and a little tail follows you around. When you shake the ball side-to-side, the color changes. Then you can draw a stroke, and when you make a circle at the end, the program puts the stroke down in the current color. Neat! Then, if you shake the ball up and down, the screen clears. PHEW!

This all works on just one tile (who can ask its neighbors for help.). Next, I need to make one paint program run across ALL of the tiles. You might say "Diane, that doesn't sound so hard, now that you've got it working on one tile." And then I will say "ah, but the devil is in the distributed computing," And I would tell you all about how hard it is to get everyone to agree that right now the ball is GREEN, much less where they should draw a magenta line overlaying a red one, oh, and the current cursor position is on my neighbor above me, and oh, what do you want me to draw?

And this paint program isn't the thing I said I was going to do for my thesis. This is the thing I said I was going to do, which was REJECTED as TOO SIMPLE. What I said I was going to do, was make this cool animation/simulation application, where you can design little agents and have them walk around interacting with each other. If you thought it was hard to make everyone agree that the ball is green, guess how hard it will be for everyone to agree on the state of a hundred interacting little agents that need to be aware of each other, without respect for inter-tile boundaries. HUFF!

I really don't know how long this is going to take me, but I bet it will be longer than two weeks.

In other news, last week Mike and I got a coffee table and another book case from IKEA. What was funny is that in every department, I was drawn to pieces from the LEKSVIK collection. I would just look at a piece, and I would think "Oh, isn't that nice?" then I would walk up to it, and it would be LEKSVIK. Our coffee table and new book case are from this collection, to match the first book case we got, also from that collection.

Last weekend, we also put up the curtains that we had bought the week before. Well, we put up the curtains in the living room. The curtains in the dining room are still waiting to go up. We had some trouble with the drill -- we didn't have a bit that was large enough, and by the time we got to Home Depot to get a bit, I was pretty stressed, and I like freaked out because there were like a hundred different types of bits and I felt like I didn't know what I was doing (remarkably like I didn't know what I was doing...). Anyway, so we went to drill the holes, and we marked them out so the curtain rod would sit level and all that. Then Michael, the brave soldier, went to drill the holes, and put the plastic screw-holder thingies in. Well, the drill wouldn't go in far enough to get the plastic thingies all the way in. So we had to drill extra holes. Mike was not very happy about this, and so the dining room curtains are still waiting to go up.

Finally, this weekend, it had to happen sometime. I finally ran into the wall with Mike's car. I have been freaked out about this since we moved in (our driveway is VERY narrow, and there are cement walls on both sides), and I have tried to avoid driving. On the driver's side, the wall kinda creeps up on you -- the driveway goes down, and there is a retaining wall for the yard that stays level, so you can really get very close to it without realizing it. And on the passenger side, the wall rises up about seven feet from the ground, and I'm always scared of smashing the rear right corner into the wall. Well, I smashed the front left corner into the retaining wall. Not smashed, really. Scraped against. It was kinda scary really, because once I got that close to it (I was like completely parallel to it) I couldn't turn away from it, because I couldn't turn the wheel. The only way out was to scrape. When I hit the wall, I was very close to the end of the driveway, so I was able to get out, but then I was freaked out (are you noticing a theme?). It really wasn't so bad -- Mike had done a similar thing a few weeks before. Mike made me drive ALL WEEKEND. I had to back out of the driveway FOUR TIMES. I almost smashed the rear right corner, trying to avoid the wall on the left. I will need to come up with more devious ways to avoid driving.

This weekend, we also (finally) got a filing cabinet. I have been working with one of those file accordians since freshman year, and Mike... Well. Mike doesn't really have a system for filing papers and stuff. Let's leave it at that. So, we got a filing cabinet and some colorful hanging folders, and file folders. Yay! Mike decided that he wanted a label maker. I thought this was pretty silly, but Mike said that this is what they recommended in his "Getting Things Done" class at work. So now we have a label maker.

This weekend, Mike and I did our taxes. I had been freaking out about this, because I sold this little mutual fund that my father had bought for me when i was five -- it hadn't been performing very well lately -- and I was totally freaked out about computing the cost basis. I was sure I was going to owe extra money, since it had been growing for twenty years. I sold it now, so that I would pay less taxes on it that I would next year, when I am finally going to have a real job. I wouldn't have thought it was a big deal, except that an ex-boyfriend of mine, who happened to know a few things about money had made it all sound very complicated. So I was freaking out and avoiding it. We tried to do taxes last weekend, but we got stuck on Mike's educational expenses. After getting stuck on such a little thing, I was even MORE freaked out. Well, this weekend, I finally took out the twenty year history of the account that I got from American Century, and put it all into Excel. Wouldn't you know, it was a capital loss! "What?" you say, "that doesn't sound very good." Well, no, not "good". The thing was worth more than my father put into it. This was mostly due to all the dividends being reinvested, while the price of shares in the mutual fund had peak out in 1999, and have been in a slump since. So, I think I picked a good time to trade in for something else. No need to stay on a sinking ship. And it isn't very much money, so I don't need to worry about having made too bad a choice.

After doing our taxes, we wanted to print them out, so we could send them. I haven't owned a printer in years, and Mike has been saying how nice it would be if we could print directions off of Google when we want to go places. So, guess what. We got a printer. It is a multi-function print, scan and copy machine. And it does the printing on the photo paper, and you can plug your camera straight into it, and so on and so forth. It looks like a little space-ship.

I am freaking out, man!

New Guidelines

So, I am *deeply* bummed that I missed the Museum of Science trip. So, in light of my disappointment, I am issuing some new guidelines for those who want to get in touch with Michael and I.

1.) Call me.
2.) If I don't answer, email me.

Michael isn't really very careful to be sure his phone is, shall we say, "on". And it certainly isn't a given that it is "charged". And, even if it *is* on and charged, it is probably in the car. And if it isn't in the car, half the time when I call him, he says he never heard the phone, even if it is in his pocket. And Mike checks his non-work email about once a week, if that.

After seeing Christine talking about going to Maine to do laundry, I had concluded that the Museum of Science trip had been cancelled, otherwise I would have been more aggressive about trying to call. And I don't have all the relevant Theriault/Kennedy family phone numbers, because those are in Mike's phone and palm pilot, which may or may not be on, charged, and available in a given day.

Anyway, after concluding that the MoS trip was off, Mike and I decided to go anyway. We got there in the afternoon, and there were no more tickets for the Star Wars exhibit, and there were no more Omni shows for the day. So, we went back to the Galleria, where we must have just missed Christine and Company, because we left there between 4:30 and 5.

In other news, last Monday, I had my first guitar lesson. I wanted to talk about how to hold the guitar and where to put my fingers. We spent the whole hour talking about music theory and modes of the major scale. At the very end, I actually picked up a guitar and attempted the C major scale. I have another lesson on Thursday. I am not sure how long I am going to keep this up, since my graduate stipend is small, and I cannot spend like I already have my new job.

Spent all week and most of the weekend working with networking code in C. For anyone who has not done this, let me tell you, it is ugly. The C networking libraries must have been written by about a bazillion people, and the structures and names make precious little sense. And I am doing multi-threading on top of this, so my threads that are doing the sending of messages sometimes try to chew up all of the CPU time, so my real program can't run. Grrrg.