That Last Week

So it's the last week of the semester. That means it's time for a post about how insane my life is right now and how I shouldn't be taking the time to write a blog post.

Well, this is it. You may want to refer to my last semester rundown for context.

With classes only on Tuesday and Thursday the mayhem is relatively contained, but that just makes it all the worse on those days. Last week I spent untold hours on a group projet involving far more VB.NET programming than anyone should ever be subjected to, while trying to prepare for a presentation on my software quality assurance research.

The weekend was the calm before the storm, although it should have been the emergency preparation before the storm. Consequently I spent most of yesterday in various computer labs, culminating a VB programming hacking marathon.

I came home at 10pm to get started on the final installment of a simulation project that was due this morning. Around 5am I realized I was not going to make any more progress, so I put aside the barely mediocre report and tried to get some sleep. Fortunately my 8am class had been cancelled so I was able to sleep for most of 3 1/2 hours. It seemed a reasonable compromise until in class the professor offhandedly commented that we were welcome to wait until Thursday to turn in the report if we wanted to spend more time on it. My roommate and I stared at each other dumbfounded, trying to comprehend the meaning of this through our sleep-deprived semiconsciousness. Yeah, we just wasted an (almost) all-nighter.

After that class I had an exit interview ("postmortem" as we call it in SE) with my department chair, my last chance to formally complain about things like hurricanes, fountain budgets, and the Ratio. It was a painless conversation as promised, and I offered a few suggestions on how to improve the program- specifically a C++ course, which he said everyone had been bringing up.
From there I immediately went to more fun-tastic HCI group work, and after a couple more hours of work we had finally completed the project. Sadly we have to present the thing to the class during our final exam time slot on Saturday, so I can't relegate it to the past just yet.

I managed to stay more or less conscious during senior design and even got a final small piece of documentation written. From there I came home, took a shower, and collapsed into bed for a couple hours. Now I'm just trying to get something useful accomplished before going back to bed for the night. I can sleep in tomorrow but at some point I have to study for tests in HCI and  and, if I want a decent grade, redo my simulation report. Besides the 2 tests on Thursday we have our big fancy end of the year presentation on our senior design work for the faculty, administration, and various other VIPs.

After all of that, I'm almost done with my undergraduate career. From that point all I have to do prepare for the HCI presentation, take an open-note test on Saturday night, and spend a couple hours next Tuesday pretending to care what next year's seniors do with our EcoCAR system.

The end is in sight.