OK, time for a more upbeat entry than my last one!

The semester is over, and I'm finally done with exams, so right now I'm enjoying a well-deserved break. I got respectable grades in all my courses (except Religion >_>). Still, my GPA for the semester is 3.27, so I'm happy; just another goal to set myself! In other news I bought myself a new laptop:


Specs!

Dell XPS M1330
CPU: C2D T7500 (2.2 GHz 4 MiB cache)
GPU: 8400 GS (128 MiB of dedicated memory + 767 MiB shared)
Display: 13.3" 1280x800
RAM: 2 GiB
HDD: 250 GB

It's very nice; I've been having lots of fun using it everywhere I can (including a chiropractor appointment I took my sister to :p ) and pretty much just enjoying my new toy. It's not a gaming powerhouse, obviously, but HL2, TF2 and Portal play wonderfully on it, and I love the size of the thing (it has roughly the same footprint as the notebooks and textbooks I use for class. Could be a bit lighter, though).

Next on the gadget list is a new cell phone. My current one is three years old now, and I could really do with one with a better camera for when September rolls around (I borrowed my mom's digicam for the above pics). I've already got a specific model in mind and am just waiting for them to drop in price before I pick one up.

So yesterday in my Heat Transfer course, we were giving short oral reports on various subjects related to heat transfer. My topic was heat pipes, and I think it went rather well! :)  I noticed something while I was doing it, too: when I get nervous, I get a little hyper and start to talk faster. I think it actually helped though, because the whole room seemed energized after I was done (I didn't bore everyone to sleep, like some of the other presenters did). One of my classmates even came up to me after I was done and complimented me on my presentation!

Also, there's only one more week of classes left, and then finals from the 4th to the 11th. I can't wait for this summer, it's going to be awesome!  My current plan is to spend the bulk of it in California, hanging out with some of my friends from high school (we're a really close bunch). The 24 hours of LeMons is on my todo list (some guys from a car forum I frequent are going to be participating), as is PAX and Rainfurrest (which I've already mentioned) and a trip to Yosemite with my family. The only downside to a summer this awesome, is that this will probably be the last time I get a break this long. Next summer I'll likely be doing my co-op/summer training thing, and after that I'll start working, so no more 10-week vacations for me. :(

Best make the most of it, then.

Man, it's been way too long since my last entry! I've been meaning to post more often, but as soon as I get on the computer, I get distracted and waste my time browsing forums, tech news sites, and chatting on IRC. In an attempt to make up for it, I'll lay down some of the little happenings over the past week:

Thursday:

Picked my dad up from the Dammam airport, which was quite a long drive. Interestingly enough, the airport in the neighboring country of Bahrain is actually closer than Dammam's airport (as the crow flies, I haven't measured it by road). He said the weather was really nice in Switzerland, and that he had such a good time he wished he could have spent another week there! He did miss me though, so he's glad to be back.

Sunday:

A Chemistry professor I had last year wanted to talk to me, so I dropped by his office between classes. As it turns out, he's leaving the university (awww) to get a job at another university in London, and he wants me to write a little bit about how he was as a professor, which he will incorporate into his teaching portfolio. He did an exceptional job teaching the courses I had with him, so I happily obliged.

Tuesday:

We had our second-ever free sparring session in Tae Kwon Do class. The first session we had was at the beginning of the semester, so we couldn't really do much, and my classmates weren't really into it. Since then, however, we've learned lots of kicks, steps and combinations, and we were able to have some real sparring action going on! Everyone was a lot more enthusiastic about it this time as well, so we had a ton of fun. :D  I also watched the original Matrix movie again, which I hadn't seen in years. After all this time, it's still an awesome film; the two sequels just pale in comparison, in my opinion.

Wednesday:

It was raining this morning when I went to class. It almost never rains here this late in the year! It was also very windy and hazy for most of the day. I took these pictures around 11 AM, just to show you how bad it was:




There's a city out there! I swear!

Right, so that's how my week went. As far as other things go, the end of the semester is closing in fast (my first final is on the fourth of June! Yikes!), and after they're over I'll start the job application process for Aramco (the national oil company). Wish me luck!

OK, so I'm trying to early register online for courses in the upcoming fall semester, but I'm hitting a few snags.

One of the courses I plan to take is CHE 306, a core course and one that is a prerequisite for basically every 400-level course in the curriculum. For some reason, an important class like this only has ONE SECTION SCHEDULED. At least it's open, however, so it's not all bad. The bad part comes in when I tried to add more classes. CHEM 311 (another required course that is a prerequisite for a lot of later courses) only has two sections. One of them was already closed when I started registering, and the other is at the same time as CHE 306. Once again, bad, but not too bad, because there's another chemistry course on the curriculum, CHEM 323. The lone lecture section is open, and it's even at a convenient time for me! The downside? All the lab sections are full, and you can't take the lecture without the lab. I tried signing up for the lab's waitlist, but the system just gave me an error that now I can't sign up for the lecture section because "Term Not in Adv Reg". Apparently, Grok the Caveman doesn't want me to enroll in the course.

So at the end of it all, I was only able to register 10 hours worth of courses, even though the minimum is 12 hours, and I'd ideally like to take 16 or more. There's another course worth 2 hours that I'm going to register for later (the only reason I can't do it now is because its schedule has changed, and the registrar's website hasn't been updated yet), but that would still leave me at the bare minimum number of classes for next semester. Hopefully I can sort out the "Term Not in Adv Reg" problem with the chemistry courses and maybe see if I can take Tae Kwon Do again, as that would bring the total number of hours up to 16.

Anyways, I hope I didn't bore you all to sleep with this little rant of mine.