The New Pad

The new place is pretty cool. I'm renting a room out of my friends' condo. Well ... they're friends now that I've met them. They're originally friends of my coworker, and one of them used to work at Full Sail. I had him in Final Project. He works at n-Space, which is a "Nintendo" company. I don't think they're owned by Nintendo, but they only work on games for Nintendo consoles. Currently, they have a DS division, and a Wii division. He works for the Wii. The other guy, who happens to be the older brother, works as a high school Math teacher. So I think that's pretty cool.

They're quiet, and have completely different schedules than me. They own a big HD tv (with HD programming). I have to say that regular HD shows don't strike me as worth it. They do fill up the wide screen, but the picture quality doesn't look incredible. However, HD sports are absolutely amazing. The baseball game looked so much better in HD. Though I would honestly need a side-by-side comparison with a non HD ball game. Football games, too, look much crisper. They showed an instant replay from a non-HD game, and it looked pretty bad. I mean, in comparison.

These guys are big football fans. They also like to play poker, which I've started to pick up from Blade. Blade wants me to get us in a game so he can win all their money. Ha ha ha.

They hadn't really thought about renting out their spare bedroom. In fact, they had been using it as an entertainment room, with the big tv and surround sound. They also had a leather couch in there, which is still in here. They don't have room for it anywhere else, and I said I'd be fine with it in here. Well ... it's kinda in the way of my door, so I have to maneuver around it every time. But I've got maybe a foot of space I could pull it away from the door. I just have to get around to doing it.

The closet is also full of random stuff. So I have my necessary dress clothes hanging on the outside of the closet on door hooks. That happens to be angled into the sofa, so I actually have to maneuver between my clothes and the sofa. But it's not too bad. All the stuff that used to be in my closet is now in my storage unit.

I have a very small place in the fridge to put food, but that's fine since I don't buy a lot of "fridge-food". Most of my food is soup or tuna in the pantry. I don't really have any room in the freezer, but I manage to fit a few small things in there. But I'm doing pretty good with that.

I share a bathroom; it's clean so I'm happy. The bathroom has a linen closet, and I've got a shelf in there. Once I get around to cleaning my towels, I'll be using it. I think it's strange that we keep the toilet lid closed. It's not like we have pets or women around, but we do have a few ants. I'm not sure if that is a valid reason though. Another thing about the bathroom is that there's a stereo right behind the door for listening to music in the shower. But it's right behind the door. It takes up a good 30 degrees of rotation. But I can make do.

I wouldn't say my room is clean but it is cleaner than my other one was. Again, a lot of my stuff is now in storage. Once I have my laundry cleaned, I should be able to move stuff around. I think I'm going to get my little bookshelves out of storage. I have room for them, and I could really use them. I'm using a table as my desk, and that's working out well for me. I have boxes all over the table, but still have enough room to "work" on my computer.

I don't see work letting up on me any time soon, so we'll see how long I lazy out of cleaning. I'm also lazying out of work right now ... but whatever.

***
Quiz 1 had an average of 78, and a median of 90. So half of my students did well, perhaps a quarter did alright, and the other quarter just flat out sucked. That's not really my fault. The only thing I could have done better with is explain how strict I'd be on grading. Which, I'm actually less strict than my predecessor. You'd be surprised how badly someone could mess up a function that takes two integer parameters and returns a floating point value. *sigh*

Quiz 2 is tomorrow (Monday) on pointers. I'm actually expecting about the same grades. The average will probably go down to 73, but the median should still be above 87. Meaning, half my class actually knows what they're doing ... I think.

I had a student make an appointment for office hours on Saturday. So I came in and helped him a little on pointers. He said he understood pointers in general, but didn't get the concept of dynamic strings. Or rather, he doubted that he could replicate getting user input, allocating a char array, and copying the string over. I helped him with that, and he said he'd keep at it over the weekend. I got an email today asking for another appointment tomorrow. So we'll see if he figured anything out on his own.

I have another student coming in for office hours tomorrow as well. I should probably look at his last quiz before I meet with him ... but we'll see if I get around to it. I don't know much about this one; he hasn't asked me for any help this month. I actually didn't think he was in my class until he told me his name. Though I can't remember it now.

Quiz 3 is this Friday. I guess I'll be making it on Thursday. I also said I'd make a study guide for the final. Which is pretty much going to be a giant list of topics they should be prepared for. So ... it might not be helpful at all. But a giant list requires them to have enough time to study it. I figure they should have the list before the weekend, cause I know they have eight hours of calculus on the Tuesday before the final.

So I'm busy this month. Very, very busy. Though I like this better than being the PG2/PG3 monkey. I only have to show up for work three days out of the week; the rest of the time I can work from home. Also, I was starting to get real lazy in the PG3 labs. I'm pretty much always busy when I'm at work now. So that makes the night go by much quicker.

***
I got a new phone! It's a Samsung A437 from AT&T. Same number, though. I thought I'd just be able to swap SIM chips to get all my phone numbers traded. Nope! It's almost impossible for me to get the SIM chip out of the new phone. You have to slide it out of a small opening, but I can't get a good grip on it. So I manually typed the 43 numbers back in. *sigh* It's a bit thinner, but bigger in the other dimensions. It still fits in my pocket just fine. It has a little camera on it, which is what I was looking for. I don't listen to music off a phone, and I don't surf the internet, or watch videos. So the A437 is exactly what I was looking for. I honestly doubt I'll take any photos with it either, but you never know. The best part: it was free! Well ... once I mail in that rebate. Until then, it was only $30 with a two year contract.

New place, new-ish job, and new phone. A whole new life I'm going for.

***
Well, I still miss my friends in IL and WA. I've gotten much lonelier since Del, Blade, and I parted ways. I see Del online sometimes, and I went to a party last Friday with Blade. Though I got there as the party ended, since I worked late.

I sorta made a lot of friends with the students. But I'm not allowed to hang out with them outside of the work environment. And most of my coworkers have other stuff to do. So I don't have a lot of friends left in the area. *sigh*

***
I get paid next Friday. We'll see if the raise has gone through, or if I'll be waiting another two weeks. That would be awesome if it's in already, but I haven't signed any papers. I kinda doubt it then.