M431K3

Winter break went by uneventfully. Was planning to spend some extra days at college, but the classrooms with the materials I need are locked, and the only classmate who has a keycard to open them was there only on tuesday. Didn't get much done.

Dyed my hair on thursday, fiery red. Couldn't really find the darker shade of red I was looking for at the drugstore. I'm done with Manic Panic and similar brands, the colors are nice but the dyes stain everywhere. The red hair dye turned out brighter than I expected, but I kind of like it. It doesn't cover the ends of my hair well, though, probably because of the blue and dark brown hair dye underneath. Not sure if I should do a black dip-dye to cover it up.

Finally fixed the problem I had with my android app! No idea what it was, though. Right before the autumn break, I asked a professor to help me, and he wrote a program to calculate the checksum. I thought I had tried implementing that code in my own program before, without success, but it works now. It did raise a brand new problem: since the program the professor wrote is based on strings, and mine is based on byte arrays, I have to convert everything to the correct datatypes, which isn't always as easy as it seems. I have until next monday to work on it.

Also started a hobby project: coding a website, mostly with HTML and CSS. I found a really cool retrowave grid animation thingy online, but for some reason, all other divs would not place themselves under the animation, but right on top of it. Tried to make it easier for myself by simply removing the animation and putting a picture in place. How hard could that be? Well, the divs do place themselves under the picture div now, but I can't scroll down to see them.

Ordered a new swimsuit from Disturbia right before new years. Shipping hadn't updated for a week, and I haven't received a confirmation email yet. I've emailed them three times now, but they won't respond. Bought a pair of pants on a second hand website, was kind of anxious to see if they would fit since my legs are usually a bit too thick for normal women's pants. They arrived yesterday, and luckily, it was a men's size, so they fit perfectly! And they were cheap, too. The more I buy second hand, the more I dislike buying things new, especially clothes. Maybe I'll splurge a bit when I get my first paycheck at my new internship.

Please. I'm almost there.

Finally, after at least three months of learning at least four and a half completely new programming languages, running into errors that plagued me for weeks, blood, sweat, tears, gallons of tea, strings of profanity so dire they'd make my grandma turn in her grave, I can say that two of the six projects I had this semester are (almost) finished. And the result isn't too bad either.

My teammate and I demonstrated our Embedded Systems project to the professor on wednesday. We'd been working all day to fix the last small things (that weren't actually that small) and I was confident that my part, a GUI app written in C# (custom buttons and title bars, using a USB protocol that no other project group used, the whole shebang) would earn us some bonus points, which it did. Though, I don't consider a desktop app an "embedded system", you could argue that it interacts with one. At the end, the professor asked us "if you had 100 points to divide between the two of you, how would you divide them?". 60/40, I said, 60 for my teammate and 40 for me, since he did most of the actual embedded systems-related work. Made sense to me. Instead, both my teammate and the professor said 50/50, because we both put a lot of effort in it, learned new things, and ended up with good results. The professor even said that I should be more confident in my skills. I just don't classify a desktop app as "embedded", is that hard to understand?

The Labview project is coming along nicely, the web client is as good as finished, the Labview VI itself has a timing issue where it kept invoking an event, even when it was technically not triggered. I hope I can fix the issue before winter break starts.

Most other projects are a nightmare at the moment, so I'm looking forward to having more time to spend on them. I haven't looked at my industrial automation project for two weeks now. Oops.

At least I found a nice Lip Service jacket on a second hand website. I kind of want to overhaul my entire wardrobe, throw out t-shirts I never wear anymore, and adopt a slightly different style. At the same time, I know myself good enough by now, I'll probably keep wearing simple black jeans and t-shirts all my life.