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Almost halfway through the semester.

Knowing that midterms were coming up, I decided to fix my Excel spreadsheet so that it would automatically calculate the averages of my students. It’s something I had been meaning to do for a while, but I kept putting it off. I decided to go ahead and fill in 0’s for all the assignments that hadn’t been turned in. When I started putting in those 0’s, some of the students’ averages starting going down pretty drastically.

Oh well. It’s their fault for not doing their work. It was interesting seeing the new averages take shape. I’m not saying it was fun. I’m just saying it was interesting the way the math worked out. Surprisingly, I felt no remorse for doing that.

I figured I should give an update on my situation. The job hunt has not gone as well as I would have liked. I got lots of nibbles. For a while the phone was ringing off the hook. However, I wasn’t getting any bites. It seemed like all the companies I spoke to didn’t want someone fresh out of college. Or maybe they just didn’t like me.

I hate to have to settle for something but a man’s got to pay the bills. Going home and living off my mother wasn’t an option. My brother-in-law and a former professor had suggested that I look into teaching. I heard about an opening, so I applied for and was offered a part-time position teaching computer science classes at the local community college. A few days later I was offered a position tutoring at the university. All of this happened less than 2 weeks ago. Both of these positions last until December.

Maybe better opportunities will open up later. I just hope I don’t miss anything because I am locked into these jobs until December. They’re pretty much throwing me to the wolves and expecting me to figure out a lot on my own. It’ll be ok though. I start tomorrow.

Life has been ok other than the frustrating job search. Other than searching for a job I haven’t been doing much other than reading (Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia) and watching DVD’s. I beat X-Men Legends a second time and now I’m trying to figure out what game to work on next. I also plan on redoing the assignments I did for the Advanced Computer Graphics class I took last semester.

If gas doesn’t stop going up, I might be riding my bike everywhere from now on.

My cell phone number and primary email address have changed. I’ll get that out information out later.

Well, Christmas break is pretty much over. I’ll be heading back to work in about 6 hours. I have to get back on a normal schedule. I started this vacation schedule before Christmas break even began.

Anybody make any resolutions this year? I always avoid doing that so I won’t be disappointed if I break them.

It’s been 2 weeks since I made it back to Starkville from Dayton, OH. As much as I liked being in Dayton, it feels really good to be home. Living out of a hotel room is not my ideal living situation. I missed having a kitchen, having a shower with decent water pressure, and a lot of other little things. The worst part was not having a car because I didn’t have the freedom to move around like I normally do. On the bright side, not having a car did meant that I had to interact with the other interns outside of work more than I may have in the beginning, which turned out to be a good thing. The work that I did involved visualizing radar data using VTK and Paraview, both produced by a company called Kitware. They can be good tools to have on my belt if I decided to go into scientific visualization as a career. All in all, it was a good summer. The first five weeks were really hard on me, but things got much better after that. I’m glad to be back, and I’m ready for football season to start.

I think I’m actually going to try to make it to football games this year. I used to go to almost every home, but I’ve been going to fewer games each year. Last year, I only went to one game. Our record has been 8-27 over the past 3 years, so it’s been hard for me to motivate myself to lose 5-6 hours out of a day to go out and support a team that’s probably going to lose. I could watch on TV or listen on the radio and still get other stuff done.

Our new football coach Sylvester Croom, has caused a lot of excitement for our program. He’s the first black head coach in the history of the SEC. He was a running backs coach for the Green Bay Packers before he came to our school. Hopefully, he can turn the program around in a few years. I’m not too encouraged by the fact that after every practice, he talks about how many mistakes they are making and how much improving they need to do. At least they are improving. I saw on the news the other night that Coach Croom is implementing the West Coast Offense. I can’t wait to see that! It’ll be interesting to see something new on offense. I hope our new quaterback and our receivers are up for it.