The past two days I’ve been bedridden thanks to a leg surgery for chronic exertional compartment syndrome. It’s nice getting all them people wishing get-well-soon’s and whatnot.

Spent some time watching Don Knuth’s biographical interviews with CBS. They were really good — dude’s a Christian also and apparently did an interesting bible study where he cross-sectioned the text, selecting the 16th verses of the 3rd chapter of each book and conducting some deep study in that fashion. I’m going to have to finish my booklist before going ahead with purchasing his books, but I think I will put that on the to-do list for this summer. He’s inspiring to me on so many levels. He makes me want to do math.

Really excited for this coming semester: I’m leading smallgroup in PAR! Not really sure what it’s going to look like and I’ve been feeling fretful on-and-off, but I’m generally excited in a good way.

Christmas Eve: wasn’t able to leave bed much — kinda hurts to walk. But we watched Disney’s 2009 remake of A Christmas Carol, as well as The Sound of Music, and mom made delicious dinner + apple pie. Yum.

Today: Woke up around 8:30am to open presents and stuff. Dad got me an annotated ESV study bible, which was a welcome gift. Esther wasn’t home yesterday nor today and won’t make another trip home until Wednesday, but I already purchased her gifts at the mall when I went to visit. Mom loved the Orchid broach that I picked out for her at the Union Square Holiday Fair during thanksgiving break. David was excited about the Garmin Forerunner I got him, too. Yay for black friday sales. I spent the morning alone since it wasn’t really practical for me to go to church, but I got some good quiet time in. Sucks not to be able to play piano right now — I’m looking forward to going back to that when my legs heal up though.

I’ve recently taken to building a personal wikipedia API that will be able to take keyword queries and return stuff like article text. I think based on this API I will be able to create a word importance API with fairly good accuracy, as starting points for ada’s backend system. I’m also looking to CSS transforms and webGL as a method of generating the UI.

Sunday: Church, filled out some paperwork that needed to get done, got some code working that allows web-based audio recording (via flash).

Monday: woke at 6am, made David breakfast and saw him off to school, cleaned the house: organized mail, cleaned the rangetop, mopped the floors, took out the trash, cleaned the bathrooms, etc then made sure David did his homework, annual dentist visit (no cavities yay), watched some party down, went to bed before 11.

Tuesday: Woke at 6:50am, made David breakfast again, saw him off, went Christmas tree shopping with Mom, set up our Christmas tree (Got it for $5! The worker at Lowe’s really liked my mom I guess…) shopped for some other stuff, came back and set it up, had lunch, and spent the rest of the day reading and making sure David would sleep early. Went to bed around 11pm.

Wednesday: Trimmed the hedges, went shopping with Mom at H-Mart for some Asian goodies, went Christmas shopping with/for Esther, watched Good Will Hunting for the third time with her, and passed out on the couch around 12am.

Thursday: Helped run errands for Esther, set up some lights in the front of our house, finished some GUI development for Ada.

Tomorrow: Surgery at 6am, so we have to leave around 4am.

Kind of dreading the surgery / hoping that it heals quickly.

The sunflowers
They lined her way that day
And smiled at the sky
As the birds flew on their way

Her hair of gold
Was a golden crown
To match the petals found
Now little girl
Lifeless child
Lay on the ground

In the blink, blink, blink of an eye
In the blink, blink, blink of an eye
Oh your soul passes by
In the blink, blink, blink of an eye

Fifty-one years is just never quite enough
Fifty-one years to walk to crawl, and yes to fall
Fifty-one years with fifty-one tears, and fifty-one fears
Then one day that beeping heart it don’t beep no more

In the still, still, still of the night
In the still, still, still of the night
Towards the tunnel of light
In the still, still, still of the night

Hate to be the bearer of the inevitable
But we all must go
Yes we all will go
Yes we all will go
In the day or the night
In the dark or the light

In the blink, blink, blink of an eye
In the blink, blink, blink of an eye
Oh your soul passes by
In the blink, blink, blink of an eye

In the still, still, still of the night
In the still, still, still of the night
Towards the tunnel of light
In the still, still, still of the night

Are you ready to die?
In the blink, blink, blink of the night

Am I ready to die?
In the still, still, still of the night

With 30 days of break. I’m super happy to be home.

I lugged my AT101W with me back home! I wonder how I will bring it back to Illinois on the plane.

TODO List for the break:

• Get surgery
• Finish programming some important stuff
• Friends
• Family
• Clean the house

Vague list, but I’ll add to it as time goes on.

Man I can’t believe I did such a long hiatus with this blog. Things have been happening.

Past month: Finals studying and other studying that made me completely unable to update on a daily basis. My sleep pattern got so friggin weird — 2pm-7pm was my daily sleep time. Yeah, wiggity wack.

Coming month: Plans for a lot of programming, since I expect to be sitting around in bed and stuff like that.

Setting up the Christmas tree today. Pics later :]

I snagged myself a black Dell AT101W for $20. That’s helluva lot cheaper than it should be. Ebay for a black one is $70-ish.

It’s a thing of beauty. I had to buy a special adapter because it uses an old PS/2 connector, but now that I’m using it, typing is so glorious. I could type all day long. I’m kind of tempted to bring this keyboard with me to Mozilla this summer — my coworkers would probably be impressed at first, then annoyed at the clickiness of it. Oh, the clickiness. I love it. It’s a muted kind of clickiness because it’s an ALPS switch keyboard. But I prefer it to the full clickiness of the Model M or anything like that.

CS373 exam was whatever, I passed the class.

CS412 studying starts now.

Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, paradise.

The elephants. I love the elephants. So. Friggin. Much.

54% on midterm 2. Now awaiting the final grade and hoping I beat the average. There exists a high probability that I have a C in this class, but it’s okay. Need to ace CS412 and Stat400. Moar studying, go.

In other news, I wrote some rap in my studying delirium this morning.

Friggly wrote a very inspired haiku on South Jersey:

In prisons with bars
full of drinks
slaves to chance roll dice.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Thursday: More yumyums and chillin’ out with the family. Watched Tangled with David and dad (finally) and it was a terrific movie.

Friday: Shenanigans in NYC with Kevin, Lehsah, Lilia, Cathay, Sharon, and some friend of Sharon’s. Lots of shopping. $1 pizza and cheap indian food in midtown for lunch, then strolling down to east village where we shopped at the Union Square Holiday Market — picked up mom’s Christmas gift as well as a pair of awesome mittens for myself. Figured I need some warm gloves that I’m less inclined to lose, because they’re so awesome. Meatball factory for dinner, and obligatory “snack” from a Halal food truck afterwards. So delicious.

Saturday: Woke around 11, lunch with Andrew at 12. Hung out with him at B&N and went to pick up some stuff for my brother at Target. It was really good to see Andrew after so long. Night: dinner, chess with David and Dad. David has become better than me at chess — we went 1-2. Boo. I beat dad in Chinese chess, though. Hehe.

3am — driving back to campus.

Sunday: Spent all night and most of the day driving. Arthur’s mom made muffins that were so good, and Kevin’s mom made some Yó Fàn that was quite delicious. Arrived on campus around 5pm and spent an hour cleaning the ground of mold that grew out of our fridge — the power went out over break and we had milk in the fridge. It sucked. Dinner with Brian Johnson at Basil Thai, Toy Story 3 with Rico and some other friends in my room. Sleep.

Today: Cyber Monday! Trying to avoid buying too much stuff that I don’t need, but I snagged David’s Christmas gift on discount.

Christmas Shopping Status
=================
[x] Mom
[ ] Dad
[x] David
[ ] Esther

Homework Status
================
[ ] CS412 Assignment 3 (MP) – Wed 11:59pm
[ ] CS242 Final Project Part IV (MP) – Thurs 11am
[ ] CS373 Homework 7 (Written) – Thurs – 10am
[ ] Stat400 Homework 7 (Written) – Friday 2pm
[ ] CS412 Assignment 4 (Typed) – Dec 7 11:59pm