Andy Morrow's Blog

This has been and will be one of the longest nights I think I’ve had in a long time, if not ever. I got my ox very stuck in the mire, after a manner of speaking, and so I’ve been trying to get Bob’s new website live in time for his radio appearance this morning at 5 AM Pacific time since 7PM Sunday. It’s now 3:30AM Monday, and it’s still not up. This is the most infuriating step – the website is as finished as it’s going to get tonight, and it’s all there, but I can’t manage to get the domain names configured correctly. It may have to be taxminimiser.net intead of taxminimiser.com for a day. Sigh.

Oh well. I’m paid for this, and if I had started this little project earlier, I wouldn’t be in such dire straits right now. Life lessons, or whatever those things are supposed to be.

Aside from having to work, however, Sunday was an extremely spiritual and a very special day. I was ordained to the office of elder in the Melchizedek priesthood by my father. I had an unbelievably spiritual interview with the stake president immediately beforehand that left me pondering deeply. This may sound strange, but coming home to Manteca has overall been a spiritual high point. It’s been a fantastic way to finish off 2008 and get ready for 2009. Certain things in my life will change in my efforts to be more Christlike in the future. I’m going to be happier.

The spirit that I felt yesterday I cannot fully put into words. I am grateful beyond what I can express for the gospel and the joy it brings into my life. I absolutely have a testmony of the truthfulness of this work and that God knows us each personally. He watches over us each continuously and blesses us through the worthiness and actions of others. I will strive to be worthy and to act in such a manner that I can be just such an influence in the lives of others.

Merry Christmas, everyone! I’ve had a lovely Christmas so far. My primary present is a Nikon camera. Hooray! Just what I was hoping for. It’s got a nice screen on it and an 8 megapixel sensor. And a nice case! I’ll be doing my photo-journalism all across campus now.

Gary’s been watching He-Man for some time now. It’s one heck of a show. It is clear that He-Man is flamboyantly gay. He’s like a gay lion-tamer when he’s got that ridiculous outfit on. And his sister’s power is apparently to grow her hair out. Sooner or later, Mia will come to our house ranting and raving about He-Man instead of Dora.

I think Mia got more presents than anybody else. She appears to love them all, especially all the little-people toys. Mark got a graphics tablet – super, super cool – and I gave him a Strong Bad game, which he is now playing. Dad got himself a GPS, which he’s very excited about. Moriah got me a super-fly hat which I love. It’s really warm and will be perfect for those cold winter days in Provo. I made some goodies for Paul, Melissa, Katie, and Gary. I’m especially jealous of the fudge that I made Paul and Melissa. It looks good.

Well, I’m going to shower and see if I can arrange for Moriah to come over for a while. See you all soon.

I’ve been trying to troubleshoot my bizarre issues with my Mac’s wifi card. It has been randomly, unpredictably working and breaking. Right now it works. I’ll make a bet that tomorrow it won’t. I have no idea what to do about it. I’ve heard that one person with the same errors I had needed a new internal card. I suppose we’ll see.
Other than that, it’s been a lovely vacation. I’ve been enjoying myself thoroughly.

I didn’t get quite as much done as I had hoped for. Turns out that the chemistry test will be taken tomorrow morning. I’ve done quite a bit of good studying, however, and I seem to have passed my cleaning inspection. It wasn’t too rigorous. I think Tyler’s will be a little more strict, because the room has to be ready to be left for two weeks.

– Days later –

I’m home for the holidays! My flight was short, but trying to get on took forever. More details to come in a later post. I’m glad to see everybody, and it’s so nice to get a break. Hooray!

It may not be the first snow, but it’s the first real snow. And I’m excited. It’s just below freezing, and the snowflakes are coming down pretty quickly. They’re huge a wet – each snowflake is probably almost half an inch in diameter.

– Much later –

I’ve just gotten home from dinner. I went to a party at my boss, Robert’s, house. I came home, got a few things done, ate dinner, and then came back to finish my blog post. We only got about two inches of snow on the ground. It’s a good start, however, and I’m expecting more this weekend. Hopefully we can play in it tomorrow. That would be amazing.

I’d best study.

In response to Mom’s question, we initially planned the religion for the final to be on Tuesday; however, numerous people contacted my teacher with conflicts, so he gave up and made it a take-home final. He’s going to email it to us and I will likely take it during the weekend.

Why am I feeling so much better? Several reasons. First, my group placed second in the Capstone Demo Day competition. The only project deemed cooler than ours was a 12-camera motion capture arena that created an accurate, realistic simulation of trees moving in the wind. I won a BYU Computer Science hat and a BYU Computer Science shirt. We’ll continue to work on our project for a bit after finals week, after which it will be given to the BYU CocoaHeads group to continue development and maintenance. It was really neat to be a part of that. I spoke during the presentation about the technical challenges that I faced and overcame. It was a ton of fun. Plus, we got free pizza.

Second, I scored wonderfully on my English paper. I expected a rather poor grade because it was written in less than a week. Admittedly, I’d been doing research long before that; however, the actual writing was done in less than a week. I scored 92%. Ooooooh yeah. Plus, that was almost 1/3rd of my grade. It was worth three times as much as my final.

Third, my partner on the persuasive brochure turned out to be very useful and helpful. He just didn’t have many ideas at the very beginning. I did a little over half of the writing and found the images. He did some writing and did the page layout. We got it done on time.

Finally, my religion paper is going really quickly. I wrote about half of it in about an hour. I think that gives me enough time to finish that and do my calculus homework tonight, maybe with time left over to try and make up the four hours of work that I am short so far this week. Life is good. I can pull this off with no problem.

In response to Mark’s questions:

1. James, the guy I hope to room with next semester.

2. It is a can of magical disgusting-smelling powder.

3. The indefinite integral in general is a calculus concept. The specific one that I could not remember was (10^x)/ln(10).

4. Forty-two.

In response to Dad, I’m trying. It’s getting harder and harder, as is my schoolwork. I’ve got a big paper due for religion awfully soon (aka tomorrow), so I’ll be sleeping and eating much too little until I get that finished. Sigh. I think I’m going to spend a good portion of my reading days sleeping, because that will be most productive. Wish me luck.

Also, my last chemistry exam didn’t go so well. I scored 70% on the multiple choice and expect something comparable on the free reponse. Sigh. I’m going to finish this semester with good grades, darnit!

In the good news department, however, it looks quite certain that I’ll be getting an A (4.0) in my math class. I misunderstood the grading system to mean that my teacher could not give out any 4.0s at all. That’s not the case – he just can’t give out very many. Since I’m currently 2nd in the class, I expect a good grade. Hooray!

Good times.

Here’s a picture of me and my terrorist comrade. Enjoy.

Just to let everybody know that I’m alive and doing well. I took a calculus exam tonight. I know I got one question wrong – I couldn’t remember the indefinite integral of 10 to the power of x. Oh well. I think I got everything else right. I felt really good about it.

I’m kind of frustrated with my English project. It seems like my partner is going to do absolutely nothing. Sigh. That’s a part of life, I suppose. I think I’ll kind of be hauling projects along at work, too. That’s okay, though. It’ll sound good on resumes to say that I was appointed project manager on a project or two immediately after being hired. I don’t mind there, though. My coworkers are honest and fun.

I’ve been on two dates recently – one to a choir concert and one to the First Presidency Christmas Devotional. Honestly, I was barely able to stay awake for the devotional. The Motabs did their quiet, peaceful music and I was fighting to keep my eyes open and uncrossed. I didn’t fall asleep, however. I was proud of myself.

It’s almost 1:30, however, so I’m going to bed. Goodnight, all.

It being rather late and I being completely un-tired, I’ve decided to write a little here. Maybe I’ll put myself to sleep.

Life is okay. Actually, it’s pretty good. I don’t know that it’s gotten quite back up to the level of great. As mentioned, my English paper got in, but just barely. I wound up 4 hours short this work week. Sigh. Maybe I’ll make it up working for Bob tomorrow. That would be really good for a wide variety of reasons.

Tomorrow, I also need to do laundry and start a paper for religion. Scott and a few other folks are getting a room in the library, so I’ll go there with them. Or maybe to my office.

I’ve spent a lot of time in my office as of late. It’s a really nice, peaceful place to study. I can really be very productive, as opposed to my room. I’m going to try and move in with James next semester. Right now, it doesn’t look good. Nelson already agreed to move out and somebody else already agreed to move in. Maybe once the new guy gets here. I could still spend just as much time in Tyler’s room when I wanted to, but I’d be in a quieter room. Or maybe I’ll just hold still for once. I guess we’ll see.

Alex, my friend from CS598, spent his last day in our office today. He’s officially leaving to work at Cluster Resources. We had a going-away staff lunch – two pot roasts, corned beef, fresh bread, potatoes, carrots, and cabbage. For desert, we had sugar cookies and mint brownies. Plus, yesterday, one of the girls from the business office gave Alex cinnamon rolls, which he kindly shared. So, I’ve been eating well at work. It’s nice.

More importantly, however, I’ll miss Alex. He’s a good friend. I’ll likely still see him around every now and again, but it’s been nice having him in the office. It made transitioning into working there easy.

I went on a date this past night with Leilani, one of the girls I home teach. We went along with three or four other couples to a BYU choir concert in celebration of Christmas. All the BYU choirs and the BYU philharmonic orchestra were in attendance and sounding amazing. Afterward, we went to the girl’s hall lobby and starting an impromptu choir and ensemble. We had piano, cello, violin, flute, and four-part choir. It sounded really good and was a lot of fun. We then proceeded to play pool. Once they switched from 8-ball to Z-ball, I went home to retrieve my bed, which had been stolen while I was at work and wound up hidden in a closet on our floor. Z-ball is a game in which one object ball and the cue ball are placed on opposite sides of the midline of the table. The cue ball is rolled with the hand to strike the object ball with the goal of pocketing it. If one player should fail to pocket a ball, the next grabs the cue, positions himself on the far side of the table from the object ball, and rolls. I don’t like the game, and I think it’s unnecessarily hard on the table. Besides, it was midnight and I was ready to begin trying to go to sleep.

I’m beginning to be home-sick. It’s the combination of the thought of coming home so soon, dreams about family, and being very tired of school right now. These last two weeks have been pretty hardcore. I’m looking forward to another hardcore beginning of a semester and then a mildly-laid-back remainder.

Well, I’m over 600 words and ready to sleep. I’ll call Sunday.

Barely. Sorry to leave you all without news from me for so long, but my homework load this past week has been unholy. Everything got turned in on time, and I think my English paper deserved a B- at least. I supposed we’ll see what my professor thought.

So, yes, I’m still alive, but too busy to even think. I’ve got to get back to it, but I’ll write and call this weekend. Talk to you all soon!