After a couple of weeks of no energy, congestion, coughing, and being unable to sleep well, I'm finally coming off a cold/flu that knocked me on my butt for the past couple of weeks. I spent the weekend focusing (again) on resting and I think that I'm finally getting past the illness. I can't hardly talk due to the remnants of a sore throat/persistent cough, but I managed to finally get back into the swing of things this weekend.
I'm running a bit behind schedule on some of my projects, but it's not as bad as it could be. Somehow, I managed to fight enough of a war of attrition with the homework and other obligations that it looks like I might pull off the end of the quarter in relatively decent shape academically. I know that some of the work I've handed in over the past week hasn't been as good as I could normally do, but at least it got handed in.
One of the things that bothers me most about being sick is that I've completely stopped going to the gym regularly. My regular gym visits began to taper off once the quarter became busy, but being sick stopped it altogether. I don't think that I'll start again until spring break and I'm hoping that the next quarter isn't so consuming as this has been. I need to find a decent work/life balance, but that will have to wait.
After two long weeks, the Superbowl will be on tonight and I'm rooting for the Bears. I've invited a few people to watch it with me and Holly, so it should be a good evening.
This is also my first blog entry for this new month. Despite my prediction that last week would be a light one, it still kept me occupied enough to keep me from posting here. I did survive the week and managed to get everything in on time. Unfortunately, it looks like this month will be a month of hell, as my to-do list is quite long and there's a lot that needs to be completed before I can take a breather. This is not like the second part of a 400 meter dash where you are in position and you know that you've got to give that last 200 meters all you have and you hope that you don't die of exhaustion on that last fifty meter stretch.
So, here's what's on my plate:
Three courses with three courses worth of regular course work.
Three projects. Two of those projects are final projects for two of my courses and count for a substantial portion of my grade. The other project is one that I'm assisting an NU faculty member with.
Organizing an event for a speaker who will be visiting NU in May.
Regular mentoring duties.
Helping where I can in for various departmental events, including prospective student weekend.
So far, I've been kept busy with just the coursework and the mentoring. I've spoken to Willie and he knows that I'm planning on skipping a few weeks this month, so the mentoring will lighten up. As for the projects, all three have substantial software development components. My project for my methods course is to test two types of user-interfaces for that control a hardware device. This requires that I write a hardware simulator so that my UIs behave as real as possible. My machine learning project will be enhancing Books with some machine learning mojo so that it can better assist the user during routine data entry. My other project will be refining and expanding a tool that I've already spent a significant amount of last month working on.
The deadlines for these are either the end of the month or the end of the quarter (which is not long after the end of the month). Fortunately, I feel that I'm paying to my strengths and if I can pull all of this off, I'll have something to show for the work that can be used as building blocks for bigger and better things. So, I've spent a large portion of my mental energy this weekend doing what I can to create workable plans and timelines that will carry me through the month. I'm cautiously optimistic.
I did take some time off and I finished "Half-Life 2: Episode One" yesterday. It was pretty short, given the twenty dollar price tag, but Valve really did a good job expanding and refining the single player gameplay in this installment. I really enjoyed my few hours playing and I'm looking forward to "Episode Two", which probably won't be out until later this year. If the previews for "Episode Two" were any indication, I may be waiting longer as I doubt that my current PC is up to the task of running it. We shall see. I'll probably end up playing the next installment just as soon as I upgrade to Vista - when I get a new machine.
