Beginning of the End

This past week was interesting. I had a successful presentation, which was good, but then Dr. Makki announced that we needed to have a first draft of our final paper turned in by the end of the day on Friday. Of course, it was a somewhat lax requirement, because I think that often he doesn't remember these deadlines he sets. I still felt like that would be a great deadline and motivation to abide by, however, so I put together a rough draft of the paper by Friday. By Friday, a lot of our group were pretty burnt out and frustrated, but still felt like they had to continue to work on Friday night in order to get more done on the paper. Around 8pm, Justin and I felt like we should come and pull them away to do something else for a while, since they had been working for almost 12 hours at that point.

We decided that it would be kind of fun if we found some sort of LAN game we could all put on our laptops and play together. In the end, we decided that all five of us would have the most fun playing Starcraft; at least, that's what all our computers could handle. We lost track of time and played until about 1:30 in the morning, and a fun time was had by all. We had so much fun, in fact, that we decided to do the same thing on Saturday for the day. Instead of Starcraft, we decided that we wanted to play Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. So we went into the building where we work, and accessed a lab there that we had administrative rights to, and installed COD4. Since these machines were 2.6GHz Quad-cores, they had no trouble running the game, and we had a great afternoon playing a local LAN game of Call of Duty against each other.

Monday and Tuesday passed pretty uneventfully, but this morning we had to give a visiting professor a brief presentation over our projects. He is actually the Computer Science department head at Texas Tech University, and he was looking to find out more information about our experience because he was looking to apply for a computer science REU at Texas Tech. Actually, those presentations probably were more enlightening as to the real state of people's projects than any of the two presentations before this, because we were forced to summarize our project in our own words and very briefly, which is very tough thing to do if you don't have a firm grasp of the material.

This afternoon, a group of four of us went to the new Harry Potter movie, which was absolutely spectacular. It is as least the best of the Harry Potter movies since the second one, which makes it pretty darn good in my book. That was definitely a worthy way to spend an afternoon.

We're drawing near to the end of the program, and there's not much time left to get things wrapped up before I have to submit and present and then come back home. It's going to be here before any of us here know it, and I'm not sure I'm ready for it to be over.