Thanksgiving

One of those few days we get off during the year is thanksgiving. I don't really mind not getting many days off--it moves the year along. Also, papers have a nasty habit of being due on the day before vacations. For instance, I have a 900 word paper due tomorrow for The Origin of Evil, a religion class. That's only a few pages, so it shouldn't be too hard to do, but still, it's a Tuesday. When are papers ever due on Tuesdays?

While I'm on the topic of odd due dates, my board game is coming right along. Apparently, I'm supposed to be presenting my game with my group. No one in my group knows about this--nor does anyone else in the class, as far as i know. Class should be fairly interesting, as the syllabus and the professor apparently do not agree.

Back to thanksgiving. I'm heading back to my parents' house for the holidays, as are most people I know. There are some people in the area, though, so anyone whose family is too far away to visit for a long weekend is staying with someone else. The residential halls are still open for
the week, though, so there are plenty of people staying on campus. WPI is almost never without something exciting going on on campus.

Mid Terms

A great part of WPI is that even on the worst of days, the most mid terms you can have is 3. Chances are that one of your classes doesn't have a mid-term test, so having a mid term yesterday and another today is fairly common. I have a final today in IMGD 20XX(the board game class), which I am not very worried about. This class turned out to be more work than I had suspected, though--we need a working rough draft of a board game by the 26th of November. My idea is awesome, though.
So not too many people know about the Nez Perce Trail, which was a group of Native Americans evading the US army and moving towards Canada, only to be stopped a mere 30 miles from the border. The game is some sort of racing game, with one player attempting to use superior numbers to trap another before the second reaches Canada. It should be very fun, assuming it is properly balanced, which will probably be harder than it seems...and it seems incredibly hard to do.

Science, Gravity, and Mice

Life at WPI is fairly interesting for me. I just got out of a Physics test, which I am feeling fairly confident about. I had to do one problem four times before I realized my poor old calculator isn't saving variables any more, but I still finished in plenty of time. I feel fairly confident about this class in general, which I'm taking to cover some of the general science credit I need as a CS major.

On a slightly more fun note, I got Super Mario Galaxies yesterday, and I have played it for a few hours already. I have to say, I'm impressed. Ignoring an overabundance of slow, unskippable conversation and occasionally frustrating controls, Galaxies has that same wondrous feel that Super Mario 64 had for me way back in '96. I kind of miss being able to just go and sucker-punch enemies, but I am having lots of fun. This was definitely worth my money.

As a final mention, my cat Bergelmir killed his fist mouse last night! It was awesome--I heard a crash from the kitchen, and went over to see a box of spaghetti knocked over, and my cat hunched over on the floor, mouse hanging out of his mouth, staring at me and growling. He growled pretty much the entire time he had the mouse, for no apparent reason other than he was feeling very close to his more feral ancestors at that moment. He must have felt like the Big Guy in the household, since he hoped up on several counters he knows he shouldn't and ended up taking a few laps of milk out of my cereal this morning, but half a hand-held squirt gun later and I'm fairly certain he's back to normal, other than being an awesome, cute, and playful killing machine.

First Post

I suppose my first post should be about why I'm making a blog. The point of all this is just to describe my experiences as a WPI student. WPI is a great school, and I'm very luck to go here. As of now, I am taking 3 classes-the normal amount for a WPI student. Every term we get 3 completely new classes, so even though it is only 3 weeks into the term, we're already coming up on mid-terms. WPI is fast-paced, but it is nice to work on only a few classes at once, and we'll be done with this term in another 4 weeks, which is never a bad thing.