It's official: the first 5 weeks of the semester are done! This can mean only one thing: October break is here. An incredible four day weekend to catch up on sleep, do some homework and generally admire the empty campus and the locked buildings.

It's around 23:30h right now, and I'm typing away in the dark while Kaleena is 'preparing' for her LSAT tomorrow morning (the T stands for 'incredibly hard Test'). Despite my Economics- and Computer Science exams, the last couple of days haven't been that bad. The site has seen a lot of progress, both under the hood and... well... not under it. I'm pretty happy with the way it works right now.

By popular demand department

I'm planning to buy a digital camera sometime soon. Until that time my 'archived material' will have to do. Credit for these pictures goes to Bridget (cheers):

• The first picture is one of Colgate's many gorgeous sunsets. Well... I'm pretty sure it's Colgate anyway... This was on May 5th, 2003.
• The bottom picture is a great action shot of a "I'm just sitting there like..." moment. A "I'm just sitting there like..." moment is when Kaleena is trying to convey a sense of dismay at someone else's stupidity: "So he's doing [rediculously stupid thing X] and I'm just [etc.]" Usually this is accompanied by the depicted gesture.

Site updates department

I've made a lot of the changes I wanted to make. To state the obvious: I've changed to the color scheme. I personally like the result a lot, but as my good friend Nii likes to emphasize: I don't know jack about beatifulness. Feel free to comment.

Aside from the colors, I've made a lot of stuctural changes:

• The weather plugin -- As I said before, I thought it was really disturbing that the weather plugin would take a good 15 seconds to load and update itself every so often. I fixed this on Thursday, basically by ripping out the piece of code that does the updating. That piece of code is now run every ten minutes, seperately from the webserver. Problem solved. What remained was the rather lousy output format, which I improved (I think) by sticking it into a table.
• The date/time format -- Nucleus, the program I'm using to run this website, has rather limited date formatting. I really wanted 'full text' dates and times, so I installed the aptly named 'BetterDate' plugin. You can see the result at the top of this page; the date is written in its full glory.
  
  With the dates done so nicely, I decided I wanted facy time indications as well. I made some modifications to the BetterDate plugin to handle the time as well. Rather than a to-the-second record of when I posted something, the pages now have a much more 'poetic' description of when I made a post. Again, let me know what you think.

What's been going on department

The last couple of days have been pretty exciting. On Wedensday, Kaleena and I bought plane tickets for Washington DC. Kaleena has an interview there in early December, so we'll be staying there for a weekend + Monday. My professors, in all their goodness, have let me know it's okay if I miss class that Monday. (Side note: haven't missed a class yet this semester! W000t!).

Thursday was a pretty run-of-the-mill day for me, although I really wish I had done a little better on my Economics exam. That day's oddest comment once again goes to Professor Mulry. After considering several other family relations (e.g. grandfather), he made the following statement:

Algol 60 is the... what's that movie called... the Godfather of imperative programming languages.

Again, don't be alarmed if you don't think it's funny. Of course Thursday was also the day of the first debate between John Kerry and George W. Bush. My summary of the event: both candidates could've done better, but some left more room for improvement than others.

About time to go to sleep department

It's been a good hour, but I'm going to sign out now get some sleep -- good night!