Dean's List

It took me 12 quarters here at Cal Poly, but I finally did it. I managed to pull off a 3.5 GPA for the Winter 2006 quarter, making it onto the Dean's List. It was quite exciting and highly anticipated... here's how it all broke down.

ENGL 149: This was perhaps the most surprising and disappointing... then again it set me up for the big excitement. Anyways, I was expecting to get a 100% in the class from Day 1, when I heard from Brian how easy Professor Rheingans was... and how relaxed she was in class. All the quizzes we took totally held me back, being as how I fucked up most of them... worth 10% of the grade I think. Project 1: 100%, Project 2: 100%, Project 3: 70%?!?!?! Yeah, that screwed it up... all because I wanted to screw Hasan over for not doing SHIT in his part of the project. Midterm: 100%, Presentation: 100%. I wonder what I got on that final paper... oh well. Final Grade: B+

EE 409: Okay, so her class is pretty fucked up. 1 quiz, 1 attendance, 1 midterm, and 1 final = your whole damn grade. A total of 13 problems combined that accounted for all the points... talk about BS. The whole class would've been easy, but I fucked up on the first midterm (lots of details here, basically she decided to change everything up on us and not give a test similar to what we had up our sleeves, and that just fucked us up). Haha, there was the whole incident of Andrew's transmittal to Arakaki's e-mail of our copy of the old final... good thing we had that thing, because the actual final had about 2 (out of 7) of them on it verbatim. I thought I did okay on the rest of it, and hoped that she would curve the class. I guess I either screwed up more than I thought I did or she didn't curve it as much. Final Grade: B-

EE 449: This one was a no brainer, Brian/Chase/I killed those labs and lab reports (all but 1) and averaged like 96% on all the reports, plus my notebook was spectacular. Final Grade: A

EE 442: Adam's a godsend. After Adam took the lab final, he basically came out and told me exactly what I had to do step by step on the final. I went in and took it... fudged some numbers around but I got the overall idea of it. We did okay on the lab reports, I think we averaged like a 8.5/10 on them... which I think was what brought my grade down a bit. Either way, I did okay. Final Grade: A-

EE 460: This time we get to thank Andrew for hooking it up after his section took the test before mine did. I definetly got at least 1/2 of the final right, on the forming/storming/norming/performing/adjouring part... but the "iterative something" I would've fudged, had Andrew not told me about it. Then there was that gay little evaluation test which we don't even know if it played anything into our grade. Final Grade: A

EE 402: Okay, so at this piont in time, I'm sporting a 3.2 GPA with the grades already given. But for one reason or another, 402 grades were not posted on Wednesday all day. I calculated and figured out that nothing short of an A in this 4 unit class will bump me up to a 3.5 MAXIMUM. Therefore, there was no room (+/-) to spare at all. I did great on the first midterm (90, should've been 93 or more had I not forgotten units and screwed up on signs) and above average on the second (66, class average was a 55 and this should've easily been a 80 test but time came into play and I also had a couple tiny concepts wrong). Obviously almost a 100% on the homework, and I studied pretty hard for this test. My 1 sheet of notes was fantastic... I had little compartments and whatnot on it, and I fit EVERYTHING from sheet #1 and #2 onto there, rewrote EVERYTHING. The final was 11 problems, of which 7 of them I had little to no problems with. There was the Smith Chart problem where I didn't have a TI-89 calculator to convert phasors to rectangular forms for me, but I managed to figure out ONE set of conversions, and basically took the assumption for the following section to be correct (doing it with the actual Chart) and just fudged a number that yielded 2% error, heheh. Then there was the reverse Smith Chart problem, of which I just kinda screwed around a bit but ended up I think getting the general principle of it right. The antenna problem I BS'ed my way through via the notes I had on my sheet. Lastly, there was a perfect conductor problem which we had to solve for the current density (Js) which I did NOT know how to even start... so it was turned in blank. Nevertheless, Thursday morning when I expected the grades to be posted, I was finally able to put all the dreams I had (and I really did have dreams where I dreamt that I had gotten the A in that class, only to wake up and go "fuck that was a dream") into reality and scream "YESSSS!!!" when I finally saw the above picture, showing my... Final Grade: A

So there you have it folks. A 3.5 GPA for one quarter and a little "Dean's List" insertion on my transcript for Winter Quarter of 2006. When the Dean's List certificate comes in the mail, it's going up on the refridgerator.

Kara is the Awesome-est

So there's this girl I've known for like, 5+ years... and she is the awesome-est. She's sent me this really cool purple Huskies shirt from her college, and I've sent her one back of Poly. It's not fair that she's getting to go to Hawaii for spring break for FREE. If you can, go out and buy her Starbuck's at 3 in the morning because she'll make you a pretty good deal...

Well this weekend was pretty eventful. It started Thursday night, when Dan picked me up to go have dinner at a sushi place in AG with Kristen and a bunch of her friends for their birthdays this weekend. It was really nice, and we had TONS of sake to drink. The food was pretty good too, and having a Japanese chef cook food in front of you was really cool too because he was doing all these fancy moves. Then after that we came back to SLO and went downtown to Blacksheep where we had a bit more to drink, and then Dan dropped me back off at home.

I woke up the next morning to finish this stupid tech writing project at 6 in the morning. Went to class, then went to work till 4. Then I came home for a couple of hours before having to go BACK to the bowling alley for the Engineering Ambassadors social. We had a pretty good turnout of around 15+ people and we bowled a couple of games. I screwed around the first game, but when the 2nd game came around and we were in teams, I tried to bowl well, and rolled a 193. Let's see if I can't do that again Wednesday night to earn myself a shirt *knock on wood*

After bowling, Kristen called and told me to go over to her and Dan's house to hang out... I couldn't say no to the birthday girl, so I drove out to Morro Bay. We had some drinks and food, watched some Winter Olympics opening ceremonies, and proceeded to play Cranium for like 3 hours. The girls took the first round, but Dan and I took the second round. The girls love the green cards (the acting and humming ones), and Dan and I were awesome at the blue cards (drawing, making things out of clay). Yeah that's right, I can make "fireplace", "saddle", and "top hat / baseball cap / crown" in 60 seconds. We were fucking awesome. We all stayed over that night, and the next morning we went out to breakfast together. I came home that afternoon and just took a nap, as allergy season kicked into full gear and my eyes were red as hell and I had a runny nose. I stayed in that night and just cleaned up the house a bit... and unclogged the toilet, lol.

Sunday morning I went out and washed my car, and got some tree sap remover stuff... which hasn't worked completely yet because I guess it's been on there for a good while and it was also really sunny so it probably didn't work too well. I'll see if I can't get it to work later... then it was time for poker at Lambda Phi Epsilon's quarterly tournament on campus. I started out doing okay, catching a couple hands on the river at our deadly table. But what goes around comes around, as it happened to me a couple of times where I was out river-ed. What I mean by our wicked table is this: almost every hand where someone's in the lead pre-flop or after the flop, will LOSE after the other person catches a turn or river card. It was better to be behind in the hand, as they almost always made their hand. We saw pocket 2's bust Aces... only to have me pick up the same 2 Aces (both black) the immediate next hand and milk 2 people almost dry. I got down to a point, and then I decided to add on chips for another $10. Tables started dwindling, and I made a move at one point with pocket 4's pre-flop, only to have the other guy call and flip over his pocket 6's. I caught a 4 off the flop, and that was that. I stayed in till the final table, and was doing pretty well. I started the final table going strong, picked up a couple good sized pots and was almost the chip-leader at one point I think. But a couple losing pots here and there and blinds wore me down, and I was soon fighting for my tournament life... at that point it was 5th place. I picked up pocket 4's again, and went all in to have someone call with an A J off-suit. He hit his J off the flop, and no 4's showed up to save me. I took home 5th place out of about 90 people, and a 256 Mb MP3 player by Creative (Muvo). It was good fun I think, and good practice for me.

What an entertaining weekend... and it will continue. I have a midterm in 409 to study for this Wednesday, bowling tournament Wednesday night, and I have to go pick up Apollo Thursday. Will should also be getting here Sunday. Busy busy.