Here are some graduation pictures taken by either me or my dad at Heather and my graduation last weekend. In one of the pictures you'll see Darkbuns and some other pictures have me and my family.

So I graduated today. Heather and her brother Chris also graduated. It was an interesting ceremony to say the least. We had some weird speaker who gave the oddest commencement speech I've ever heard. This guy's name was Alan Kay I think. He's quite the accomplished computer scientist but his speech was so off the wall. He went on for like 20-25 minutes about how we should never think of ourselves as experts and how we should forget what we just learned at UCI. It confused many people in the audience. Anyways, it was fun and afterwards we went to Heather's house for a post-graduation party and that was fun too.

Let's see, tommorrow is Father's Day and Heather and I are going to Las Vegas for 2 days to do nothing. Should be fun. Also, one of these days I'll get my stupid "photo blog" thing working. I wish hostnational.com would get off their asses and install an Image::Magick perl module. Damn them...

It's official, I'm done with school. Well technically I still have to get my diploma, but I just took my last final today at 8am. It's amazing how quickly senioritis can spread and totally kill any desire to do any real work. Mix that with my Pass/Not Pass option in my History class, and you have a receipe for disaster. Halfway through my final, I was tempted to just stop writing and turn it in and hope for the D- that will get me my Pass. But with every plus there is a minus. This is a major point in my life, as I now get to start working for the rest of my life. I've got my job already and I start working a week from Monday (actually I'm at work right now, but still as a Student Engineer). It's sucky to think that for the next 40 years or so, I'll be working 40 hours a week, 48 weeks out of the year. Sigh.

On the plus side, I had a hockey game on Tuesday and we won. Not only did we win, but I had the first goal and the game winning goal. Now we're playing for the championship next Tuesday at 8pm. Joy.

So I just took 2 midterms and I must say, I am SOOOO ready for school to be over. It's not that these were hard midterms, it's just that there are so many things I'd rather be doing than studying for classes that don't help me.

So one of these midterms was in Bio 9D: Diseases of the 20th Century. Sounds cool doesn't it? Actually the teacher taught it pretty poorly and the midterm ended up being a bitch. So I think I'm just gonna drop the class and not worry about it anymore.

My other midterm was in History 126B: History of WWII. This was pretty good. It wasn't an 'A' midterm or anything, but then again, I'm already taking the class P/NP so all I need is a C. Ah the joys of being a senior ready to graduate.

YAY for math! I never thought I'd say that in my life, but I happened to get one of the easiest teachers ever. Not only does he grade REALLY easy, but he gives tons of extra credit. This isn't regular extra credit, it's 'super duper extra credit'. So in class one day he says that the first 10 people to submit this 'super duper extra credit' gets an automatic A in the class and don't have to take the final. So I busted out my laptop and finished it real quick. So I got an automatic A, as well as Heather. So we're both really happy about that. Joy.

I've been very busy with school lately, so I havn't had time to update the site as might as I would have liked. In one of my classes, ICS 125, I created a website (link here) for our group. Essentially we're making a project for Raytheon that calculates and points a security camera that's tracking people or objects. This is being done in java btw. Anyways, from the looks of it, I won't be applying to grad school at this time. I didn't really plan it out well enough, nor do I think that I took the rest of my college career as serious as I should have. Well, not necessarily SERIOUSLY, but I was never thinking of going to grad school, so I didn't do some things correctly. Anyways, good news is that I don't have to goto my writing class tommorrow. Woo!

So I had my first day of school yesterday. It started off on the wrong foot when I my class location was changed at the last minute. I was just sitting in the old class when I heard lots of people talking about Socialogy instead of ICS Writing. Someone else was in the same position I was and he asked some people what class it really was. Good thing he asked them or else I would have probably sat through at least the first 10 minutes of class wondering what the hell was going on. So after my first class, I went to see a counselor regarding grad school. Come to find out, I DID start thinking about grad school a little too late. Well, the counselor didn't exactly say that, she said I should always apply and see what happens. But I don't really have any teachers that I can get a good personal recommendation from, nor do I have any research done. I was PLANNING on doing research later in the year, but by that time it's pretty useless to the following year's grad school application. We (the counselor and I) finally decided on the best course of action for me to take. Basically, go suck up with as many teachers as I can, as well as really suck up to my ICS teachers this quarter. Then I should take the GRE sometime before Christmas and send (hopefully) 3 good recommendations along with some (hopefully) high GRE scores to the grad school board in Janurary. Now because they have so many students, as well as the Ph.D program to review, they won't get to the master's applications until March or so. So I will do a quarter of research during the winter quarter and ask my research professor to give me a recommendation sometime in March. That and I will take a graduate course in Winter as well so that it will look better on my application. All in all, my counselor said I have a 'better than 50-50' chance of getting in.

So here's my school schedule for Fall 2003 for anyone who's interested.

36400 I&C SCI 125    T T   03:30 04:50  ET   204    TAYLOR, R.
36401 I&C SCI 125   M W F  08:00 08:50  ET   202    TAYLOR, R.
36402 I&C SCI 125   MTWTF  07:00 09:50P CS   192    TAYLOR, R.
36420 I&C SCI 139W  M W F  11:00 11:50  ELH  110    TONNE, D.
36421 I&C SCI 139W    W    12:00 12:50  CS   253    TONNE, D.
36620 I&C SCI 184   M W    05:00 06:20P SH   134    LI, C.
60040 ANTHRO  2B     T T   09:30 10:50  HH   161    EGAN, J.
60041 ANTHRO  2B    M      10:00 10:50  SSL  129    STAFF

EDIT: ICS 139W changed locations

So lately I've been thinking about life after college. After talking to several people from work and #teamslack, I've been thinking that perhaps I should go for a masters degree as soon as I graduate. The problem lies in my current GPA. My ICS GPA is a respectable 3.4 but due to some laziness on my part, my overall GPA is about 3.2 (not counting the 2 bad math classes that I will probably retake). Of course the average GPA of ICS grad students at UCI is like a 3.7-3.8, so I don't know if I could even GET IN, let alone pass it all. It would be nice to go to work and get a masters at the same time. I guess the first thing I do when school starts in a week is to find an ICS counselor and ask them a bunch of questions. I also need to ask him about doing research for some professor. Regardless of whether or not I go to grad school, I will probably end up doing some research this year because I only have 3 classes to take after Fall quarter. woo