February

Maybe I remember things incorrectly but it has rained much more this winter than in previous winters. It was supposed to rain on Friday but it seemed to arrive a day earlier than predicted. A highly appropriate quote was Quote of the Day sometime last week:

"The trouble with weather forecasting is that it's right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it."
- Patrick Young

On Thursday amidst my usual afternoon boredom I looked to the right and saw that it was raining like mad, which improved my day to an extent. But the best moment was around 2:45 PM when suddenly the clouds disappeared all at once and all that remained was the largest rainbow I have ever seen (this photo doesn't really do it justice but I like it anyway):
Yes, this is the view from our dorm room window. I know, I didn't think this kind of thing existed in Los Angeles either.


Orthographically awesome French words:

• créée - Feminine past participle of créer, to create.
• mangaient - Third person imperfect plural form of manger, to eat.
  

Phonologically awesome French words:

• semblable - Because "blab" sounds like "blob."

My computer struggles have finally been resolved, after more than a month, and I got a nice 45nm processor out of it too. The old, presumably defective E6600 is currently being sent to Intel; hopefully they will replace it.

The rest of February was mostly spent failing midterms. PIC10a: 60%. Math 32B: 61%. PIC10a's was four questions, one of which revolved around information he taught THE DAY BEFORE THE EXAM. So we hadn't gotten a chance to try it out in homework or anything so of course I had no idea how it worked. I could have gotten like 75-80% otherwise. Calc was disappointing because I knew the material well enough, but I made a bunch of stupid mistakes, like wasting 30 minutes getting angry that my integral was so messy because something possessed me into thinking that the derivative of 1/u was ln|u| (I guess I confused it with the antiderivative). Fortunately I fixed this one by the end of the exam, but similar errors were made on nearly every other problem. Round 2 of the midterms for these two classes are this week - both on Wednesday, actually.

College is too hard. I'm transferring to NASCAR Technical Institute: