Week 8: July 14th - July 20th
Sunday:
I watched Kimberly and Brian most of they day while Laurie and Danny took Chris to Boy Scouts camp (somewhere 6 hours away). We went to church in the morning, and I was impressed that they managed to sit through the service. It's not easy to do when you're young and not used to it. Then we came home and rode bikes to a pizza place for lunch (I have not ridden a bike in awhile, and it made me very tired), went to the pool, and then just hung around the house. It was a full day. And one of these days I will beat Brian at that card game.
Monday:
Day One at work without Laura. How sad. The Software Requirements Engineering Reading Group met again this morning and read a journal article on the Common Criteria. Then I messed with MySQL all day. I had permission to access the database, but then I kept getting access denied errors. Turns out I needed to say that host was "localhost" instead of "tigger.csc.ncsu.edu". Then it took me forever to figure out how autoincrement works. Apparently, you have to have a value in every field in order to make an insert into a db, meaning, you can't just insert a string of empty fields like ",,,". It would have to be "NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL". I'm sure this is common knowledge to everyone else, but I just had to play with it awhile to get it all to work. Messing with the details can be tedious, but it is awfully satisfying when it finally works.
Tuesday:
Laura called today and said she wouldn't be coming back until tomorrow because she's sick (poor thing). So we'll just have to suffer through another day without her. I messed with the survey some more, and I also read the chapter from Building Secure Software that we're going to be discussing on Thursday. We've skipped ahead a few chapters since the summer is coming to a close. (We are skipping the chapter on buffer overflows even... I can't understand why no one else wants to work through that - It's quite entertaining).
I had to skip the volleyball games for the past several weeks, which displeased Brent, so I headed over to Tucker Beach after work to rejoin the sportif (that was for Thomas) gathering. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I'm planning on attending Thursday as well. I keep trying to convince Laura to come too, but she hates sand volleyball(and she's from Florida no less). Afterwards, I went to the NC State theater and watched I Am Sam because it was free and some friends had said they liked it. It certainly wasn't my favorite movie, but it did inspire me to listen to Abbey Road on the way home.Wednesday:
In the morning I showed the survey to Laurie, and she made some suggestions. Then we left to go have lunch with the CRA-DMP students and mentors from Duke. Emily Tennant is working with Dr. Carla Ellis and Diana Jackson is working with Dr. Susan Rodger. We wanted to try to meet with them before the summer is over because the campuses are so close together, and it is a great opportunity to meet other people. I have to say that it was probably the first time I've been in a room with that many women involved in Computer Science (nine total). I really enjoyed the opportunity to talk with everyone.
In the evening, Laura and I watched Law & Order again. I'm kind of glad I was too busy to watch any of the new ones during the school year, because now I get to enjoy them all. And they promote such good discussion.
Note: The bag of Crunch 'N Munch w/ Peanuts actually has a note on the back of the bag that says "May contain trace amounts of nuts."Thursday:
This morning we had the security discussion group again, and this time, we went over my survey and code. Everyone made some helpful suggestions on questions to modify and others to add. I then went back to making changes in the appearance of the suvey, and ended up messing with session variables in PHP (which was not a big deal). Then I started writing some Javascript to validate fields. I also read over another paper for Laurie that one of her students wrote and offered a few grammatical suggestions.
En la noche, I tentatively progressed from studying the verbal section of the GRE into the quantitative, and to my great surprise, it isn't bad at all! In fact, I actually am doing better in the math section, which comes as quite a surprise. It's nice to know that I have at least learned a little bit of math after all these years.Friday:
I pretty much played with Javascript all day working on the validation stuff for the survey. Dr. Carla Savage (who I think might be the only other female CS faculty member here) took Laura and I to lunch with her and her daughter, Rebecca. She is a really sweet woman, and we both really enjoyed the lunch. She works in discrete math (as well as other things), and so she answered one of our GRE questions and offered to help us with anything else we needed. On the whole, it was a good day.
Laura and I had planned on being diligent that night and studying, but we ended up wasting the evening away watching TV. I don't even think there was anything interesting on, but that's usually the case.Saturday:
That morning, we got up early(ish) and drove down to the thriving metropolis of Rockwell, NC. Laura's friend David's family lives there, so he drove up (from TN), and we all went out to the lake on his brother's ski boat. We were out for about an hour before we got caught in a torrential downpour, so we headed to the shore and sat in the car while the storm passed. (Poor Laura fell and soaked her towel while heading from the boat to the shore - it really was quite humorous, though). After the storm passed, we went out for many more hours of fun on the water. I couldn't ever get up on the wakeboard (which was highly vexatious), but I did kneeboard for awhile. And I certainly tried to wakeboard enough to where my arms are very very sore still. Poor Laura also got smacked in the face with the kneeboard. Her nose was bleeding profusely, but she's ok. What a trooper.
Later, we went to Applebee's for dinner and then saw Minority Report. I liked it better than any of the other movies I've seen this summer, but it still wasn't my favorite or anything.