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The end is near

It wants to be summer. It wants to be summer so bad. It’s actually been hot the past few days, and I’m thinking of old summer memories. If there’s one thing I am, it’s nostalgic.

The last day classes was Wednesday, and it could not have come sooner. I had my last exam for digital logic on Tuesday. I didn’t do as well as I hoped to, but with the inevitable curve, which the professor says should be “substantial,” I’ll have a B. My other exams are all on Wednesday and Thursday, and I leave next Saturday.

One aspect of on-campus life that I’ve never taken advantage of is the swimming pools. There are several here, at least two of which are located near dorms, and at least one of which is located near my dorm. It’s across the street, in fact. I’ve just never gone because of the weather (most of the time I’m here, there’s a risk of having to wear a sweater) and I guess because I usually wouldn’t have someone to go with. But some of my friends from the dorm want to go soon, and I happened to be thinking the same thing.

24-hour quiet hours went into effect at midnight Thursday. In my experience, the continual quiet forces an anticlimactic ending to a year of life in the dorms. People take will take exams over the course of the next week (they start tomorrow and run through next Friday, excepting Sunday) and, being unable to laugh and shout and have a good time, quietly disappear. Inevitably, I am one of the last to leave. I just happen to pick classes that have late exams, and I live so far away that my parents can’t swing up and get me whenever they want.

I’ll actually be one of the last to leave this time, but for once, a lot of other people are checking out on Saturday morning. So maybe this last week won’t be too quiet.

One of my pet peeves is hearing compression artifacts in digital audio. It’s distracting and unnecessary now that we have high-bandwidth connections and better audio formats that make MP3 obsolete. It turns out that not everyone cares about fidelity as much as I do. In fact, a Stanford music professor has found that in six years’ worth of listening tests, his students have shown an increased preference for low-bitrate MP3s over their higher-quality counterparts. One explanation is that people like what they’re used to, and many young people are used to stuffing their iPods with every MP3 they can find and taking them on the go. This also explains why some people think vinyl sounds better. It actually doesn’t, of course; they’re just used to hearing music that way.

Some guy called Doug Nufer wrote a book called Never Again. Each word in the book is used only once. Talk about a constrained writing experiment; it’s actually almost 200 pages. And it looks like the second word is “the.” Tough. (Via J-Walk Blog)

This is probably something I would do. The BBC reports: “A Finnish computer programmer who lost one of his fingers in a motorcycle accident has made himself a prosthetic replacement with a USB drive attached.” The article has a picture. (And the prosthetic is detachable, which is good because he’d probably want more than 2 GB eventually.)