Is it really over all ready?

My classes seem good so far, but the four classes I was planning on taking turned in to six. One that I'm quite excited about is a new class based on competitive coding. We're focusing on techniques that will be useful for competitions such as the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. I was a competitor last year, but we didn't have much warning, and as such, we didn't do incredibly well. Interestingly, in the three weeks leading up to the event, I learned a lot of tricks that came in really handy on some of my programming assignments.

The student organizations I'm working with seem like they'll take a lot of time this semester. I'm trying to get a lot of students involved in these clubs, and get some cooperation going for events. I'll be attending four organization meetings next week, so we'll see how that turns out.

I made your standard issue Philadelphia Cheese Cake today. Turns out if you half their recipe and only use 2 packages of cream cheese, you get exactly enough filling for one of those Honey Maid graham cracker pie crusts. I'm planning on topping it with some ice cream topping strawberries, because I already had them, and the store I was at didn't have little cans of cherries.

I made quiche for the second time ever tonight. My last quiche was delicious, but a bit runny. I modified the recipe I used last time by using less egg, and adding shrimp. I also wrapped the edge of the crust with tin foil, which I remember will keep it from burning. The recipe I based this quiche on is here. I'll let you know how the modified recipe turns out.

Edit: The quiche was good, but I need to meet in the middle. The reduced eggs made the spinach a little over powering. The shrimp was a great addition. My wife recommended that I add mushrooms next time.

A friend recommended BigWords to me after I had already bought my books my first semester back in college. Luckily, she did so before the week they give you to return the books runs out, and I was able to cut my costs down by more than half. This year, I've luckily got some friends who have taken most of the classes I'm taking, and the teachers haven't switched to a new edition because they like the new font. Turns out I'm only buying one book, but I saved about $100 on it.

I'm at my dad's place for a couple of days, which is far enough in the mountains that he only has dial-up. Makes you remember just how nice cable internet really is.

I met with my investment guy yesterday to talk about getting some money out for college for my last year. When we finished talking about what I needed to talk to him about, he asked me to take a look at his laptop to see if I could figure out how to copy some music over to his Palm. I took a look, and he showed me the set of songs that he had purchased on Rhapsody. Rhapsody had an option to copy music to a portable device, but apparently they don't think of a SD card as a portable device, and it wouldn't transfer the files. I could transfer them manually, but they had some weird extension, and were DRM protected from being read without being signed in. I told him that we could free his music by burning it to a CD and then ripping it, or by getting a tool that would strip the DRM from it, but that he was better off buying music from a source that doesn't prevent him from doing what he was trying to do in the first place. I told him about Magnatune, though they don't have the tracks he was looking for, and about iTunes going DRM free for an extra fee. Either way, I doubt he's getting the money back from Rhapsody that he spent under the impression that he would be able to play it on his portable device.

Jason Mauer just tipped me off to a couple of Vista updates for performance and reliability. Head on over to Jason's blog entry for the details and download links.