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I decided to take ECEn (Electrical and Computer Engineering) 380: Signals and Systems this spring.
It's one of those classes that every EE dreads for several reasons.
It requires you to still remember all of trig, calc, physics, ECEn 212 & 313.
You must have, and know how to use either a TI 89 or an HP 50g.
You have to know mandarin if you want help from the T.A.'s. (I'm up to about 10 different sentences!)
It's a 5 credit class..... enough said......

I figure if I just take this during spring, I'll still be able to keep up my 20 hours a week at work and survive. Then when summer comes around, I'll up it to 40.

So, if you were planning on hanging out with me this spring...... just check my class/work schedule
It doesn't look very likely. My ONE class has 18 assigned class hours. Yet again, I start at 8AM. After I do my hwk, and "study" for tests, it seems I'll just have the weekends off..........and you know what that means........ It means I'll be spending that time with "privileged" people.

Are you "privileged" ??
If you don't know the answer to that, then you probably aren't.

I suppose my title isn't too appropriate. I should have called it "yet another reason why AOL sucks."
we've all heard the horror stories of people who try to cancel their AOL internet account, and get a CSR (customer support representative) who doesn't want to let them.
well, they just went one worse, by finalising their threat to sue Gaim (an open source chat client that lets you have one program that will combine yahoo,msn,aol,icq etc.. accounts)
It's really a great idea, as I have some friends who are on aol, others on msn, and others on yahoo.

For those of you who don't know, open source is basically free software that anyone can distribute and modify as they like. Being open, it's usually available for multiple platforms (MAC, PC, Linux, BSD etc..)

Apparently, Gaim originally stood for "GTK+ AOL Instant Messenger."
AOL initially complained, but didn't do anything about it. Now they've decided to force Sean Egan, the lead developer ( and now a google employee) to rename it.
the new name? Pidgin.
why pidgin you ask?

this is what wikipedia says about pidgin:

"A pidgin, or contact language, is the name given to any language created, usually spontaneously, out of two or more languages as a means of communication between speakers of different tongues, and usually a simplified form of one of the languages. Pidgins have simplified grammars and few synonyms, serving as auxiliary contact languages. They are learned as second languages rather than natively."

Isn't that a cool name considering what the program does?
It's only available at the moment in beta form in source code, so those of you who want to install it will have to compile it.

here's how you do it: (note this is for debian based linux distros, it will differ for RPM based ones, as you'll have to use YUM junk)

first you should install all the dependencies of it with this command
"sudo apt-get build-dep gaim"
I also had to install libtool (but you may not need to)
"sudo apt-get install libtool"
get the source code from pidgin.im (a file called "pidgin-20070408.tar.gz"
untar it with tar -xvf pidgin-20070408.tar.gz

cd to that directory and run the script
"sh autogen.sh"
then run "make" and "sudo make install"

that's it!
It should use your .gaim preferences, and you can load it up by pressing ALT-F2 and typing "pidgin"
I personally just renamed the shortcut to gaim to now load up pidgin

here's a screenshot of my computer running it. Sean has said he'll release the final 2.0 of pidgin in the next week, so some of you may want to wait for that.

So, it's that time of the year again. The Friday before April's conference is always the Ohio Cincinnati Mission reunion.
I knew this year was going to be good, as a few of my old comps who hadn't been last year (as they lived in far away states) were making the trip up - José Reyes, and Jonathan Illescas (one Salvadoreño, one Mexican, both currently living in Texas).

I went alone, which set me up to receive your typical "why aren't you married yet..." response, but it was fine. It was actually an even mix of married/single people there. I imagine next year that will change dramatically.
We left and went to LeBaron's house, and chilled.
I ended up getting to bed at around 3AM. It's cool that all of us still get along so well. We haven't really changed that much.
I woke up the next morning, and had to take my ECEn 313 circuits test in between sessions.
It sucked. It was a short, but difficult test (it probably would have been easier if I'd had more sleep......)
The Salvadoreño had tickets to the 6pm session, so a few of us drove up with him. While there I saw a bunch of people protesting. I read some of their signs (ridiculous!) One of the signs said "Mormons are liars. God hates liars." As I walked by I said "God hates the sin, NOT the sinner."
The guy then started swinging his sign at me (and almost hit me!) It was quite a funny experience, as those standing there attack one point of our belief without really knowing why we believe what we do, and without making the effort to study it. Instead they tell us what WE believe.
We then went over to a girls' apt., and chilled till around 3AM.
The Mexican had tickets (his dad was the stake pres. in Texas, and had given him the whole stake's allotment of tickets! :) so we all went up again on Sunday.



From left to Right:
José Reyes, Zach Moon, Nelson Clement, Amy Clement (yep, they're married), me, Anders Peterson, Jonathan Illescas, Justin LeBaron.