I started this morning going to work. It was pleasant, and I got to see Chris for the fist time in ages. I went to class at UNI and returned to work and ate a brief lunch. All was going well. I went to the high school and returned to Physics. Just like normal. I wandered over to Composition and Rhetoric with Ewald. She seems scary, but I think I will enjoy the class. I have had little to no time to write, and now I will have an excuse to do so even if it is in essay form. She has a lot of rules, but they don’t scare me. I then when to Sociology with Mullan. I have high hopes for that class. We have a rather large variety of people in it, and its dual credit and extremely interesting.

After high school I returned to work briefly with David and showed him around. We talked with Diane for about forty minutes (putting it at 4:40pm) before David decides he’d like to go on a service call! So we went over to the library and swapped a power supply on one of the lab computers.

I came home and before going inside I decided to do the shoveling I had put off from yesterday. I already felt kind of annoyed with things today, so a physically straining and numbing activity was almost desirable. After an hour and a half of good work getting the snow that we had driven over and was caked on the driveway off into the yard I went inside and ate dinner. All was seemingly well.

Later I opened an e-mail saying my father had collapsed at Legacy Point and had been taken to Mercy Hosptial. And there goes the day. A decent day, quickly and absolutely crushed by less then fifty words on my screen. I waited an hour or two for an update. Apparently he has some type of virus that hit him rather suddenly and, supposing all goes well (which it rarely does), he will be out tomorrow. ::sigh::

After a somewhat liberating talk with Wade about that status of life, I’ve decided turning in early would be a good idea. I need to be at work by 8am after all. I love work. It keeps my mind away from the more troubling matters and pays off (literally).

After that (lasted till 3:30 or so) I got to take dogs to the vet! Oh boy, so much fun. Sarcasm doesnt go through blog entries well if you don’t use tags. Today reminded me how much I really am allergic to the four legged crazys, so if Loki (my black lab) does live with me next year I’m definitely going to get some medicine for it.

Later I went and had dinner with Logan at Famous Daves. Yum. That was fantastic. The woman also started by asking us if we wanted any Michelob or daiquirii’s (I think it was daiquiri’s…), which was somewhat interesting. We then headed over to Blockbuster to find a movie and determined we would watch Beverly Hills Ninja (one of the first movies we ever watched togeather). Soon after we went to Hy-Vee to buy candy so Lauren could check us out (“you forgot the condoms?!” haha )

So all in all it was an interesting day. I have lots of packing and moving to do tomorrow and this weekend (and all of next week for that matter). Hopefully I’ll figure out my living situation and find some time to finish up my math/great books stuff so I didn’t completely screw myself over last semester (::shudder:: I can’t live with a 3.6 gpa… must… makeup… work… for better grades…). Speaking of homework, I suppose I should finish my homework for Computer Org. or at least tell Fienup to report my A-. ::sigh:: If only I had a bit more time to program in assembly (aka bash my face into hard objects).

- Perfect score on the Eastern Civ test (100/100). Woot.
- Perfect scores on CS II homework and test (without testing code even).
- Made $20 tutoring a college student
- Assembled a kick ass computer, for which I will (eventually) recieve $80.
- Spring break is but a week away
- My truck still has half a tank of gas (yup, this is a good thing)
- The play is on Saturday
- Great Books w/ Demoss is amazing, as is the Apology by Plato.
- Got to eat Village Inn and Carlos O’Kelly’s in the same week
- Made top 10 posters on Gammon’s forum

Ok, some intermediate things here:

- Signed up for the ACTs
- Got some sleep, but not too much, by pulling shifts with Dan
- Hacked away some math assignments (see next section)
- Video in Eastern Civ on Monday.
- Reading time in Eastern Civ today.

And the kickers, all of which have been happening recently (minus the first one):
- Mom back in the hospital on Tuesday (this cancels out like, 5 good things)
- Still have several math assignments to do
- Literary Analysis paper is due next week (I have a bit to read yet…)
- Comp. Org. homework due today that I don’t have done and don’t really know how to do…
- All of the problems of putting the computer togeather (eg. incompatible RAM, SATA troubles, optical drive troubles, Windows installation troubles (err, SATA troubles again…))
- No time to work on Kaladea
- No time to work on phpQuote
- No time to work on much of anything
- Horrifically unprepared for the ACTs next month
- Cable/Internet died during ACT registration
- 65 point quiz in Eastern Civ next week
- My knees died (I contribute this to tripping on the sidewalk, but standing for 4 hours straight prolly didn’t help either). This was resolved after two hours of icing them down with frozen peas.
- Terrible weakness and sickness Thursday morning.
- Mental meltdown + seemingly unavoidable academic failure
- Absolute depletion of care for math class ::sigh::
- Only got to see my Grandparents yesterday for a total of 45 seconds (twas leaving for tutoring)
—–

I’m not really sure what else to say. This weeked is going to be incredibly busy, as is next week. Then, finally, I’ll have a break from it all (which, sadly, will be used to catch up on things…).

—–

Can anyone name the song that contains this posts title in its lyrics? I’ll give you two imaginary cookies if you do! Google should make it easy.

This quote is actually from Wallingford’s blog. I found it especially fitting today and yesterday, with the various conflicts I’m currently dealing with in my academics.

Never before have I ever felt so undermined and unproductive, and yet, so accomplished. I’m one of the few junior’s who can say they go to college (albeit part time), and yet, I feel my academic zeal slipping. Like, seriously slipping. Fast. I’ve become very sick and annoyed with high school. It seems more like an annoyance than anything else these days.

This flame is constantly fueled with my college planning (I’ve got the courses I plan to take -totally- mapped out for UNI, though its not in a semester schedule (i’ll save that for later)). Also, the fellow I have e-mailed about the MIS major in the Management department was very nice, making me even more eager to join the college ranks. The reply form him was a tad amusing as it said “if you plan to visit the UNI campus,” which I do every weekday!

My feelings are strange currently. For the first time I feel like I’m goinging somewhere, like I’m realling doing something, and like it may actually matter. I’ve always ranted about about the importance of education, but never has it seemed more relevant than now. I am going places (finally), and the faster it happens the better.

Conversely, my performance is (way) down. The grades are in from last semester, and though they are relatively good, there is definitely a downfall (GPA drop again, ::sigh::). Every single one (to my amazement on a few) was an A or A- except math. What was math? C+. Yep, thats right, a C+. For the first time I’ve achieved (wrong word?) a C+ as a semester grade. I will blame this on a few things to defend myself (bad teacher, my mom’s illness’, my complete lack of mathematical competency, lack of time budgeting for math assignments, rather large amount of lengthy problems on the final (which screwed a lot more people than just me)), but it is my fault.

I need a break! Holy crap, this week has been bad! And tomorrow is “Zero Hour”. My brain is going into meltdown mode. Sadly spring break isn’t until March (though next wednesday is professional development day (I still have UNI class)), or, more specifically, 4 weeks from now. ::sigh::

Oh, it turns out I should be able to take a few MIS classes over the summer! I’m probably the only kid around here that is happy with the news they could attend school over the summer (hurray for speeding up college). Granted this will cost money, something I still need to discuss with my parents. However, things remain hopeful. If all goes well I may be able to grab my bachelor degree’s in 3-4 years, and have masters in another 1-2. This is all still subject to many things (for example, a really good job offer (one can always hope, eh?)), but going on to get Phd’s would also be nice. With the certificates I wish to get I may have to add another year or so onto my college experience (or should it be a college expense?), so it seems likely that going to classes through the summer’s will be a good option for keeping myself on track.

—-

What I am avoiding by currently writing this (with most of it due tomorrow):

A Computer Organization assignment (and test to review for), several math assignments (I’m so lost…), an eastern civilization assignment (well, partially, only some of it is due tomorrow), and a book to read for great books.

– Edit –
Interesting note: This post has the id 200, meaning it is the 200th post I’ve ever written. Crazy.

I spent some time verifying the balance of the tree’s and everything looks pretty good. However, I have one node in -every- tree I create with a balance of 2 (which is bad). The code leads me to believe that this node used to be a root node that was later rotated out of the root spot.

I will attempt later (if my professor can give me a lead) to fix the problem, but overall the effects are extremely positive. I ran the program on a 338 meg text file named osu.medline, which contains various informations on effects of drugs, diseases, disorders, their causes, and things like that.

This is a sample output (I won’t paste all 7.2 million words it read) with the number of nodes/unique words capped at 200,000 (Note: words of length 3 or less are discareded):

Nodes w/ 0 bal: 136003
Nodes w/ 1 bal: 32057
Nodes w/-1 bal: 31939
Nodes w/ other: 1
Overal balance: 120

Number of words: 7201810
Number of nodes: 200000

Time: 32 seconds*

–
It took just over 32 seconds to read 7.2 million words and inset them into the tree (and balance the tree accordingly). This is very impressive. The fact that 136,000 of the 200,000 nodes are balanced perfectly (balance == 0) means the tree is in very good working order, and the only problem is the “other” node, which has a balance of two. The others, -1 and 1, are local fluxuations that exist and will exist until the tree need’s rebalancing at that particular spot.

In closing (for now), the method outlined works. It is fast (7.2 million searches and additions! in 32 seconds!) and provides a very good tree.

*This time is a little off. Sadly the timer is not very resolute, and it in no way accounts for the hundreds of thousands of small words (length < = 3) that were read, translated to lowercase (with smashed punctuation), and then discarded. Also, this test was run on a Sidhe (http://sidhe.cs.uni.edu), a very fast machine.

-- edit --
I added two lines of code to avoid even smashing/converting strings of length less than 4 already. This decreased the overall time by one second:

Nodes w/ 0 bal: 136003
Nodes w/ 1 bal: 32057
Nodes w/-1 bal: 31939
Nodes w/ other: 1
Overal balance: 120

Number of words: 7201810
Number of nodes: 200000

Time: 31 seconds

-edit-
Code has been updated. The original is main.cpp, the recent additions are under main_mod.cpp.

http://www.nick-cash.com/download/cs2/1