Day: March 30, 2009

I had a lovely birthday! My wonderful family in Monterrey surprised me with a beautiful bouquet of tulips, mom and Christian and I made chocolate cupcakes with pink cream cheese frosting (Mrs. G, I’m hoping to make the cake soon. Maybe this weekend!), and Jenna stopped by with a pretty lamp for my room. Mom also made a quiche for dinner, hence today’s Betty Blonde. She remembered to chop and peel and break and mix the ingredients though, so it came out perfectly. 🙂 It was really a great day.

Last night I completely re-organized my schedule – again.  Usually I’ll wake up, read the Bible, eat breakfast, and head to the computer for math homework. Going to the computer first thing in the morning is not good for me. There’s way too much temptation to check Facebook, read blogs, and catch up on news and e-mail.  Thus the alterations to my daily schedule!  Today I woke up, read the Bible and ate breakfast. Then I went upstairs and turned on the classical station (which unfortunately for me was having a radio-thon) and spent an entire hour on CLEP US History II. I got SO much work done.  It was really incredible. Even though it slowed up my morning a bit, I got way more work done than I would have if I had started with my math and done my CLEP in the afternoon like I usually do.  I can’t avoid doing homework on the computer. I’ve got math, Spanish, and blogging to do, but today I placed non-computer homework in between all the computer homework.  It has worked very well so far!

Christian got reinvigorated on his C++ Programming again this weekend.  I think part of it was because Lorena and Kelly left us in the Barnes and Noble for four or five hours over two sessions on Saturday and Sunday.  Saturday morning, Kelly had a piano competition followed by her birthday shopping spree.  We needed to have a second bookstore session, because Lorena and Kelly did not get to participate on the first one.  Christian and I were not needed for either of those, so we situated ourselves in the nice easy chairs by the electrical connection in the corner of the store, bought our selves something to sip (hot cocoa for Christian, coffee for me), and programmed away.

I talked, previously, about the messiness of learning.  C++ is definitely one of those topics that I learned in a very messy way.  Fortunately, Christian has been through a lot of the messiness already.  He spent most of a year learning C# so he has a pretty good handle on object oriented programming.  In addition, he has had several false starts on the whole C++ topic.  The were false starts mostly because we could not decide which programming environment he should use.  We fooled around with several different ones, but finally settled on Visual Studio Express.  We talked a little bit about precompiled headers, I helped him with an example program, and we were off and running.  I think he worked his way through three full chapters of C++ Primer Plus.  It is a great book.

If he keeps up a good pace, we really should try to do a micro-controller project this summer.  I think it would be great to program something that includes a fountain with goldfish, a webcam, some motors, and a server to control and view it from the internet.  We have an old spare computer and an I/O board we can use.  I think we even have some stepper motors.  We really enjoyed some goldfish we kept in a wooden half barrel.  They are available at Home Depot.  We could make something a little more elaborate this time.

I planned to get a new fuse for the multimeter we blew out last week when we were testing the ham radio, but we did not get around to it, what with Kelly’s birthday and all.  We will have to wait until next week.