Sick Monday Morning (Student)

So it's the Monday before finals and I'm sick. It's going to be a great week…

I've had to skip classes today because I have a nasty cough and some gross sniffles. I don't know if I'm contagious or not, but due to a self-imposed quarantine I don't think I will be infecting anyone. While being sick sucks quite a bit, especially in college (nobody to make soup for you), it might actually be a good thing.

I have quite a bit of homework due at the end of this week, and in my 2 hours awake I have just pounded on it. It's a great feeling to get work done ahead of time, and I'm doing a speedy job at it right now. Such a great job that I felt I had to write it down somewhere. I plan on wasting some time now trying to find funny things online, mostly because I'm a little sad from being cooped up in my room all this time (though happy at the same time, really).

Post-Thanksgiving Morning (Student)

Well, it came and went, but I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. My Thanksgiving started early and ended early. I started working on my ZBLL document at about 12:45 when I got back from class. At about 5:30 I went to dinner. It was roughly 5 in the morning when I stopped working, and I woke up at 10 to continue. For those who don't know, ZBLL is a method for solving the last layer of a 3x3x3 Rubik's cube that involves knowing 501 cases. I don't know them all (actually I don't even know half at this point), but I took it upon myself to publish speed solving versions of the algorithms a few years ago. I've tried to keep it updated as I learn new things, but it just doesn't work that way sometimes. However, I finally have another version out, and you should give it a look:

ZBLL Algorithms (version 3.00)

I figure people who want to learn this are going to be learning it over school breaks, so this gives them a nice winter holiday season to get it done. I don't actually expect anyone to learn the entire thing in that amount of time, but I at least gave them the option.

I said I would explain why white cubes are better than black ones. It's not the feel or the look, but rather the background that it presents. The beauty of a white cube is that you can use black stickers on it. This lets you take advantage of color opponent process (Wikipedia link), theoretically making it faster to recognize pieces as they move around the cube. The problem with the black plastic cubes is that black stickers appear to be nothing instead of something, and so it takes extra effort to figure out what pieces are moving around. I have a  few pictures of the cube I have set up. The blue isn't really the shade I want, as I sometimes get it confused with black in bad light, but in good light this is a great color scheme. The reason I chose not to put opponent colors opposite each other is that this requires re-learning your entire color scheme. This way, on the other hand, only replaces orange with black. I can go back and forth between my non-specialized color scheme and this one without issue (well, very slight issue) because that is the only difference.

I spent my Thanksgiving away from home this year. A dormmate lives about an hour and a half away and I crashed at their house for Thanksgiving. I got to meet a very interesting grandfather. He's a very intelligent person and is not afraid to say or ask anything. Absolutely anything. From sex to politics to religion, he covers it all. I had a great Thanksgiving even though it was away from home, and I stayed up till after midnight doing some reading I have assigned over break.

Thus I started and ended my Thanksgiving working. It is now officially finals season here, and I figure I will be doing a lot more working from now on. I did discover that I can get CD's from the library here, so that should make my days of reading and writing more interesting (I can only deal with Pandora and Spotify adds for so long). I've really gotten into jazz recently. It seems that people only know Miles Davis and John Coltrane by name. I'm a big fan of Charles Mingus (Mingus Ah Um is great), but the best album I have heard so far has been the Dave Brubeck Quartet's Time Out. I can't even describe how great it is.

Gray Sunday Morning (Student)

It is a very, very gray day here in Chicago. Yesterday was probably worse, but today is still pretty bad. Looking out my window, all I see is a tree without leaves, some gray sky, and a beige-ish building across the street. It looks incredibly bleak out in the world right now, and as a result I'm in my room working.

Monday is my second calculus midterm, so there is some studying going on for that. Tuesday I have a humanities paper due, so there will be some work put into that. It's almost Thanksgiving, so I have another release of my ZBLL algorithms due to the speedcubing community, so I will also be working on that. My old blog was dedicated to this, but it's sort of fallen apart as I haven't had time to update and really just stopped cubing for a long period. For those who are interested, you can find the blog HERE. Then I have a 6 page paper due for American History the week after Thanksgiving, so I have to start thinking about that. It's going to be a fantastically productive Sunday.

I recently got my 2x2x2 LanLan cube, which is kind of a problem. It is just too smooth. As a result I spend way too much time playing with it. It has yet to lose me any sleep, but that fact that it's there is causing a few problems. To the right you can see a picture of what it looks like. From here it just looks like a 2x2x2 Rubik's cube, but the internal mechanism makes it much better than any Rubik's brand cube. Still, you have to give credit where it's due, and Erno Rubik's design is what made this possible, so I thank him for that. White cubes are, in my opinion, superior to black ones, for reasons that I'll get into later.

As far as sleep is concerned, I've lightened up on my schedule. Thursday I felt rather awful with a  migraine and slight fever, so I decided to not set my alarm at all and just let myself sleep. I did that Friday and yesterday, as well, because I'm still feeling under the weather a little. Getting sick would be a very bad thing and I can't let that happen. In high school I got sick a lot, but I blame having to stay through an entire day for that. The big advantage of college is that you don't have to worry about quite so much every day, so overall you are less stressed. You aren't forced to be in the same building for 7 hours a day taking 6 or 7 classes you don't like. Instead, you max out at 4 classes you don't like.

The Early Morning Student

Welcome to the early morning student's blog! I will go through each of these words in reverse order to give you an idea of what this blog will be about.

First of all, the word "blog." This is a blog, short for weblog. It is here that I will I write down the interesting happenings of my days for all the world to see. But why would I want to do that? Because everyone wants to know what it's like to be a college student. I am no longer wondering, but I know I did in my high school days.

That brings me to "student." I am currently a first year student at the University of Chicago, the place where "fun comes to die." Pretty much my entire life I've thought of myself as a student before anything else in my life. I'm not the early morning baseball player (though I do that sometimes) or the early morning stretcher (though I do that every morning), or even the early morning Rubik's cube solver (though I do that more than once every morning). I am a college student, here to share with you all my joys and pains of university life. I realize I am starting this blog about more than halfway through my first quarter (actually, we are getting close to finals at this point), but better late than never, right?

But why the "early morning" student? Why not the sleepy student? The basic answer is I like mornings. I can't stand waking up late. If I don't get something done in the morning I spend the rest of the day lost and confused. A productive morning lets you slack off when you really want to. At some point you have to face facts: you want to slack off later in the day more than you do in the morning. I don't like to fight this urge, so I chose to get as much out of the way as possible in the mornings. I get more done in the day and I'm fully awake for my first class. What's not to like?

I do other things. Waking up early is not the only thing I do. I made the baseball team here at UChicago as a walk-on pitcher, so my next two quarters will be a little bit full. I also solve Rubik's cubes and similar twisty puzzles. I have a passion for American history, and most of my free time reading is spent on the subject. I play board games quite a bit here in my dorm, and much more at home. I am learning how to do basic programming late at night thanks to (my addiction to) iTunesU. But more of this will come later.

Academically I have yet to find a subject I haven't enjoyed. UChicago has a notoriously rigorous and expansive core, and I will spend my first two years here completing those requirements. You're probably interested to see my schedule for the quarter, so I took the liberty of attaching it here. Unfortunately because of my physics lab I could not get a schedule of all-morning classes. Despite that, I am very happy with my schedule (insert a Weight Training class at 11:30 - 12:20 on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday):

I wake up at 6:28 every morning to get to my class across the street. I am the early morning student. This is my blog.

(hope I'm not violating some copyright or anything with the University of Chicago logo on the side there...)