The last few days

I spent all night Tuesday night into Wednesday morning working on the AI for my last school project (a Checkers game for the PocketPC) until I finally had it making smart moves (it forced Dan into a triple-jump that he never saw coming, and then proceeded to defeat him). Then I tried it on the PocketPC, and it died. It used up so much processing power and memory that unless we turned it way, way down, it would take forever to move, or run out of memory and die. Oops. So, I made the AI really dumb again. By that point, it was almost time to get up and get ready for work anyway, so I didn't even bother going home; I just wrote Mom an email message to let her know I'd be ok (since my cell phone ran out of batteries overnight), took an hour-long nap, and went to work. Then from work I went to a school faculty meeting, and from that I went to an UgSAC meeting, then I had a bit of time to make sure we had everything finished and looking beautiful for the demo. Professor Kessler doesn't like games very much, but we impressed him on point after point, feature after feature, until he was just amazed at how well we did. In fact, I think the only thing that he said critical of us was, "You guys have way too much time on your hands." That made us pretty happy.

Some of us are probably going to polish the it up and look into the possibility of selling it. We all agreed (in writing) that each team member gets 10% of net profits as royalties if that happens. It probably won't make a whole ton of money, but it could be nice to have a little money coming into my account while I'm serving a mission.

After demoing the project and signing the royalty agreement, I finally went home and crashed--or, was about to. Once my cell phone started charging, it realized that I had about 5 voice mails, so I figured I'd better check them. After I'd listened to the first one, I got an incoming call from my Dad, who said my Aunt Loralee had called my stepmom to say that nobody had seen me since Sunday (which is silly, because Mom saw me Monday and probably even Tuesday morning). I guess Mom never checked her email, and lost Liz's phone number so she couldn't ask Liz if she knew where I was, and so when Loralee called her to convince her to go to a Xango meeting, she said that the first priority for her when she gets home is to find out where James is. Loralee asked, and Mom explained that she hadn't seen me for "a couple of days" (this was Wednesday afternoon), and so Loralee took it on herself to try to track me down through my dad's family. Sheesh. Well, needless to say, when I got off the phone with my dad I found that the remaining voice mails were all Mom trying to figure out where I was, except for the last one, which was Loralee doing the same. Once I got all of that straightened out, I was able to get to bed and I slept until 7:00 this morning.

After finishing my last day at work (!) today I went to school to pick up my "regalia" (cap & gown). As I was about to leave, I noticed a car had poked itself into my bumper. I guess somebody'd forgotten to put their parking brake on. Luckily, they got back in time to pull their car back out, after which the bumper assumed its original shape and we all went home happy.

One of the other team's leaders in my Senior Project class emailed the Professor because his team is unhappy about the grade they got, and he accidentally copied the email to the whole class. That made me nervous until I got a chance to check my own grade--It's an "A"!!!! I am so happy! I'm pretty positive that the rest of my grades will be A's, too, since my demo Wednesday went so well and my only other class was the Industry Forum (easy "A"). Talk about ending school on a good note! I think I'm gonna go dancing tonight.