Ladder Ball

When I went on the Fathers and Sons campout this year, one of the guys had brought a game he called Boku Ball or something. Well, I couldn't find on the game on the internet under that name, but I did find Ladder Ball, which is the same game. Wikipedia said that this game goes by many names, but it didn't enumerate them all, so I'm sticking with Ladder Ball.

I thought I would cut all 2 foot lengths and it would turn out just like Brother Hatch's, because his was homemade like mine, and I had measured with my hands and I thought that all of his lengths were 2 feet. Apparently, I didn't look very closely (or think very carefully either) because the game would have turned out 6 feet tall and his were only 3 or 4 feet tall. I ended up testing 18 inch lengths and 14 inch lengths, but I decided to go with 1 foot lengths for verticle bars and 2 foot lenghts for horizontal. It's a good thing I didn't pick longer than a foot too because I thought I had several feet more pipe than I needed, but it turned out to be just barely enough.

Tamara and I had a great time playing our new game.

Lock, Shock and...

Last week I went to the gym with my buddy, James, and as we were going to our lockers he asked me, "Hey, is that your lock on the bench?"

I was fairly sure it wasn't because I always put my lock right back in my gym bag and it had been a few days since I'd been to the gym. Surely someone would have stolen this nice lock with an easily changeable combo by now. So I looked in my gym bag and I looked a little more thoroughly. Sure enough it was my lock. I just couldn't believe it, but it had dents from dropping it on the ground and it was the right size and it was sitting right in front of the locker that I always use.

James still thought it could be someone else's lock, but I was certain it was mine.

A few days later, I was in my car looking for something in the console between the seats and I found my lock again. Now this time I was equally surprised because after a strange event like finding my lock on a bench, I would be sure to stick my lock in its dedicated pocket in my gym bag right away so that I don't risk losing it again. Fortunately I had my gym bag in the back seat, so I pulled it up and checked the pocket, and I found my lock again. ??? I had TWO LOCKS! It turns out that the one in the gym wasn't mine after all. I'll have to give one to the lost & found and if it's not claimed, I can probably keep it.

Sick Burger

My professor for two classes, Mr. Burger, is sick and will not be joining us anymore. This is especially unfortunate as one of his replacements is a woman with an intensely somnolent voice and the other is some arabic or asian dude with a really bad accent who speaks really fast so that I can only understand half of what he says when I'm paying close attention and less if I'm trying to multitask. His name is Satendra, which he pronounced Say-TEN. (no pun intended, I think...)

Probability of Being Sure

Tonight Tamara and I were at IKEA looking for kitchen ideas and I stumbled upon an interesting topic: I asked her, "What percent sure are you when you say you're 'reasonably sure'?" She said she's 85-95% sure. I then asked what percent sure she is when she says she's "pretty sure". She said 65-85% sure. I found that interesting because I am just the opposite. I'm more sure with pretty than with reasonably. Tamara thinks it has more to do with intonation than verbage.

Contact Attack!

Earlier today, my contact was attacking my eye and it was not comfy, so I rubbed my eye and it didn't feel much better. I intended to take my contacts out, but I was busy with other things, so I just ignored my vexatious eye until it stopped vexing me. Now it's all better.

There are many things that go away when you just ignore them. There are other things that don't.

Cat Names

We were discussing possible cat names. Here is a list of suggestions:
Cat
Meow
Cow
Okapi

New Semester and Web Page

It's a new semester and so far I'm ahead in 3 of my classes and the rest just haven't had any homework assigned yet. That's ok, but really I prefer that they give a list of all the homework for the semester right in the syllabus so that we can get things started early. Otherwise, I run into the problem of not being able to work on things right away when they're assigned and then it's hard to keep on top of it all.

My classes include:
EEE 202 Circuits I
EEE 202 Circuits I Lab
PHY 132 Physics II Lab
MAT 243 Discrete Math
CSE 220 Programming for Computer Engineers
CSE 230 Computer Organization/ Assembly Language Programming

Two of my classes (both CSE) are taught by the same professor, Mr. Burger. The first assignment in each of his classes is to post a profile picture to his moodle (moodle is an open source version of BlackBoard) and write a brief description of yourself. To the left is the picture I posted. My friend Nadim took this picture with my broken camera. He had to take several because the screen is broken and we couldn't see the pictures till after I put the SD card in my computer.

I also used this picture to update my profile at the ASU directory and my Blogger profile. I don't like this picture particularly, but it is good enough and I'll take a better headshot someday and update again.

ASU offers web page hosting, so I made a little Jack Site to test it out. I don't know if they will terminate it after I graduate. I also fixed the URL to www.turner08.com.

I updated my email alias from Jeffrey.C.Turner{at}asu.edu to Jack.Turner{at}asu.edu. Both of these addresses get forwarded to Jack{at}turner08.com anyway, so it's really not so important.