originally posted october 10, 1999

reflections at the sixteenth-way point

Wow, the first updates in almost two months. Yes, I'm still alive, and I've just been very busy here. The computer science program here is very intense, but fortunately I've met up with some great people. Sharing a floor with people of different majors, backgrounds, and even genders definitely has its advantages.

It's quite a shock to go from the second half of high school, perhaps one of the most relaxed educational environments possible, to the first semester of college freshman year. From the very first day of class, all my professors hit the ground running. I didn't even have my books -- BigWords didn't plan on shipping them until September 1, so I wound up canceling my on-line order to run to the bookstore on campus and wait in line for upwards of 20 minutes. Fortunately, they had all but one of the books that I needed, and I wound up getting the last one through an alternate source.

So how does it feel to finally be done with the first half of the first semester of my first year? In a word, relaxing. In another, lonely. Nearly everyone I know here is either at home or asleep (or both, who knows) for this mid-semester break weekend. Sleep doesn't sound like an entirely bad idea, considering how lousy the weather is both here in Pittsburgh and back home in New York. Oh well, can't win 'em all.

Finally, my dorm workstation serves as an active mirror of this site most of the time; it's at http://weill.res.cmu.edu. Stay tuned.

Back to October 1999, or to the year 1999.

Where am I?

This is Weill Aspects, the official news archive of Jason Weill Web Productions. All articles posted to the front page end up here. This page was generated automatically by a series of Perl scripts.

Articles in Weill Aspects are organized solely by date. You may find the Google search in the left column to be useful if you are looking for an article but do not know the date on which it was posted.

Weill Aspects is composed of static web pages generated as appropriate when a new article is posted. It was developed in May 2001 as a way of managing the content on this site. I also used it extensively while in Japan, during which time I did not have continuous access to the Internet. I was able to write daily updates during July and August 2002, pack the files onto a CD-R or memory device, and upload them from the Internet-connected computers at school.

These scripts are all hacked together in less than elegant fashion, and I don't plan to release them. Some of the design that went into Aspects also was used to develop Livestat, a suite of Perl scripts to process statistics for academic competition tournaments. Livestat is available freely.