Small Intermission

Finals ended last week and I am glad that I will never have to see some of those classes again. Looking back on the semester, I realize that French was not all that bad. Honestly I am going to miss the subject, but not the having class every morning. Another class I'm not going to miss all that much is Abstract Algebra. Now I know that I might regret this but for some reason the topic doesn't appeal to me quite as much as number theory, analysis, or other branches of mathematics. The funny thing is that algebra and number theory are very closely related. Just about every theorem we learned in algebra could be stated in terms that wold make it applicable to a number theory class. Overall the semester wasn't that bad, surprisingly advanced calculus turned out to be ,what I considere, my easiest class. I still have to wait another week or so to find out my final grades but I am pretty confident that I made As in all of my classes.

When I returned home I found my laptop waiting for me. In case you are wondering I mentioned the laptop in one of my last two post. Setting everything up was pretty straight forward, no real surprises. The only real issues were getting used to the new feel of vista and removing all of the unnecessary preinstalled software. Really I could group these into the same problem since it took me a while to find the "add/remove programs" function in vista, which happens to be called "programs and features". After finding this I spent the next hour or so finding unwanted material and then waiting for Windows to uninstall them. Overall Windows Vista isn't all that bad, I would rather be using XP but after spending some time with it you realize that in all actuality it isn't as bad as some reports make it out to be.

Here are a few screen shots of my new set up.

In use:



Desktop:















As you probably noticed this is not the usual Windows set up. I have "replaced" the task bar and system try with an application called ObjectDock, which imitates the thing that is used my Macs. On the side is Google Desktop's side bar, personally I prefer it to the one that comes with Vista.

Finally, my birthday was a little while ago. I didn't really do all that much, just had lunch with two of my best friends and then spent time with the family. Even though it doesn't sound like much it turned out pretty well.