To pick up where I left off last week, CSO was AMAZING. We bought tickets for the upper balcony, but I guess because we bought so many they upgraded us to the main floor at no extra cost. As we discovered when we got there, they upgraded us to five rows away from the stage. Granted, the symphony hall is designed so that everything sounds great no matter where you sit, but it’s cool to be so close to the actual players. The first piece they played was the world premier of Osiris by Matthias Pintscher, which was an awesome piece made more so because after the piece was over they brought Pintscher onstage. You never actually get to see the composer, so I thought that was cool. The second piece was Bartok’s Piano Concerto no. 3, which was my favorite of the evening. Mitsuko Uchida played the piano part, and she’s officially one of my favorite musicians of all time. The whole orchestra wears black formalwear, and she came out in what looks like brightly colored pajamas and played the piece beautifully and without any music. The evening ended with Images from Debussy, which was still beautiful but not as strong as the other two. The whole evening was pretty much amazing, and I’m happy to have been able to bring people to such an awesome event.

As for the programming competition, it was a bit of a mess. The programs they gave us were ridiculously difficult. They weren’t that hard from a logical perspective, but the judges kept sending ours back because it only worked on some of their test cases. That was really frustrating, because we can’t know what information they’re using to test our programs, so we could only guess at what we were doing wrong. We finished in third place with two problems done, which was a little disappointing but not bad considering how tough the problems were. The novice team from North Central took second in their division, so it was a pretty good day all around.

That’s it for interesting things this week. School has been getting pretty stressful, and so all this week I’ve been dealing with headaches and lack of sleep, so by today I’m pretty burned out. Hopefully I can recharge over the weekend in between writing a paper, doing research for another paper, doing general class readings, and so on… yuck. Hopefully I’ll have a better outlook for next week.

Things have been pretty much nuts lately, no lie. I’ll try to recap everything as concisely as possible.

COW events abound, for one. The Winter Party went spectacularly and we dropped off the blankets we made with Project Linus. Their representative told us that the blankets were going to go to hospitalized children, so it’s really cool to be able to extend comfort to kids in a tough place. Tomorrow COW is taking a group of people into Chicago to see the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which is really exciting but has been awful from a planning perspective. It’s taken us until today to get the transportation in order, and let me tell you, being responsible for moving 20 kids to the middle of a busy city an hour away is a pretty stressful thing. Everything did finally get taken care of, though, and so we’re all set for tonight’s concert!

Also, the ACCA programming competition is tomorrow (before we leave to see CSO). Me, Chris, and two other computer science majors are competing on NCC’s Advanced team. I’ve already been trash-talked by some people I work with who will be on competing teams, but NCC has the home court (computer lab?) advantage this year, so I’m confident we can take them. I know I’ve talked about the competition before, but as a recap, it consists of teams of up to 4 players with 1 computer per team trying to complete 8 programs as quickly and correctly as possible. There’s a Novice division for first-year programmers and an Advanced one for everyone else. This will be my first Advanced competition since I was too busy last year, but I’m really excited and confident that NCC will be able to do really well.

In other news, I was accepted into NCC’s study abroad program in China and Japan! NCC has an amazing study abroad program and I’m really excited to be able to participate. The trip is during Fall Term next year and goes from the beginning of September to mid-December. We spend the first half studying in Beijing and the second in Kyoto, with a week in the middle to travel wherever we want. I have always wanted to travel abroad but never had much of a chance, and going to Asia simply blows my mind. I can’t imagine ever being able to go outside of a school program, and I’m so excited that I’ll get to go. It’s really expensive and kind of impractical to go to either country alone, but with this program we can apply scholarships and such toward the trip. Plus we’ll actually be studying while we’re there, which I think will help us learn more about the culture than we would be able to on our own. There are all kinds of meetings and classes things I will need to attend to prepare, so I’ll keep you all posted on the process.

Of course, on top of all this, classes are getting more intense as finals start to loom nearer. It’s been pretty crazy. Hopefully next week I’ll be able to give a good report on our CSO trip and have other exciting tales. Stay warm!

I feel like I should say something about the NIU shootings, but, to be honest, the horror of the whole thing renders me speechless. These things usually happen in faraway places, but NIU is very close to us and it’s strange to have the repercussions echoing so close to home. I’m not particularly close with anyone who goes to NIU, but there are some people in my intern program at work who do, and I’m worried about them. Some of my friends and family are close to people there. It’s really a terrifying thing.

In these situations it’s especially frustrating because so little information is available this soon after the event. We don’t really know the motives, or the situation, or anything, and we have to regroup wherever we can. From what has been released so far, it sounds like the gunman was unstable due to some issue with medication. It’s a waste that so many lives were changed because of such a petty issue. It’s impossible to make any sense of it.

My sympathies go out to everyone at NIU and everyone personally affected by this tragedy.

First off, Laser Tag was an outstanding success, despite the weather, as my fellow blogger Chris will tell you. I was afraid no one would come because it was so cold and icy, but everyone did, plus we sold out all our tickets. It was tons of fun and generally awesome, and I’m very pleased with how it turned out.

Because we don’t like to see any commuters bored, we have still more COW events coming up. This Friday is our traditional Winter Party, which COW co-sponsors with Cardinals in Action (CIA), which is a service group. It’s usually very small and low-key, and in recent years we’ve added a service aspect in addition to the food and chilling out. For a wintry theme, we get people together to make no-sew blankets that we then donate to Project Linus. Project Linus is an organization that accepts donations of all kinds of hand-made blankets, from no-sew blankets like ours to hand-sewn quilts and more, and donates them to children who are ill or have suffered a trauma. It sounds a bit obscure, but Project Linus is an organization that’s very close to my heart. I received a blanket from them four years ago when my stepfather died. I thought (and still do) that it was an extremely sweet and heart-warming gesture, and since I was 16 years old at the time, I’m convinced that it would have even more meaning for a younger child. It’s so simple to make the blankets and donate them that it seemed perfect for a COW event, and so here we are.

Aside from COW events (and there are even more coming up after Winter Party, but those plans are more fluid for now), my mind has been on academics. I have one more midterm left to prepare for, and the whole term in general has been flying by. It already feels like things are starting to ramp up for finals, and there are still four full weeks left before them… yuck.

Here’s hoping it stops snowing someday. Stay warm!

Today is the first official snow day I have had in college. It’s really rare for a full day’s classes to be canceled–sometimes they will cancel just the evening classes or something, but today it’s bad enough that pretty much everything is shut down. It’s a pretty sweet deal, since I was supposed to have a midterm today but that will probably be delayed until Monday.I didn’t find out about class cancellation until I was three-quarters of the way to school today, and since it’s such a long drive (about 45-60 minutes under normal circumstances) I figured to just go the rest of the way. Plus, I have a responsibility to bring food to folks today–it’s Friday of fifth week, which means that it’s time for COW’s Cardinal Breakfast, where we bring in donuts and bagels to the Cardinal Lounge. People need their carb-laden breakfast, no matter what the weather is like!Tonight is also COW’s trip to Laser Tag, finally. I hope that people actually show up, but we don’t meet until 5:30 this evening. With any luck, the roads will be cleared, so people feel comfortable coming to campus and the bus runs okay. I’m optimistic, though, since people have really been looking forward to this event (not to mention that they’ve already paid to participate!) and wouldn’t miss it if things clear up out there.In the meantime, I should probably do something productive like work ahead on readings for my classes… but let’s be honest. There are no classes, snow is everywhere, and I’ve just consumed a lot of sugar. That sounds like a perfect formula for SLEDDING. If I do get to go, next week I’ll report on how it went. Stay warm!