My preliminary schedule for the coming semester has been updated: /files/school/schedule3s.html

I’ll be dropping one course from that selection, most likely CSC318 on tuesday nights, so I’ll have tuesdays off (not that it will accomplish much, I’ll probably still come down to campus).

My fate for Operating Systems will be announced any day now. If things don’t go well, I may waste ~$700 and take some courses during the summer. Conveniently, my expenditures for the previous year have been very limited, so I already have enough money saved up for next year’s tuition. So, worst case, I can forego working full time in the summer (yet again) and concentrate on school and a couple of side projects to pay for my expensive lifestyle of weekly restaurant-eating.

Here’s a brief summary of my accomplishments for this winter break:

• Built two computers (for my relatives and parents of the significant other).
  Lesson learned: Latest NForce4 chipset motherboards don’t work with the latest Maxtor SATA2 hard drives.
• Played a fair amount of WarCraft 3 (mostly the Dota Allstars map).
  This is good in that I haven’t played a single game of anything since summer-time.
• Started another project which will never be fininshed. Named FeedNoodler (for now), it’s going to be an improved web-based RSS feed reader. It’s being co-developed by Hyfen (of doom). If you want to contribute somehow for some reason, you may contribute to the FeedNoodler Wiki, such as by adding to the Wishlist.

Possible plans for the future?

Something needs to be done with shazow.net. Right now it’s at that stage where it works well enough for it to be a shame to abandon, but not complete enough to do all the fancy things I’d like to do. One option is to migrate to an existing blog system like WordPress. By the likes of Maria, this action would be considered a sell-out. I agree with her.
So, I decided, if the OS/161 gods bless me with a passing mark, then I’ll opensource the shazow.net codebase and start on rewriting the core node-handling system into something more powerful and secure so that other people can start on writing nice modules for me to use.

Lastly, I want to mention good things about my fantastic host, DreamHost (referrer-enabled link).
They recently upgraded their services and features 4 to 8-fold. Their basic service, for example (the one I’m using), was upgraded to a ridiculous 20 GB of disk space and 1 TB monthly transfer cap. This is, as they said, jawdropping. I highly recommend them to anyone looking for a new host. Now, I just need to find of a good way to waste all that space. :D