Over the past few weeks I've been reminded by more than a couple of people within my sphere of influence that my blog has been relatively (okay, completely) dead for the past... wow, couple of months, I guess. Granted that at one point I was writing an entry nearly every day, it's got me thinking about why I was able to write so much back in the day and yet never find the motivation to do so now. I could come up with the usual excuses, I don't have anything to write about, or I don't have time, or what not, but those never seemed like the key reason behind why I haven't written much at all in my blog this semester. It wasn't until last night, as I was plodding away at my fifth and final hardware lab report for my digital design class, that it hit me: my creative-writing (more on that in a minute) energy has been poured into lab reports, modeling assignments, documentation at the College of Nursing, and other writing-intensive things. So, where has all the writing gone, you ask? (I'm reminded of an old commercial for Hershey's Cookies n' Creme chocolate bars, way back in the day... where the kid would open up the cookie jar and exclaim, "But where have all the cookies gone?!" after which the 'announcer' would butt in to say, "Into Hershey's Cookies n' Creme bars!" Random? yes. Pointless? probably. Amusing at this time of night? most definitely.) I'll try and explain as best I can.

First of all, I haven't forgotten my blog completely. Yes, it's gathered some dust, but it's still something that I want to write in often. I still come up with ideas, usually as I'm trekking around campus between classes (of course, by the time I reach my next class, and subsequently a piece of paper to write down said ideas, I've moved on to other things), and I have started a number of different blog entries only to leave them lying half-complete and never to return to them again. In fact, I've started more than one "mini-series" and made significant headway into them, after which I lost interest and left them until I find motivation to finish them. Both of them were Starbound related, and I had made outlines and everything for them, and had made it more than halfway through the first one, with more than enough content to finish it and do it complete justice—however, my ADHD kicked in somewhere there and I lost interest completely in finishing it.

Part of the reason, at least at first, that things were quiet was because I was (and still am) planning to restructure my blog and finally move it to my domain and Wordpress. While I need to just bite the bullet, setup Wordpress with the default layout and start using it, I decided I'd do something a bit more bold and attempt to do it "right". 37Signals would appropriately butt in here and add that I need to "get real", somewhat like they did to the beaver overthinking his dam (a beaver after my own heart, if I do say so myself). In the process of doing it "right," I'd be writing a Wordpress plugin that synchronized my LiveJournal and Wordpress the way I felt syncing should happen (no such complete plugin exists, else I'd just use that). It also involved splitting my blog at least three ways—into FutileOhm, a.k.a. my lengthy ramblings about whatever I feel like similar to what it is now, more Starbound/Church oriented writing about my experiences therein, and then random comments/blurbs/links/etc. that I find. The latter of the pieces is due to the fact that a lot of the time I have short ideas that I'd love to blog about, but they don't warrant a full entry on my blog. So, they sit in NetNewsWire (which conveniently saves tabs between web browsing sessions, which has proven as much a blessing as a curse), gathering dust, until I stumble across them a month or two later (no lie), realize that they're just taking up precious real-estate on my NNW tab bar, think to myself "oh yeah, I was going to blog about this..." and then close them. This usually happens during one of my periodic "cleanup" phases in which I attempt (often with great futility) to go against my pack-rat ways and get rid of stuff I'll never use again. Clearly this refactoring of my blog has yet to happen, so maybe it'll become my summer project. You know, because I'll have so much more time this summer when I'm working 40-hours a week on top of being at church or church-related stuff every day except Friday.

Enough of what I've been wanting to do though. The fact is, my classes this semester have been very demanding on my writing skill, as was my job at the College of Nursing during the month or so before I left. At the CoN, after telling my boss I was leaving, I was basically asked to document the programs I'd written and scripts I'd made and what not. I absolutely loved doing this—writing about something I've created and put effort into and know inside and out is something I thoroughly enjoy. I spent about two weeks writing documentation for the various projects I'd worked on, giving it to my boss and coworkers to experiment with, test, and critique, rinse lather repeat. It was intense. Well, any writing is intense for me, but this was even more so because I was on a deadline and I wanted to make sure it was understandable and complete before I was off the payroll. I got it done with time to spare, and while I miss that job, it was good to finish up there in order to make more time for Starbound, which was getting the short end of the straw more often than not when things got busy.

As my job at the CoN drew to a close, I figured I'd have some more motivation to write given the amount of writing I'd been doing the few weeks prior there. This wasn't the case at all. You see, around this time is when two of my classes kicked into high gear and started requiring me to write reports or projects in what has been ever-increasing volume. The most writing-intensive class I'm taking this semester is my CSE120 class, Digital Design Fundamentals. Basically, it starts with "this is a 1, and this is a 0, and they are not the same thing" and ends with us simulating the logical design (using logical AND/OR/NOT/etc. gates, binary switches, etc.) of a 4-bit microprocessor, complete with, well, everything that's needed to make a microprocessor that can perform logic and arithmetic automatically based on instructions and data stored in its ROM (don't worry, that sentence would have flown right over my head too before taking the class). Starting the second week or so of the course, we've had a lab report due every week, each of which has been of greater complexity than the last. Half of them were in the hardware lab, using wires and chips and logic trainer board things to build circuits, and the other half are simulation labs, where we build the circuits on the computer and test them that way.

My first lab report was 1 and 1/2 pages (not including the title page), whereas my last simulation lab report was about 11 pages long, minus 3 pages worth of graphics/tables. This is all single-spaced, so when you do the math you realize that's a lot of writing to have to be doing every week. It's not fun, sarcastic, witty writing either. Instead, it's technical writing about the guts of nice digital circuits, huge tables of 1's, 0's, and X's which are used to build said circuits, and pretty pictures of the simulations of the circuits themselves. (If you're curious as to what my writing style looks like when I'm writing dense, technical stuff using lots of fancy jargon to describe the guts of pieces of a microprocessor, check out one of my sim labs.) That said, I still thoroughly enjoy writing the lab reports for that class. They're enjoyable for me because the subject matter interests me, and as I said earlier, I like writing about things that I created in detail and explaining every last detail of them. That's precisely what I do for the lab reports—I build the circuit in the hardware/software lab, test it, and then write about it. While it's tedious, it certainly accomplishes what it's meant to do, and as a result I know the inner workings of everything I've built in that class pretty much by heart. Print the report on my nice, HP Soft Gloss Laser Presentation paper using my recently-acquired color laser printer, and you're left with reports that have received very high grades overall. Which, in turn, makes it worth my effort... the fact that I could spend two hours less and get a grade a few points lower (still an A) on each one doesn't make the extra effort I put into writing them—creating pretty tables, perfecting each simulated circuit in LogicWorks and tediously exporting it to PDF before plopping into InDesign—any less worth it.

My CSE class isn't the only one in which I've had to apply my furiously-longwinded writing skills, however. The other class this semester which has taken it out of my writing energy is my ECE100 Intro to Engineering class. Because growing up as the son of an engineer and realizing that everything I do, say, write, or make is grossly overengineered in itself is not enough to prove to ASU that I'm an engineer by blood, I am required to take a class which rivals 7th grade science with Mrs. Pate (heh, remember the guinea pig? rusty spoons? good times) in pointlessness. When we're not enduring hour-long lectures in which our "professor" (who's rarely there anyways) or TA sit and ramble to us in broken English about how thinking things through before you do them is actually a good idea, we're typically either making fun of said lectures in our groups (my group is the only reason I go to that class) or being assigned worthless assignments that somehow are supposed to teach us how to become engineers. Contrary to the writing I do for my CSE class, the writing I do for my engineering class is extremely witty, sarcastic, and bitterly-amusing. I don't think anyone in that class takes any of our assignments or "modeling projects" seriously, I just happen to add my own little spin in order to retain my sanity.

Take, for example, our second "modeling project". The prompt we were given is that this guy, Tom, gets home from a basketball game and wants a cold beer. However, he was stupid and short-sighted enough not to put any of his beer in the fridge beforehand. And, his freezer's broken. So, we had to figure out how long it'd take before Tom could finally relax with a cold one and further destroy his liver. One of my favorite quips (which my audience here will most certainly understand, at least) was one of the "assumptions" I made about the given problem:

Tom has no quicker way to cool his beer, but can occupy himself on MySpace (his pride and joy) while his beer is being refrigerated

Ah yes, there's just something so refreshing about relating any guy named Tom to the Tom of MySpace. If only we could be as cool as Tom.

As the semester wore on, my writing got less and less serious, as I realized that I could pretty much write whatever I wanted, so long as I had enough big words to confuse our TA into thinking I knew what I was talking about. When our third "modeling project" was assigned, I couldn't help myself. My introduction to the report follows:

Tom’s stuck in a rut... again. Now that he’s sober after his basketball-induced drinking binge, he realizes that his final exams are in no less than 10 days and that he is at risk of failing both his French and Calculus classes, which would completely destroy his chances of becoming an NBA draft pick next year. This not only entails excommunication from his girlfriend and the majority of his NBA-bound friends, it could mean the loss of a limb—not to mention his inheritance—upon breaking the news to his parents.

Upon realizing the imminent consequences, Tom decides action needs to be taken to ensure his knowledge of both French and Calculus will earn him at least a passing grade. To do so, he will have to utilize the language lab to improve his understanding of French, and hire a tutor to help him out with Calculus. Because of the successful solution to his beer-cooling dilemma, he has decided that engineering students should be utilized to over-engineer his conundrum in order to ensure he can earn passing grades on both of his critical final exams.

It gets better though. Today was our "final exam" in our engineering class. Basically, we were given yet another "modeling project" type thing, except this time it was to be solved by our groups and had to be typed up in class. I wish I had a copy of it, because ours was absolutely hilarious. Essentially, we were asked to come up with an "IT solution" to the traffic problems around ASU's campus. By "IT solution", it meant that we couldn't just build a bridge or widen the roads or otherwise normally engineer the problem, instead we had to use "Information Technology" to ease traffic congestion. Not content to just tweak the light timings a bit (the lights in downtown Tempe are exquisitely timed as it is, which is a topic for another time, I should think), we engineered our own solution that was something to the effect of this:

Due to lack of foresight in implementing Tempe's infrastructure when planned 126 years ago, large amounts of construction are now required to add additional infrastructure needed for future projects and as such traffic congestion around ASU has become a problem. In order to solve the traffic congestion problems around ASU, raw data from road sensors* and satellite-based real-time traffic monitoring which is already in place and collecting data, will be fed into our extremely complex and technically advanced traffic-flow modeling software which members of our IT department have been developing over the past 15 years. This modeling software will take control of the traffic lights and segment cars into functional groups, which will then be routed through the grid accordingly. To augment the dynamic nature of the supercomputer-powered traffic-flow system, automated, mobile barricades, manufactured by Tom's Barricades and currently in the testing phase, will be controlled by the supercomputer as well in order to dynamically adjust traffic flow based on current needs. For example, a large group of northbound traffic on Rural road may warrant three lanes being allocated for traffic flow northbound and only one being used for southbound traffic. When the funeral procession, traveling southbound, arrives five minutes later, the supercomputer will adjust the barricades accordingly, paying homage to the dead by moving them to the sides of the road and placing them into their 'bow' mode as the procession passes, functionality specifically added to the barricades complicated programming algorithms for such a purpose. In order to create room for the ~$4 billion supercomputer cluster that will need to be built near ASU, the Manzanita dormitory complex will be leveled to make way for a state of the art supercomputer facility to be built there. While many in Tempe may mourn the loss of a historic building such as Manzanita, the iconic design of the supercomputer facility, itself designed by a supercomputer in Tokyo, will bring Tempe's architecture into the modern age and will complement the Tempe skyline.

Although promotion of the current bus system in Tempe could provide a plausible solution to the problem at hand in a much more cost effective way, the engineers involved with the project believe that the busses are worthless, and thus such an option was not even considered.

If you couldn't tell, everything after the asterisk definitely utilized our creative license. And yes, pretty much everything I said there went into our report, including the destruction of Manzi (oh what a glorious day that'd be) and the automated barricades, complete with a function to make them bow as a funeral procession passes. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Whatever the case, the point I'm trying to make is that my creative writing has been expressed elsewhere and as such I'm just out of creative-writing juice by the time I get home and have finished my homework, etc. I'm hoping that this summer I'll once again be doing much less writing, and will thus have more energy to write here once again. Writing takes a lot of energy and work. Heck, just typing this entry has taken me the better part of three hours... and I could have said a lot more than I did. If you're not convinced (unlikely at this point), one of my favorite bloggers who I've mentioned before, John Gruber, has left his job in order to pursue blogging full-time. So, blogging can be a full-time career if you make it one. While I'd love to do that, obviously I can't right now, and thus I'll do my best to keep updating my blog when I can with my insight into strange, trivial, and interesting topics that most people wouldn't have noticed anyways.