Why I hate Trail Blazers

One of the handful of things I've learned in my 15 or so years of being in school is a phenomenon I will refer to as False Test Confidence Syndrome. Now this syndrome is especially common when an extremely difficult test is involved and occurs in the following stages:

Stage 1) A difficult exam is anticipated, studying begins entirely too late, cramming ensues.
Stage 2) Further cramming and feeling of hopelessness exist hours before the test.
Stage 3) Minutes before the exam is handed out cramming ceases, and you begin to accept your fate.
Stage 4) Upon receiving the exam you breeze through it, thinking you overreacted and the exam was honestly pretty easy.
Stage 5) You do horribly on the test.

Now the confidence provided by Stage 4 is seemingly unstoppable, in fact the only reason I'm questioning how well I did on what was supposed to be an extremely difficult exam is because of all of the other times I'd fallen victim to False Test Confidence Syndrome. The symptoms are all there, I'm hoping we'll get exams back before next week's Spring Break but maybe I shouldn't hope for that. I read and re-read over the exam and continued to do that (something I never do) simply because no one else had finished yet and given that I thought it was fairly easy, I was certain I did something wrong. My fears are compounded by the fact that I have the utmost respect for this professor and I'd rather not disappoint him with a poor showing on our one and only exam other than the final. But maybe this time around I was actually right and the exam was easy? Maybe after 4 years of college I've finally found an exam that didn't provide me with this False Test Confidence Syndrome...or maybe that "high hopes" song should be my theme music.

I consider myself a decent driver, I make mistakes but for the most part when I'm driving I like to focus on the actual driving. I usually focus on what other people are doing on the road to anticipate any forms of imminent death I have to look out for as well as keep my eyes on what I'm doing to make sure I'm not scaring anyone else either. I obey all traffic laws*, and I even signal when no one is around and I'm just switching lanes. The * next to traffic laws indicates an exception, and that exception is: speeding.

Now I get no thrills out of going extremely fast in a straight line; trying to set new 1/4 mile records on a highway isn't exactly my idea of fun. Some spirited driving through uncrowded twisties is more my style. I don't have to be going fast to have fun driving, but at the same time you cannot argue that quite a few of our speed limits are in place not to save lives, but to drive revenue through ticketing. I am responsible for my own actions and I do make sure that my actions don't put others in danger (some of the most dangerous drivers I've ever encountered travel well under the speed limit), but to protect me from contributing to the revenue stream I purchased a radar detector a couple of years ago. The Valentine One has saved me so many times, but there's an issue that has just recently cropped up with V1 units: false alarms due to brake lights on newer cars. Basically whenever a newer Trail Blazer brakes, my V1 falses and usually scares the crap out of me. Mind you that it goes off normally while I'm at a stop, but the sound is quite unexpected and there are enough new Trail Blazers around now to make this irritating. I do realize it's Valentine's problem that needs to be taken care of and until it is, all I can do is try not to be behind a Trail Blazer when they're stopped. If you happen to be a Trail Blazer owner and would like to give a V1 owner a hard time, just keep on tapping your brakes while driving around, we like that a lot :)

I went for a run and ended up lifting as well on Sunday; yesterday I could barely move as I haven't ran/lifted weights in hmm way too many months for me to admit. Today only around 40% of my body is incredibly sore, so I may head out for another run and come back and lift a bit.

It's amazing what knocking one test out of the way will do to your week, it now seems like I've got an infinite amount of time. I shouldn't let that feeling sink in as I do still have to write a compiler by Friday, I'll tackle a bit of that tonight but I will proclaim Wednesday to be National* Compiler Day. The * denotes that by National I mean in the sense of my house and excluding the rest of the nation. Yep, I'm weird. I used to blame it on sleep deprivation, now I've accepted it as a part of my personality.

Take care and have a wonderfulous day.