Shall I try it? No. Considering how long it has taking me to type these sentences, using Dvorak would significantly cut down on my post length, and really, who wants that?

Much better. I think that paragraph took me four minutes to type. At least I know where all the Dvorak keys are now, and I think if I got used to using it, I could get quite a bit faster -- it does feel more natural -- but that just takes time I don't really have, especially right now.

I should be in bed. I should have gone to bed at 11, 11:30 the last four nights in a row, but I've been stupid and stayed up. Now I am fried.

We have five days until our Senior Project is due. Where did all the time go? Curly and Lolbot are a little more optimistic than I am, but I think we hit the actual half-way point yesterday. We are making definite progress, but we've also put off the hardest parts. We did the medium ones first, because they were easy enough and yet interesting. Then we did the easy, monotonous ones. Now we have the hard and the weird parts. Also, I found out today that our software won't get directions from cellphone A to cellphone B; it will merely plot all the cellphones' locations on a map. There will be no lines connecting them. Static Google maps aren't the most robust of APIs. In my opinion that cut our shiny factor by half, but we'll see.

We've been working the last four to seven days, hard. I picked up working the GUI because most of the database work is done. Every now and then I still have to write a stored procedure, and every now and then we still have to write some back-end functions to support the front end, but most of the work now is getting J2ME Polish to work. It's actually a really nice package, but no package is without it's quirks. For instance, you can't add a command listener to a tree. Any other item, and it works, but not a tree.

I will be so relieved when this is all over. We're planning an all-nighter on Saturday night, which will be the second for Lolbot this week. He has compilers due on Friday, so he'll spend all of Thursday night (tomorrow night, I suppose) on it. I am so very glad that I got sick for that week, all but forcing me to drop the class. I'd be so incredibly overwhelmed if I hadn't.

We got our MFT results back today. The tradition continues: no one from our school failed. The scale is from 120 to 200, and 140 is passing. The lowest was a 145, and the top score was between 195 and 198. Whether I think highly of my skills in computer science or not, I got a 192, the second highest. It helped that I took software testing, artificial intelligence, and database theory. I'm not sure anyone else who took the MFT this quarter has taken all three of those, and there were questions regarding each, so I was at a bit of an advantage. I hope I don't come off as arrogant. I don't feel like I look down on people. I'm just excited I did as well as I did, though I was a little overly curious as to who got the highest score. I did find out. It was a kid I don't know very well, but have been hanging out with in the labs the last few nights. He seems pretty cool, and apparently is pretty bright when it comes to CS. He was looking for a job at MS, so I gave him the email address of my recruiter. I hope that was alright.

Alexander finished the first draft of his story. It was short compared to what I was expecting. It's still more than the chapter I've written of mine, but it was still shorter than the novel I expected. The story is 19 chapters long, each chapter averaging 7,500 words. That's about 190 pages in word, or about 350 pages (give or take) in your average novel-sized softcover. Still, it begs a sequel. Things happened really quickly, at least compared to Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, or Inheritance. I liked it though. That's really the point I was getting at. I wanted more of it.

On Sunday I went to FPC for the third time. One of the congregation was a former pastor and he gave the message. I really liked him. He was very different from Doug, the head pastor at the church -- a refreshing change, even if it was only my third time there. I'd heard Doug speak several times at the INN as well. They have this LCD in the corner that has three 7-segment displays on it. The numbers light up indicating that a parent is needed of child number ### in the nursery. There were quite a few numbers that went up during the service, and my first thought was, "I wonder if they're staging a coo." It was almost as bad as the time I dreamt up a pun I didn't get in the dream, but when I woke up, it was pretty bad. ("Who would name their girl 'Anna May'?")

Monday night I sinned. Of course I sin every day, but this was the whole, I know I shouldn't be doing this; I should stop this; I'm still doing this type of sin, a full-fledged giving into temptation. Swood gets on 4chan pretty often to download anime wallpapers. The ones he downloads are pretty harmless -- pictures from animes he's watched and so he knows the characters and they mean something to him. I got in the habit of looking over his shoulder, and there are several pictures of girls with questionable amounts of clothing in the pictures he doesn't download. They were all clothed though -- nude pictures, I gather, aren't allowed on /w/ -- so that was the subconscious justification I gave myself for something I knew I shouldn't have been doing in the first place. Two nights ago, though, I was drained, and I was stressed. Swood was just closing one of the drawings he'd clicked on, apparently a long time before, and I wanted to see it, so I went to /w/. I know it had been a while before because it wasn't still on any of the pages. Feeling a little depraved, I went to konachan which I know logs all the pictures off /w/. What I didn't know was they store a LOT of hentai (anime porn basically). At that point I slipped, if I hadn't already, and spent maybe a half hour browsing that site. When my eyes had had their share, I began Windows Update to Vista SP1, and tried to sleep. When I closed my eyes, all I could see was stuff I ought not to have, including images I didn't see on the web. My imagination is "strong" that way.

I broke down. I prayed and prayed. I confessed to God, prayed for healing, prayed for purity. And it came. Suddenly those images were gone. I was given grace. I wasn't completely healed of lustful desires, but it's like the state of those things was reverted to that of several months ago. I am so glad of that.

Yesterday Lulu talked at the INN. She talked about a passage in Luke 9. It's about three men. Jesus is walking toward Jerusalem, on a pretty long trek, so I understood. The first man walks up to Jesus and says, "I will follow you wherever you go." Jesus replies, "Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to rest his head." This passage is one I've never really understood. I mean, I know what all those words are -- they're not difficult words -- and I know that "the Son of Man" refers to Christ, but it's such a strange response, and all I could get out of it was that he turned the man away. Why would Christ turn someone away, especially after the person just said he'd follow him wherever he went? Basically what Christ was saying to the man was that the man didn't know yet what he was getting into, and he didn't want the man to be disappointed. Christ had been doing some pretty amazing things, and this guy had just seen the glory and the hype, but following Christ is deeper and harder than that, and he didn't want this man to be tricked. Something that comes to mind, though, is that Lulu said that in Matthew 8, the first guy is titled a scribe, or a teacher of the Law. Scribes, to my understanding, were up there with Pharisees and Sagisees. He should have known that God was not all about glamor, or maybe the Law was just something he thought was cool, a way of power, and that's what he saw in Christ. I shall ask Lulu about that later.

The second guy Jesus approaches and says, "Follow me." From the sounds of it, Jesus knew this man well enough, or he wouldn't have asked it of the man. The man replied, "First let me go bury my father." Jesus answered, "Let the dead bury their own dead; but you go and proclaim the Kingdom of God." It sounds like Jesus is telling him not to attend his father's funeral, but in Jewish culture, they buried their dead within 24 hours, as quickly as possible. If the man's father had been dead that day, he wouldn't have been walking with Jesus on the way to Jerusalem. What the man was actually saying was, "My father is old; let me wait for him to die and then I'll come follow you." So what the guy was basically saying was, "Let me get some of my ducks in a row; let me follow you when the circumstances in my life are right."

The third man says, "Let me first go and say goodbye to my family." This seems like another simple request, but Jesus responds, "No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God." Here, the man is looking back at his family, is looking at all the losses, all the changes he'll have to make in order to follow Christ. He's wondering what his life would be like if he hadn't followed Christ and all the supposed freedoms and luxuries he'd be giving up. He's distracted. Jesus says that Jesus would have to be first in the mans life, would have to be focused on whole-mindedly, undividedly.

Honestly, none of the three men described here rang a bell with my current person. However, it did make me think back to September 2005. It was right after the CCF move-in Sunday donut get-together, and I realized that I had been thinking up to that point that I would be putting God on hold until I was out of college, and then I could focus on him. And during that night, I decided that was foolish, and wondered what better time to start focusing on God. So I made a conscious decision that night to devote my time at college to God.

As I was sitting there during the last couple songs at the INN, I started thinking of how much change I'd gone through here at Western. I've grown so much in my faith that it's overwhelming. I've been so very blessed. I began to sob.

When I got back, I started to read blog posts from that time. I thought that I had made that decision after my first time at CCF on a Friday night, not at the donut thing, so I started reading the post after the one I was looking for, and read a few of them. It was about the time I started "dating" Louise (who lives in Australia). I was really funny back then. There was actually a very subtle pun I threw in there that I read over the first time and didn't notice. The sentence it was in was immediately followed by "(Did you catch it?)" so I went back and read it. I think I always seem more clever in hindsight. It's unfortunate that I don't feel clever in the now. It might help my self esteem, though, I have kind of been getting the feeling this post seems arrogant somehow, so maybe I don't need that boost.

In the last post I had time to read before 1:30, it mentioned that Louise had said "I love you" for the first time. It actually quoted StarWars Ep II, casting her as Padme and me as Anakin, which I know didn't happen, so I wanted to read it again for myself. When we weren't being ridiculously sappy (which was more of a joke than serious most of the time), we had really good conversations. After all, I was in a relationship with her for a couple months, and all we had to go on was conversation, so I should hope they were good. But I miss them. Since she's graduated from high school and left her parents' house, she's not had time to be online, especially since the house she was living in didn't have internet access for a while. I wrote her a pretty long facebook message that actually included much of this post and went to bed.

Tonight was our Casa's last hurrah. We went to Rudy's Pizzeria. I don't usually like flat crust pizza, but this was pretty good. I wish I'd been more talkative, that is, had more to say, but I'm just beat. I've never worked this hard for this long on a program. All the programs I did for classes I was able to do in my spare time, really. I certainly had to work hard on them, and when I procrastinated, I worked hard for a night to finish them, but that was never for several days straight.

This program has also taken a toll on my life in my room. Not like that. Get your mind out of the gutter. I mean, I haven't been able to work out at the gym with Gaul, or play Smash with my roommates, or watch 21 with Swood. I did get to watch Bleach with him today, but still. We used to talk a lot more. Leaving will be so weird.

Rosa and I have another dinner planned for the Friday of finals week. We should both be stress free on that day, so I'm looking forward to it. Hopefully I won't be having an off day like I did the last time we had dinner together. I am so determined to make things awkward. I just hate it.

Dreams are just dreams, but a few nights ago I dreamt that Rosa and I started dating and shared the best, simple, innocent peck on the lips. It was preceded by some witty banter. Basically it was the most pleasant situation I could imagine, I think. Honestly I don't read anything into that, but it was a nice memory I wanted to preserve. Now I just hope she doesn't read this post if it would result in more awkwardness. That'd be the one disadvantage to the public blog. Well, one of them.

I have again succeeded in staying up until 2:00. Again I have been stupid. Let us all congratulate me! Good night.