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The last time this capsule was updated was about six weeks ago. That speaks to how things have been in my life lately I suppose. Anyway, time for an update.
I'm five weeks into the latest terrm at school, taking a database class and a research and persuasion course. The former at least has a lot of information that I didn't know and will likely use in the future, albeit boring. The latter class is strictly just a graduation requirement. I don't hate writing, obviously, or I wouldn't maintain this gemlog. I do hate taking a class that covers material I already know which is of no particular use to my purpose in going to college in the first place. It's funny to me, but my term paper is going to be on the subject of student debt, the ballooning cost of college tuition and how to fund 'free' college tuition. It's funny to me because one of the most obvious ways to get the cost down in my mind is to get rid of superfluous material and classes that people don't actually want or need. I've written as much in the first draft of my paper, too. We'll see how it's received.
School is still going well though, at least grade wise. I still have a 4.0 average overall, and both of my current courses are in line with that average. But I'm getting tired and burnt out. I have this tendency to feel like I'm failing because I know that the work I turned in could have been better, even though by the measure of my grades I'm probably on track to being valadictorian. So I have to keep reminding myself that things are OK.
Next term will be a bit of a break from school. I'll still be going, but I'm only taking one course. The reason - I'm getting married on Friday, September 13th. I'm definitely getting excited for that. We've been together for eight and a half years now but still haven't ever gone away anywhere just the two of us, so the honeymoon is something that I'm definitely really looking forward to. We'll be staying in a secluded little cottage in Northern Pennsylvania near Cherry Springs State Park, which is a dark preserve. Lots of stargazing, not a lot of people.
I did actually make a small open source contribution earlier today for the first time in a while. My 'zond' site generator (which builds this capsule) is written in Rust and depends the `gettext-rs` crate for translations. Well, this was problematic on FreeBSD as the crate would only link to the system libintl on Linux and Windows. On FreeBSD it tried to build gettext from scratch, which failed with newer versions of llvm. My PR adds support for linking against libintl from the Gettext package or port on FreeBSD, if installed. It's a small thing, but should be useful for others.
The next big thing after the wedding is going to be my solo moto-camping trip in October to Bridge Day in West Virginia. By way of explanation, the New River Gorge Bridge sits so high above the river below that it became a favorite spot for base jumping, the practice of skydiving off of a manmade structure. So many people did it every year that the state eventually just bowed to the inevitable rather than trying to stop them, and now the thrid Saturday in October is set aside every year for the Bridge Day festivities. The highway closes, along with access roads leading to the river below, and thousands of people come celebrate either as participants or spectators. You can walk across the bridge if you like. The jumpers take turns and compete on the outrageousness of their jumps, including a literal catapult and a scissor lift to get you up higher off the bridge (for that extra tenth of a second of free fall time). There's food trucks and T-Shirt stands, rapelling and bungee jumping. I'll be riding my motorcycle down on Friday morning and exploring the area the day before. I'll camp on Friday and Saturday nights, ride down to the water on Sunday morning and then back home. I'll be sure to put up a post about it here and include some photos of the craziness.
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