Wednesday, September 5, 2001

After a full sixty minutes at work this morning, I headed up to GMU to take the GRE, in preparation for my attempt at getting a Master’s degree. It went pretty well; I scored above the average all around.

One of the odder aspects to the test — besides the stupidly-constructed testing desks and the extreme attention to security — was the fact that, though the computer immediately displayed an approximate score at the end of the test, the results will go back to official GRE center, where it’ll sit for six to eight weeks before being delivered back to GMU. Now, granted, the exact score calculation may be non-trivial due to changes in questions based on your progress, but is it really impossible to compute those scores on the desktop computer I used? We’re talking straight numerical calculations here. Surely a Pentium-class computer can do those calculations within a reasonable time frame.

And do they dump all those test scores onto an 8088 when it gets to the GRE center? Six to eight weeks? MapQuest can tell me exactly how to drive from here to Seattle in six to eight seconds, complete with distance and timing measurements.

In any event, I then drove home in the midst of a glorious 78-degree, cloudless day. My niece is still here, so after I puttered around on my computers, we had dinner out on my deck. I then had another long conversation with Saalon, before climbing into bed.

In other news, I’m currently very low on available cash, but I recently stumbled on a whole bunch of — and I still can’t believe I stumbled on them — NieA Under 7 hand-painted backgrounds being sold on Anime Taro. Backgrounds are always anonymous; dealers just dump them all into one big pile and let people buy them for $5 to $10 apiece. So, you may find a Tenchi Muyo! background next to a Macross Plus background next to a Kodomo no Omache background. Who knows. These are definitely from NieA_7, though, so I’m going to have to grab as many as possible. And, at USD $8 apiece, that’s going to add up quickly.