Ah deviantArt, how I have neglected you. It's really more than I've been neglecting writing in general, though not necessarily of my own intent. Recently I have found myself a writer of a different sort.

I am blissfully nearing the end of my undergraduate life, with only a meager four classes left to take before that degree is in my hand. Unfortunately these classes are among the hardest of my academic career and I have found my metaphoric plate overflowing with scholastic requirements. This means that recently the only things I have found myself writing have been in C, Java, and Python.

Of course, if you're the type that can see poetry among the lines of logic, you can always see what I've been up to on my (still poorly designed) website. Speaking of my website, that's yet another thing well deserving of my time and creative juices that has of late been left wanting. Well actually, it's always been in dire need of attention. At present it's really nothing more than a repository of information with no attention at all paid to design.

I have also recently uncovered a nice little gem of a table top RPG system: the Tri-Stat dX general purpose roleplaying system by Guardians of Order. I have been hard at work exploring the mind-boggling array of games possible with that system. Currently I'm brewing up a mini-campaign based on the MMORPG City of Heroes.

Now that I look at it, this whole journal appears to be just a list of excuses as to why I haven't been writing recently... and I suppose it is. I miss sitting down in front of a blank word processor and imprinting my thoughts on the digital canvas.

This all being said... I am going to be code monkey for at least the next week and a half. I have that long to design and implement the following:
* an efficient exponentiation algorithm for raising number to very large exponents. i.e. 3859387432^87432
* use the above along with the extended Euclidian algorithm to implement a fully functional RSA public key crypto system
* a benchmarking system for modes of operation of block ciphers, to quantify gains from parallelism in various modes
* a full simulation of the token-ring network protocol
* a software simulator for a multi-cycle instruction set architecture with pipelining... complete with my own custom assembly language for the architecture
* also my boss at work wants me to design a web-based trouble ticket system with authenticated login and a MySQL database backend.

So to sum it all up, I am currently a writer of a different sort. I hope to find the time in the next couple weeks to work on a short story or two, Wish me luck!