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Today I went ice skating with a few Informatics students and other graduate students. It was a lot of fun. I wasn't sure if I would be able to do it since I haven't been inline skating in a while and the last time I had been ice skating was in high school. I started off a little shaky but was able to stay pretty stable and get up to an ok speed.

I did almost fall a few times. At one point I thought I was going to have to hold on to the guy who was skating next to me to regain my balance. I recovered even if it was a little graceless. Luckily he was someone I knew through another acquaintance so it wouldn't have been that weird.

They had to close the ice rink because so many people came out for ice skating. I am guessing since this was the last weekend before they close everyone decided to come out. I had invited a bunch of Informatics people to come out and some of them may have showed up only to find out that they were closed.

I am really late posting this but I am very happy for the 5 teams that were accepted into the CHI student design competition from IU. We know Michigan has 3 so that makes IU the dominate school in the competition. :)

I wasn't on one of the accepted teams but I am still going to San Jose, CA to support my classmates and to network. I am looking for internships now and will be looking for a job next year.

It should be a good time. I think we are all going to stay at the same hotel so we will be able to organize social activities while we are there.

I am probably going to take a few additional days in San Fransisco afterwards.

It seemed like everywhere I went today there were plastic buckets or plastic sheets to catch water leaking from the roof. It sort of reminded me of times after a hurricane. Often people would loose pieces of their roofs and have to put tarps on their roofs to keep the rain out.

Here it wasn't rain but melting snow on the flat roofs of the laundrymat and the mall. Many of the stores in the mall had tarps and buckets inside the store. Probably the worst was a jewelry store outside of Target. They had damage to the facade of the store and a tarp ramp leading to a huge gray rolling trash bin.

I went to the card store to pick up some cards for a few upcoming events and they had plastic tarps and buckets everywhere. I was surprised they were still open since water could quickly ruin most of their stock. They had some sections of cards covered so water wouldn't splash on them.

I talked to the lady working in the card store and she said there was a huge crack in the roof of the mall and when it went above freezing the accumulated snow started to melt and you know the rest of the story.

I could relate to the problem but in a different way since I usually associate problems like leaky roofs with hurricanes or really strong thunderstorms.

It is warming up a bit here today was in the 40s which compared to 10s and 20s is pretty nice weather. The snow is melting and will probably be gone soon and as long as it doesn't freeze at night and create ice patches things will be good.

If this doesn't get you a little concerned I don't know what would.

From a severe weather alert:
THE WEATHER TONIGHT AND MONDAY WILL BE SOME OF THE COLDEST HOOSIERS HAVE SEEN IN YEARS. BE AWARE THIS IS NOT JUST ANOTHER WINTER COLD SPELL.

Thankfully I don't have classes tomorrow so I don't really have to be out in the cold very much. Even if I did have classes I would either find someone to take me or not go to class.

The warmest feels like temperature is going to be 0 degrees. At 8 am it is going to feel like -12.

The rest of the week isn't expected to be that much warmer either.

This is another reason I am glad that my heat is included in my rent and is warm.

I just found this piece of software yesterday. It manages your power consumption on your Windows machine. It can be configured to shut off your monitor, spin down your disks and shutdown or hibernate after a certain period of inactivity. I shut my computer down once I am done using it so I have been getting the most benefit out of the disk spin down. My savings are not that great since I don't leave it on all of the time but if you are someone who does this software might help.

There is a slight lag when you need to access the disk drive but in the day I have been using it it hasn't been a real irritation.

You can also tell it not to shut down if certain applications are running or during certain times of the day.

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