And the sky is blue.

This is no small accomplishment for Massachusetts. Since Saturday afternoon, it has been raining. It finally stopped this morning around 11. Seriously, it has been constantly raining. It has been cool and dark. It's been depressing.

I find that I am much more awake and have more energy when the sun is out. I'm thrilled to have the sun out again.

Also: we now get free Starbucks coffee at work!

So yeah, I haven't updated in a while. This seems to be a recurring theme on my blog.

My spring quarter at RIT was rough. I had a full course load with plenty of work, a part-time job, and made hours at two ambulance agencies. I spread myself pretty thin, but I somehow survived. I managed to make it home for a few days at the end of the quarter, then I drove straight from Staunton to Marlborough, Mass. The trip qualified as my second time driving in Manhattan, as I took I-95 over the George Washington Bridge and through the Bronx. On June 1, I had my first day back at Intel Massachusetts. I'm back at the same facility as last year, but with a different title: I'm working in the yield analysis / device group, which I personally believe is a step up over my job last year as a process engineer. It's fairly tough to compare the two positions, though, as they are entirely different beasts. That's exactly how it should be. I'm very fortunate to be able to pull off two entirely different experiences for co-op, particularly given the job market right now.

This year I'm staying in downtown Marlborough. I'm on the 4th floor of a very old 4 story building. It apparently used to be a factory that was converted to an apartment building in the mid 1900s, with the ground floor being retail space. The building is super old and fairly interesting... some of our floors are slanted and our 3 bedroom apartment has 17, that's one - seven, doorways. The landlord rents the building out to interns only, so everyone in the building is about my age, and most of them also work at Intel. I've got two roommates who are also both 21 and work at Intel. The people here are great, and my first two weeks here have included more social events than my entire 6 month tenure last time around, so I'm thrilled about the arrangements.

Living downtown has its ups and downs. We are close to everything, including Intel, which is great. I've got great views out of my apartment. There are plenty of eateries within walking distance. But there is a fire house and ambulance base nearby, so we get more than a fair share of sirens, particularly since our neighbor is the senior center.

I'll leave it at that for now. I stopped blogging because I simply didn't have the time to write anything, but now that I'm back on co-op I will hopefully re-program myself to do the occasional update. Send me a nasty email if I don't. Also remember to leave comments!

There was a nice article about RIT Hockey that appeared on NHL.com this morning. Check it out here.

NHL.com regularly runs articles about NCAA hockey teams, and RIT has been mentioned before, but this is the first time I've seen an article headlined by the tigers.

The Winter quarter is over. At long last.

It was a rough quarter for me. I took 5 classes, several of which were pretty challenging. I also was fairly active in EMS and overly active in the NHL and AHA. I had 5 final exams, which concluded on Wednesday evening, and they all seemed to turn out okay. My grades are slowly pouring in and there are no surprises.

I need to take a minute and curse Rochester weather. I hadn't been skiing all season because I've been so busy. So I look forward to Thursday, the day after my finals and the only day without hockey, to go skiing. This Winter has been frigid, and finals week was typical winter weather... until Wednesday. From Wednesday through Friday we had unseasonably warm weather, with temperatures above 45 and drizzle. So the ski conditions on Thursday were "wet granular." Screw you, Rochester. Yesterday it was 52 degrees and sunny... by 10 PM it was 22 degrees and snowing. Today it's 13 degrees and there are a couple of inches of snow on the ground. It's going to be below freezing all of next week, too.

So why am I still at RIT instead of home? The final two hockey games of the regular season are at the Ritter this weekend vs. Air Force. Air Force is the outlier in our conference... they're in Colorado. Thanks to the distance, they play the first half of their season out west, then come out east for the second half of their season. They dominated at home. They were undefeated until RIT managed to beat them in overtime, and were in 1st place in the conference by far. When they came out east... that started to change. Coinciding with that, RIT managed to erase it's rocky start and have insane winning streaks. So as of Friday morning, RIT and Air Force had identical records in the conference and were tied for first. So whoever wins the weekend series is the conference champion. So yeah, big games.

And last night's game was a thriller. Here is the USCHO recap. Despite some truly horrid officiating, even by Atlantic Hockey standards, RIT really seemed to outplay Air Force and came out winning 6-4 in front of a sellout crowd. This means that RIT Is at least guaranteed a tie for 1st place. If RIT wins or ties tonight, we are the undisputed champions, else we share the championship with Air Force.

I'll be in Virginia next week.

I walked around in jeans and a t-shirt yesterday. In Rochester. In February.

As with most of the country, it has been unseasonably warm this week in Rochester. It got up in the 50s yesterday, and has been in the 40s all week. This is all in contrast to a particularly harsh winter: mid 20s has been considered warm, 6" of snow has been considered light, and 20 MPH winds has been considered a light breeze.

The amazing thing about this: all of the snow hasn't melted. We had that much on the ground. Also, the snow plows tend to pile up snow from parking lots in one or two areas, leading to 15+ foot mounts of snow, and those are still at least 5-10 feet high.

The bad thing about this: a lot of the snow has melted. This means lots and lots of water on the ground. And many of these nights have been below freezing... so there has been a ton of black ice. I was on ambulance duty Monday night, and our radio picks up all of the fire/EMS events in the county, and man were there a ton of car accidents.

Things will be returning to normal tomorrow, where the high is a still warm 32.

Okay, so it's been a while since my last real update. Let me attempt to explain.

The RIT quarter system is brutal. I'm taking 5 courses with 1 lab, which is 17 hours in a classroom per week and 60-80 outside of the classroom. I love the quarter system though... in a year I feel like I learn much more than any semester-based student. But it is definitely an intense 11 weeks. This is Week 9 of the quarter, so I've got two more weeks of instruction before finals.

Hockey season is in full force. I attend all RIT home men's hockey games and am starting to attend the women's games as well. If the games are home, there are always two games, Friday and Saturday night. On top of this, I rabidly follow the Washington Capitals which have an 82 game regular season, meaning there are 3 to 4 games per week, and thanks to my addiction to Center Ice Online, I get to watch them all. Each hockey game lasts a good 2.5 hours (actual clock time: 60 minutes of play, 30 minutes of intermission), with an extra hour to RIT games due to getting to the arena early.

I volunteer at two EMS agencies, each of which require a 12 hour per month commitment. The shifts I take tend to be on weekdays from 6 PM to 11 PM or overnight from 11 PM to 7 AM. If it's a quiet shift, I can get schoolwork done. If not, I'm usually sleep and work deprived.

I also work part time in the RIT clean-room fabricating RF devices for a small company.

So add all of that up, and I don't have any free time. You might argue that I'm choosing to spend my free time on hockey, but that is incorrect: hockey is a necessity. I apologize for the lack of updates. There has been plenty of stuff I've wanted to write about but just haven't had the time.

Over the next few weeks I'll be writing papers and lab reports, finishing outstanding problem sets, studying like crazy, riding ambulances, watching hockey, and probably going insane. But that's okay. Believe it or not, I am enjoying my college life. I'll try and post some more things as they happen.

How was your holiday? What did you get for Christmas?

My web hosting company got a late Christmas from a Palestinian hacking group. They think that the recent violence in Gaza is out of control, and they apparently think that taking down my website is a good way to get attention. If you visited my site this morning, you were redirected to a anti-Israel website, all in arabic.

Mission accomplished, terrorists. Instead of attacking the Israelis, US Government, or even news outlets, you attacked GMcP.net and several hundred other sites as a prime way to get attention. To further add to your success, none of my site visitors understand what the site you redirected to said.

All you've done is provide me with a funny story and more fuel to the argument that you guys are a bunch of idiots. Though I'm sure you're thinking right now that my site's demographic is now lining up to stick it to the Zionists.

All of my site services are slowly coming back up. I apologize to anyone who was mis-directed. And thank you, Host Dime, for keeping backups.

Update: For those of you interested, it appears the name servers were attacked, not the actual websites. That means had you typed in the IP address for my website, everything would have worked fine, but if you typed in my domain name, you were re-directed to the anti-Israel/anti-USA page. The attack affected Enom servers, meaning thousands of pages were affected. All services are now go. A big thanks to Host Dime support for getting everything back up!