I had my Master’s defense this morning, and I’m very glad it’s over. It went well, but one of my committee members was seriously making me nervous with all his very specific questions. I suck at theoretical stuff, and he asked questions like “did your tool produce 2ⁿ or n! pages?” and “can you give a proof why this language is not regular?”. The more I gave him “I dunno” answers, the more grim he looked. I was mentally kind of panicking, with thoughts along the lines of “does he hate my project? he must think I’m so dumb”. After they kicked me out in the hall and my advisor called me back in a few minutes later, though, the committee members were all smiles and congratulations. Pfhew. Now I just wait to receive my diploma in the mail this August (unorganized me didn’t submit the paperwork in time to get the degree this month).

I have a lot of packing to do before I visit my parents day after tomorrow. I’m bringing my Wii home for my parents and brother to play, since I rarely play on it anymore. My dad will love having access to World of Goo again, and my brother can finally beat Twilight Princess. I’m also going to bring my PS3 home because my dad’s part way through Dragon Age: Origins and I’d like to watch him play it further. Watching others play video games has always been a form of entertainment at my house, starting with the days of my brother playing Doom all the way up to my dad watching me beat Zelda. Now I’ve got my dad into some games, and it’s fun for me to watch him play. He’s very meticulous, exploring every nook and cranny, which works well in games like Dragon Age because he ends up talking to everyone and finding all the loot.

The Playstation Network being down has only been a slight problem for me. I’ve been busy with end-of-semester and end-of-graduate-school stuff, and I’ve watched more TV than played video games anyway. The only real problem has been with Netflix. I know some people said they could access Netflix by letting it attempt to authenticate with PSN twice, then it lets them in, but that didn’t work for me. It does that, shows a list of programs, and then when I try to play a show, it prompts me for a login again. No matter what I do, it always asks me for a login, which fails of course since PSN is down. I’ve been watching Grey’s Anatomy on my iPad, which actually works pretty well. I can get all comfortable and sluggified in bed with the iPad on my lap, or sprawled on the couch with it ten inches from my face. The short distance really means the smaller screen size isn’t a problem. The picture is nice and crisp too, except when the signal quality randomly and mysteriously degrades, causing me to exit Netflix and pop back in to fix it.