well today was another day. I continued with my reading of griffith's introduction to electrodynamics (but I haven't yet gotten to brian's favorite chapter, chapter 7). I think it will help a lot. although this evening while we were doing problems, it seemed to make absolutely no difference (although I will say that the problems I was working on were on a totally different topic in e&m than the stuff I went over. so of course it didn't help. *sigh*).

and here's an interesting article on cnn about how being a geek is now cool. or something like that. thanks gregg.