Friday, May 12, 2006

Last weekend of class

I'm sitting in my Data Mining class now. My first semester will be over tomorrow. What a relief.

This month, and especially this week, have been very rough on me, and I think even rougher on Ginny and Ben. I've been either working continuously or meeting with somebody every night. Ben hardly sees me, and when he does try to get me to play with him, I usually have to shoo him away because I'm so busy. Ginny says he's been unusually unruly during the day, and she thinks it's because he's stressed too.

At 10:00 I'll be going up in front of the class with my partner, Chip, to do a ten minute presentation on a published paper (not ours) about gathering marketing information from blogs and message boards. This afternoon, I will be in a group of four presenting a system that we wrote to translate logic puzzles into visual solutions. The program parses natural language and then shows what categories it puts people in. Then tomorrow, back in Data Mining, I'll be showing our data on how gun laws affect crime rates. That paper is 14 pages. I'll probably put both papers up on my web page sometime soon.

So anyway, I worked my ass off this month, and I'm ready to take a big break. I still have to go to work, of course, but just working is a piece of cake compared to working in the day AND doing class work at night.

We're planning to go to Sea World soon. No responsibilities until my next class starts in a month. A very welcome change.