Saturday, April 14, 2007

Sleep GOOD! Coffee BAD!

What's on the agenda tonight:
  1. Go out to dinner with Ginny and Ben.
  2. Come home.
  3. Bed at around, oh, 7:30.
Yargh, Saturday afternoons in class are the worst. All homework is turned in, all the recent lack of sleep is catching up with me, creeping inexorably through the haze of Coke and coffee, and even information that may well prove critical on the final exam next month seems utterly useless and trivial at the moment.

Sandy, sitting in front of me, is browsing shoe sales online. So I'm not the only one who is using the internet to escape paying attention to detailed explanations of the syntax of RTCTL. I'll pick it up later in the lecture slides and future study groups, at least I hope I will.

Next month, worse than two months ago, I am responsible for TWO homeworks and TWO tests. The good news is that unlike two months ago, I have four weeks to prepare instead of three; the Requirements homework is meant to be easy, and the Real-Time Systems homework involves playing with a computer program, something I'm pretty good at.

I haven't been excited about my classes this semester, but I seem to be doing well in them based on a slew of returned assignments where I beat the class average. I may get some more A's under my belt. Next semester I'll be taking a summer topic on Web Server programming. There's something I should have learned a long time ago.

In other news, I spoke with Dr. Ghosh (my old data mining professor) today, and he likes my idea for a Master's Thesis. I will soon post an update to Operation: Help me with my thesis. I want to thank everybody who contributed ideas in the comments; your feedback was very valuable and helped me come up with the germ of a topic. It needs a lot of fleshing out still, but Ghosh is sufficiently interested to be my adviser, and he told me he'd put me in touch with some of his former students who work at Yahoo and know how to do the kind of text-spidering that I'm going to need to start doing in the coming few months. More details later. In any case, it can't hurt to have contacts at Yahoo, since this is a topic of interest to me.

Funny story about lunch today. We get an hour between classes for lunch time. A group of people decided to head for a new California Pizza Kitchen that had just opened. Well, that was a mistake. The place was packed and slow. We didn't manage to leave until ten minutes after class had started. We got our pizzas to go, but one person (not in my class) grabbed the bag and took all the pizzas. I met him during the first break, but it was after 2:00 before I got to enjoy my barbecue chicken pizza, at which point it was lukewarm. Still pretty good though.

Yawn. Still going to be a long two hours. Okay, Dr. Mok says that the rank of several nodes in this graph is infinity, because you rank it by the maximum path length and you have the option of going into an infinite loop. Yeah, whatever.

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