off by one for 2006 October 31 (entry 0)

(1) Tue Oct 31 16:26:45 PST update:

Well, hi there. Long time no post.

School is great, but I'm very busy. Apparently I've developed a serious kind of perfectionism since I was last in school full-time, because I've been kicking my own butt trying to absorb and produce as much as possible in the last few weeks. I really want to learn this stuff, and do well.

My schedule is pretty cool -- I'm taking a course in Programming Languages, where we will do projects in OCaml, Java, Scheme, Python, Ruby, and Prolog, and an Intro to AI course which involves Lisp and a bunch of theory stuff. Then I'm in a TA Training Seminar which is great and involves Adam Kaplan of the Leonardsphere. That's pretty cool too. I did a presentation on the card game SET because I think that two things that any geek ought to do at least once in their life is play a few games of SET and write a few simple programs in Lisp. The presentation went OK, but frankly, it is intimidating to be in a classroom packed with full-on brainiacs and my Music degree does put me at a certain academic disadvantage to most of them (and a huge rock and roll advantage, so, when the Battle of the Nerd Bands happens, my team will win! Runner up! At least!)

I'm also in the standard grad student seminar, where we go to presentations and write summaries of them. The shine of being in a community of brilliant people hasn't worn off yet, so I really enjoy that kind of stuff.

I was also in a Complexity and Automata class, but I dropped that because my schedule was just too full, which is great considering what happened this week.

I got behind because of a wedding in Chicago last weekend, which put all my homework off. When I got back, I busted my butt to finish an assignment for Programming Languages, but after spending a few days willingly losing points (2^n per n days late), I finally solved the problem, only to realize that I had been spending all this time solving a related, but not quite the same problem. Oh well. Turn it in and move on, because the next assignment is crazy complicated, or sounds that way, anyway.

Comments:

Posted by pedro at Tue Oct 31 18:29:10

So, I wrote this entry a week ago but apparently didn't post it. Whoops.

Not much has changed, and I'm actually busier, somehow. But it's all good and I feel like I'm learning a ton.

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