Here I am. At college.
Yay.
But seriously, it's good to be here, because so much of my preparation has been looking, yearning for this point. So of course I'm happy. I'm taking several interesting courses:
CS 221 Datastructures is probably the easiest, because it covers such complex things as "integers", "chars", and "arrays". I plan on having all my homework done a week early so I can work on the special project yet-to-be-determined that I'll be doing for the class.
EN 221 Medieval British Literature is the second most interesting for the moment. It covers exactly what it says, and it's loads of fun. And they have a newsgroup, which is really cool, especially because postings==points.
EN 231 Honors Humor, Irony, and Despair in Modern Literature is the most fun class. We're studying Kafka, Beckett, and Joyce, and so far, I am really enjoying Kafka. He thinks very logically, but at the same time he pokes fun at logic and all of the stupidity of reasoning through things, because at the end all you do is find more questions and confuse more people. It's fun to follow his reasonings as well at his Just Plain Fiction(tm) portions to see what he was thinking and enjoy the ride of logic and whimsy he gives you.
MA(something) Calculus 1 is going to be a challenge to me, because I as a computer scientist never did well at actually executing the algorithms. I can think quickly to determine what to do, but usually by the time I get to the end, I have either made a mistake or forgotten what the question was. Unfortunately, the latter bit me rather badly my only quiz this week. I had worked very hard on the homework, to make sure it was neat, pristine, and correct(the quiz is taken from homework), but I made a small mistake on one of the problems (and I misunderstood a term). When I went to do it on the quiz, I came to the point where I actually did do the math right, which confused me to no end. This problem compounded, because I spent all my checking time making sure that I wasn't just a plain idiot (which I turned out to partly be). I then didn't have a chance to check to make sure that my answers were in the right form on the other questions, so I ended out getting an 80%. Not a good start, if you consider that I really need to keep up a 3.75. Oh well, the past is the past. To take a line from my literature course, even begging for mercy from God Almighty can't undo the past. I'll just make sure I get at least 95% on all the rest of my math, and I'll be set :)
This weekend, I'm setting up a dual head SPARCstation, which will bring my dual head box count up to 2. (I set up my own box with dual head on Tuesday night). That actually was an interesting thing, since I was able to obtain a copy of Win ME (legally, thank God) and install VMWare(I really oughta register before 30 days is up). I now have a head with Windows in it (when needed), and I head with emacs on it. This makes for very nice coding if you have to use Visual C++ but you want to code in emacs.
Of course, I'm not there now, I'm here sitting at a Dell box running Windows (ugh!) using ssh (they have the port available in the firewall, hooray!) to edit my page live.
Another note. Tomorrow, August 31, I give a presentation on Graphics Design in Linux at the Lancaster Count Linux Users' Group meeting at the Lancaster Public Library in (go figure) Lancaster, PA. Drop all Labor day plans and go. And while you're at it, use the vacation money to buy me a Sony Vaio Picturebook, will you? It would really help the demonstration out a whole lot. Ohhkay, sorry, cancel two vacations to buy me the picture book. It's not my fault they made it expensive! I'm just giving a seminar here!
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