January 25, 2006
Midway Through the Week of Pain
Well, today was peachy.
Not to gripe too much, but, uh, here goes.
Ethics and the Information Age was miserable because the discussion was largely non-interesting and I decided that tea without breakfast first thing in the morning would be a good idea.
It was NOT a good idea.
I ended up grabbing some sort of nice tasting pastry between classes to absorb all the nasty acidic shit in my stomach that was making me feel bad.
Altogether, I still don't quite know how I feel about that class. First off, this whole "Philosophy class for engineers" thing is kinda weird. They try to fix problems in theories when they should just be analyzing, they fail to properly grasp the importance of a normative theory needing to be able to cover all cases, and a lot of the time they just fail to understand what the text is trying to say. The class started out promising, but now it looks like more effort than it's worth.
Communication Electronics went by pretty quick. The professor barely stops to take a breath through the one and a half hours, and my pen is moving pretty much the entire time. We turned in an assignment today (two problems) that me and a friend worked on for about five hours and still didn't finish. The nice thing is that today we finally moved into material that I'm more familiar with. All the previous stuff was filter and tuned circuit stuff I'd either forgotten or never knew, and signals and systems stuff I never learned well. We're finally gonna look at building multipliers using differential pairs it looks like, so maybe the class will stop being such an information overload.
Then, I ate at Espresso Roma with Shef, whee. They've got these grilled Pannini sandwiches that are pretty good. They seemed kinda small, but I think my perspective was a bit skewed by the being-incredibly-hungry thing. They have this turkey sandwich with jack cheese and sundried pesto sauce that was delicious. If only they gave more. And I got my sweet college of engineering sweatshirt back, booyah.
Verification of Digital Systems is a bore. Seriously. The class has been largely intuitive thus far, and I can usually predict what the prof is going to talk about next. Not to say I'm a genius or that the prof sucks or whatever; it's just that the material we've covered so far has been pretty simple and mostly just tedious rather than challenging. The first lab for that class is building yet another god damn processor, which wouldn't be so bad except that only the controller of the processor can be written in behavioral code; the rest has to be written in structural code. That is to say, when I want to add two vectors, I can't type "A<=B+C;", I have to use logic gates (AND, OR, NOR, etc.) or logic functions to build an adder and code the proper inputs and outputs to the proper nodes. Not fun.
Communications was interesting actually. In general, I kinda like lecture for that class since the prof is quite the speaker. He dispenses all sorts of interesting advice, things to think about, and random anecdotes that don't really relate and don't continue anywhere in particular. The most interesting thing he talked about was probably the idea of balance in relationships (friendships, SOs, etc.), how to cultivate and build upon a relationship, the uniqueness of a relationship between any two people, and basically a whole bunch of random shit about the nature of interactions between two people. I think some people might have written much of what he said as being intuitive, common sense, and largely empty of significant meaning, but for some reason the lecture struck some sort of chord with me. Anyway, this is probably the second most interesting class I have this quarter so far. Interesting quote of the lecture : "'So what's new with me?' you slow son of a bitch?"
After communications, I basically tutored for about..., four hours. It would have been longer except that one of my students bailed on me. I don't mind the tutoring so much since I do like my students, and I do get some recompensation for it, but four hours of tutoring after a full day of school is a bit tiring. I think I may have gotten a bit too curt with my geometry student. I mean, I'm not there to be nice to them or anything, but I think my tone of voice got a bit harsh towards the middle of our session. I guess I can't expect my students to remember every single thing I tell them throughout the course of the year, so I shouldn't get too frustrated. At the same time though, you'd think they'd retain information longer than until just after the midterm. Maybe I should teach better, sigh.
And now I'm home, preparing for the career fair tomorrow. I've got a list of companies I want to talk to first, I've got my resume fixed up to look real nice and pretty, and I'm attempting to prepare myself to be direct in trying to get what I want : mini-interviews and followup interviews.
And I finally got the Earthquake Glue album I ordered and it turns out it's not even the actual album. It's a promo album which should have the same songs, but, it's just not the same :-/. I should have read the auction a bit closer I guess.
So, as for happier things, I did get a sweet school of engineering sweatshirt. Lion dance performances are coming up. I am progressing in the broadsword set at a brisk pace. Conditioning is noticeably toning my body and a six-pack is poking its head out to play. Some more sweet CDs are coming to me in the near future. I'm probably going to pick out a new shortboard within the next five days and get back into skating again. The weekend should be adequately busy and fun, what with parties and celebrations and performances. The Japanese release date for Mother 3 has finally been announced. And as much as I appreciate an interesting, coherent story in books and movies, I really enjoy Kung Fu Hustle. It's such a ridiculous and awesome movie with things that just happen and are tied together plot-wise with style, spunk, and good intentions.
Not to gripe too much, but, uh, here goes.
Ethics and the Information Age was miserable because the discussion was largely non-interesting and I decided that tea without breakfast first thing in the morning would be a good idea.
It was NOT a good idea.
I ended up grabbing some sort of nice tasting pastry between classes to absorb all the nasty acidic shit in my stomach that was making me feel bad.
Altogether, I still don't quite know how I feel about that class. First off, this whole "Philosophy class for engineers" thing is kinda weird. They try to fix problems in theories when they should just be analyzing, they fail to properly grasp the importance of a normative theory needing to be able to cover all cases, and a lot of the time they just fail to understand what the text is trying to say. The class started out promising, but now it looks like more effort than it's worth.
Communication Electronics went by pretty quick. The professor barely stops to take a breath through the one and a half hours, and my pen is moving pretty much the entire time. We turned in an assignment today (two problems) that me and a friend worked on for about five hours and still didn't finish. The nice thing is that today we finally moved into material that I'm more familiar with. All the previous stuff was filter and tuned circuit stuff I'd either forgotten or never knew, and signals and systems stuff I never learned well. We're finally gonna look at building multipliers using differential pairs it looks like, so maybe the class will stop being such an information overload.
Then, I ate at Espresso Roma with Shef, whee. They've got these grilled Pannini sandwiches that are pretty good. They seemed kinda small, but I think my perspective was a bit skewed by the being-incredibly-hungry thing. They have this turkey sandwich with jack cheese and sundried pesto sauce that was delicious. If only they gave more. And I got my sweet college of engineering sweatshirt back, booyah.
Verification of Digital Systems is a bore. Seriously. The class has been largely intuitive thus far, and I can usually predict what the prof is going to talk about next. Not to say I'm a genius or that the prof sucks or whatever; it's just that the material we've covered so far has been pretty simple and mostly just tedious rather than challenging. The first lab for that class is building yet another god damn processor, which wouldn't be so bad except that only the controller of the processor can be written in behavioral code; the rest has to be written in structural code. That is to say, when I want to add two vectors, I can't type "A<=B+C;", I have to use logic gates (AND, OR, NOR, etc.) or logic functions to build an adder and code the proper inputs and outputs to the proper nodes. Not fun.
Communications was interesting actually. In general, I kinda like lecture for that class since the prof is quite the speaker. He dispenses all sorts of interesting advice, things to think about, and random anecdotes that don't really relate and don't continue anywhere in particular. The most interesting thing he talked about was probably the idea of balance in relationships (friendships, SOs, etc.), how to cultivate and build upon a relationship, the uniqueness of a relationship between any two people, and basically a whole bunch of random shit about the nature of interactions between two people. I think some people might have written much of what he said as being intuitive, common sense, and largely empty of significant meaning, but for some reason the lecture struck some sort of chord with me. Anyway, this is probably the second most interesting class I have this quarter so far. Interesting quote of the lecture : "'So what's new with me?' you slow son of a bitch?"
After communications, I basically tutored for about..., four hours. It would have been longer except that one of my students bailed on me. I don't mind the tutoring so much since I do like my students, and I do get some recompensation for it, but four hours of tutoring after a full day of school is a bit tiring. I think I may have gotten a bit too curt with my geometry student. I mean, I'm not there to be nice to them or anything, but I think my tone of voice got a bit harsh towards the middle of our session. I guess I can't expect my students to remember every single thing I tell them throughout the course of the year, so I shouldn't get too frustrated. At the same time though, you'd think they'd retain information longer than until just after the midterm. Maybe I should teach better, sigh.
And now I'm home, preparing for the career fair tomorrow. I've got a list of companies I want to talk to first, I've got my resume fixed up to look real nice and pretty, and I'm attempting to prepare myself to be direct in trying to get what I want : mini-interviews and followup interviews.
And I finally got the Earthquake Glue album I ordered and it turns out it's not even the actual album. It's a promo album which should have the same songs, but, it's just not the same :-/. I should have read the auction a bit closer I guess.
So, as for happier things, I did get a sweet school of engineering sweatshirt. Lion dance performances are coming up. I am progressing in the broadsword set at a brisk pace. Conditioning is noticeably toning my body and a six-pack is poking its head out to play. Some more sweet CDs are coming to me in the near future. I'm probably going to pick out a new shortboard within the next five days and get back into skating again. The weekend should be adequately busy and fun, what with parties and celebrations and performances. The Japanese release date for Mother 3 has finally been announced. And as much as I appreciate an interesting, coherent story in books and movies, I really enjoy Kung Fu Hustle. It's such a ridiculous and awesome movie with things that just happen and are tied together plot-wise with style, spunk, and good intentions.
# posted by Yann : 00:11
