I am returned. So my brain got all squidgey, but now it is back to
normal. It is amazing what twelve hours of sleep and a shower can
do. Actually I should back up a little bit. Yesterday I finished my
project. This was a good thing, because it was due then. I am somewhat
disappointed in the final result. It is working. I am not concerned
about getting a bad grade, but it is just not my best work. I suppose
I should not be too hard on myself. I had to relearn java (not hard)
and pick up the JDBC and Swing APIs (harder) very quickly. The grand
total was circa 3000 lines of code. The swing API did some unexpected
things. I think if I had known about them in the beginning I would
have designed differently and had considerably less code.
After I finished the project Rick mentioned that there was a Google talk that evening. I didn't want to sleep until after the sun went down (that always does something bad to my circadian rhythm), so I figured that after the 17:00 turnin I would head over to the talk. I did make Rick promise that the talk would not be about "Google Page Rank" though. I think that is well understood now, and they have only sent about a billion speakers to talk about it over the years. It was an interesting talk. I got a T-shirt, a black one this time.
As mentioned above, I got lotsa sleep and a shower and felt 1000% better. I went on to campus, had lunch, printed all the notes from CS541 this semester, read them, and took the midterm. I was mildly upset because I asked him before the exam if we should pace ourselves for a time sensitive exam, and he said no. None the less only one or two people had left when he called time. I only failed to answer one question as a result of this, and I feel better about this exam than I have felt about a lot of exams so I am not too upset. I will give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume it was an honest mistake. Then again perhaps his statement at the beginning of the two hours caused us all to go more slowly and thus drew out the test. Heisenberg at work. You cannot publicly guess at the length of an exam without altering the length of the exam.
After I finished the project Rick mentioned that there was a Google talk that evening. I didn't want to sleep until after the sun went down (that always does something bad to my circadian rhythm), so I figured that after the 17:00 turnin I would head over to the talk. I did make Rick promise that the talk would not be about "Google Page Rank" though. I think that is well understood now, and they have only sent about a billion speakers to talk about it over the years. It was an interesting talk. I got a T-shirt, a black one this time.
As mentioned above, I got lotsa sleep and a shower and felt 1000% better. I went on to campus, had lunch, printed all the notes from CS541 this semester, read them, and took the midterm. I was mildly upset because I asked him before the exam if we should pace ourselves for a time sensitive exam, and he said no. None the less only one or two people had left when he called time. I only failed to answer one question as a result of this, and I feel better about this exam than I have felt about a lot of exams so I am not too upset. I will give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume it was an honest mistake. Then again perhaps his statement at the beginning of the two hours caused us all to go more slowly and thus drew out the test. Heisenberg at work. You cannot publicly guess at the length of an exam without altering the length of the exam.