jmoiron.net

Today's return to classes ushered in a return to normalcy, but what's more, I feel like I have actual content to my life once again. This is a good thing.

Consider the situation. Its 6:00 AM, and I wake up prior to my alarm clock. Life is good. I get out of bed and promptly write a rather detailed Lite-ON LTR-2410B review, which will be up shortly; and for all intents and purposes, is up now, since nobody will be reading this til well after I have time to format it and get it online. After I'm done with my review, the first real content that I promised myself I'd make back in February, I walk on down the hall to the doors (did anyone catch that one?) of room 5, of which there really are only 1.

And lucky day, everyone's awake. So I go and chill and talk about this and that, and we head off 9:30 microprocessors (CS 390) a half an hour early to make a stop at the bank and hit hoboken hot bagels. My cream cheese bagel has enough cream cheese on it to cream cheese both wei's bagel and jeremy's bagel stick, and the situation is quite comical leading all the way to Edwin A Stevens, 222. Tewks fires off some nice commentary on how we go to this school to cheat and students should have lighter course loads and stuff, and all of a sudden I get the mistaken thought that this semester might be good. Upperclassman life is good.

Then the Chinese bomb drops like a cannon to the dome piece. Contrary to the low and raspy voice (courtesy: jeremy) of Steward Tewksbury, Loly Liu's soft gentle voice doesn't reverberate air much past her nose. This is a problem in the 5th row. But at least all of the usual suspects are there. There's mac guy, playing his cheesy mac clones of games that are really old. "But this one has network play and advanced features.." but its still arkanoid. There's the bad boys of CS in the front; and then the badder boy's of CS right ahead of me. Jared, Jason, and the usual company are there. Dom, Pranay, and Tim walk in late much to my surprise. McGreggor and E. Lee, keepin it real. Then theres mac guy number 2, Carlos, who had his swivel for his new mac notebook.

As I looked around the room, and around some Asian girl's personal space in particular, everything seemed as though it was back to normal. All of the people were there, and I felt at peace. So it wasn't so bad after all that Tewks left us, abandoned to the whims of a voice so soft that breathing interrupted your ear's reception.

The next class, 0 minutes after the previous, was slightly better for me. Instead of Motorola Assembly, Operating Systems (CS 492) is going to feature coding that is basically entirely in C. Because of my summer exploits; The Unnamed Asian and I learning C and getting lots of practice in a modular, pure C environment, I felt very good that I was going to get even more practice during the semester. A big concern of mine was that I wasn't going to have ample time to practice my C and learn whatever languages that I needed to in class. But there was none of that, and I remained at peace.

After our comprehensive lesson on the inner workings of a hard disk, which unfortunately I was already fairly well acquainted with, I had a faux (word up J) 45 minute break which basically let me get an oatmeal cookie and a call in to cysco food's. After that, it was off to Elli Angelopoulou's interactive computer graphics class, which will also be a big on the C coding. I was happy, very happy. It seems like I'll be able to do 3d graphics in Open GL sans texturing, but with curved surfaces by the end of this semester. If i learn a lot from this class, I will definitely take the more advanced class, which will hopefully offer some frame buffer tricks to get transparencies and the like. So life was good. Then came the Irish.

Duggan is a great guy; I mean, he knows his stuff. He really does. And he's quick to the profanity, which I've always considered to be a characteristic of great strength and confidence; If you don't care that you sound debase, then you probably really know what's going on. However, the course will be entirely in scheme and java. This is bad. Peace was broken.

We'll see how this all pans out as the semester rolls on. Right now I'm happy that for the first 2 weeks, I'll have only 2 days of class a week. However, these days are going to be real killers. I can't really imagine having to go to AI in 30 minutes, but this nightmare will be a reality on thursday. If the class is canceled, god forbid, I'll be down to 13 CS credits, which is far below the norm, and probably be forced to take some night class or something. It'd be funny If I tried Compilers, Computer Graphics, Programming Languages, Operating systems and Microprocessors at the same time. Good god, it almost makes me shudder. JING(DJ) out.