alexr_rwx | Mar. 27th, 2003

As this semester winds down (or rather, as everybody braces for meltdown), it's coming time to look hopefully towards the future, towards a time when we'll all be much better organized, stay on top of everything, live in a nicer room, get into the Really Interesting classes we've been meaning to take, and ...

*laughs* Well, anyway, I've been looking at the Fall course listings, and some interesting possibilities have popped up. My current working model of my schedule for fall involves:

CS4600: Intelligent Systems
This is the next step in my grand plan to get into CS4650 Natural Language. As of Right Now, I'm thinking of myself as moving towards an AI specialization, and the only prereq for this is Squeak (*blinks* ... ?), and this class is in LISP, and the lecture slides look to be PDFs instead of powerpoint (w00t!)... this is going to be my meat 'n' potatoes (so to speak) for the semester, the Big CS Class. Yay for getting into the Specialization classes!

CS4001: Computers and Society
It's required. Maybe I'll get into it. It might be interesting. No code, just discussion. To some extent, I've seen behind the curtain on this class, or at least its predecessor -- Jim H. (one of the ELC researchers) was trying to figure out how to better teach CS4000, and it became pretty apparent that they weren't exactly sure how to go about it. Of course, being a TA right now, I've realized that nobody's quite sure how to go about teaching anything, so...

SPAN4813: Intro to Spanish Translation
This looks really funky. I don't know the professor, but it'd probably be good to take a Spanish class from somebody other than Dra. Galloway, as much as I like her. My grand plans to translate San Manuel Bueno, Martir into the whitey tongue seem to have been pushed aside for the moment, but maybe this class will give me the training and inspiration to make it happen.

MATH3215: Probability and Statistics
Could be interesting. Also might be the very last math class I need to take, at least for this degree.

LCC3401: Technical Communication Practices
It's required. I haven't heard any nice news about this particular piece of pedagogy, but ... eh. I'd like to graduate eventually :)

So that's what I'm looking at, at the moment... and as I was juggling schedules with these particular classes, it occurred to me that all of them can be taken on Tuesday and Thursday, and this is a really fascinating possibility... it's just a matter of whether I could bear going to five classes in a day, if it means having five days of the week (!!) open for Other Stuff.

Today was pretty interesting... I got up at about 0800, after sleeping for an amazing two hours, and finished up the day's combinatorics assignment (mostly -- there was one thing I didn't quite figure out) -- this was the first one I'd made it through in a while, and it felt really good. So I did classes, tossed disc outside with Frank and Luke (Luke being one of my 2130 students -- we had about a half hour to play with before lab), ran the 2130 lab, and then came back and napped for a while, ate dinner whilst chatting with Vickie (who wasn't her normal high-intensity self today -- she's on painkillers after twisting her knee pretty badly, again), tossed disc with Marty, and then came in to work on stuff, chat with Esther, hang around with the guys (we've decided that we need to test pick-up lines in a controlled environment while wearing white lab coats), drink coffee, eat PB&J tortillas, work on this week's Practicum lab and an older 2130 lab for which a student wanted a solution... and then I'll probably pass out at some point.

Ah, and Esther's coming to visit in a few weeks, yay! :) :) ... she'll be gone pretty much for the whole summer, so it'll be good to get to see her before she flees the country...