"A little sunshine to begin with..."

I'm back in Atlanta :) It's a new semester at Tech. Terribly exciting...

Thus far, I think I've got some interesting classes lined up... it's really interesting how many different sorts of things fall under the category "computer science", because just today, I heard instructors talking about formal languages, usability and design, and process scheduling...

HCI, which I'm taking with Richard falun and Lisa pyrona and Dan, is one of the least testosterone-ful CS classes I've seen. The instructor Heather and the TA Gillian are both friendly young ladies, and the class is not entirely filled with male AI or Systems hackers out to prove something. (er, not that I'm not a male AI or systems hacker out to prove something, but...) Should be an interesting class...

Speaking of trying to prove something, Theory with Venkat is going to rock hard. Today, just as an introduction, he mapped a graph onto a connection matrix, then mapped that onto a string of bits, then asked "Okay, so how can we tell from the string of bits whether the matrix is connected?" ... and I was all like "holy crap". Formal languages seem really interesting (I've only been talking about them for two years now with 2130 -- time I get a good theoretical backing, eh?), and I've got Charles's voice echoing in my head, reminding me how cool computability theory is...

... and speaking of testosterone and systems programmers, Advanced OS should provide both of those. Although the instructor, whose name happens to be Ada (she seems to be from Macedonia), seems to have just skipped the continent... but, you know, whatever...

Also, we (Lisa and Dan and Marissa and I) hung out around the DDR machine and played frisbee, and I explained to a 2130 student from last semester why his answer to a problem on the final was wrong and he does, indeed, numerically get a B instead of an A.

And that's that! Sleep time :)

(oh yeah... and now my xterms are huge by default. terribly useful...)