To everyone of 2006

To my psychology professor from the Spring: I didn't go to your class for the entire part of the second exam, and I consequently bombed it. I got A's on the other, so how could I have bombed the final enough to not get an A? :/

To my calc-3D professor from the Spring: I NEVER went to your class. Thank you for your A and proving that I am just the fucking shit, obviously.
To the Kiltie Band: The most offensive thing we do is not play too loudly. It's we don't play in fucking time. Why is that acceptable to you people godammit?

To Carolina Crown, and specifically Matt Harloff: Thanks for giving me a chance so late in the process when other corps and caption heads dumped me off. After that April camp, I really thought I wasn't cut out to do drum corps. Thanks for taking me on board and thanks for the summer of a lifetime. Sorry I'm missing '07, but I'm proud to age-out with Crown in 2008.

To the judging community of 2006: Read my LJ, but in a nutshell, watch Finals Retreat on the DVD and tell me you didn’t make a mistake.

To the School of Computer Science: Thank you for realizing that getting certain scores on AP exams means that at some point you knew enough about the particular subject to pass a relevant course, not unlike having an A on your transcript for that course 4 years after the fact. As a result, I have 6 semesters of credit, and with my Discrete Math placement exam credit, I’m leaving your school a year early. Thanks for valuing training and putting people into the work force and academia above money and ego like some other universities.

To the Carolina Panthers: How could you keep 1-15-as-a-starter Chris Weinke on your roster?

That’s all I got. I left of a lot of stuff, so read my LJ for more really soon.

What needs to go right for the Carolina Panthers?

Before this week, I thought Carolina's season was over. Sitting at 6-8, on a four-game skid and with Chris Weinke at the helm, I really thought it should have been over. But god bless the NFC: an 8-8 team is going to get in, and Carolina is currently 7-8, along with St. Louis, Atlanta, New York, and Green Bay (of all teams). So who to root for in the last week?

Carolina at New Orleans - Saints have locked the #2 seed, good for us.
St. Louis at Minnesota - Minnesota is out of contention.
Atlanta at Philadelphia - Philly is playing for the division, good for us.
New York at Washington (Sat.) - Washington is out of contention.
Green Bay at Chicago - Chicago has locked the #1 seed, bad for us.

And straight from NFL.com:

Carolina can clinch playoff berth with:

1) CAR win + NYG loss or tie + GB loss or tie, OR
2) CAR tie + NYG loss + GB loss + STL loss or tie + ATL loss or tie

Go Washington. Go Chicago (please?) It turns out the other two games are not relevant unless Carolina ties...

Back in the RDU

I'm back in Raleigh. I've been replaying Final Fantasy IX since I've been home, and currently I have about 13 hours on it (bush league, I know). My grades are indeed final. Interesting to note that my worst semester was the semester I took the least amount of units... maybe I'm better under pressure or when my back's against the wall?

My brother went to Crown camp, he's still on purple team, but they told him he can move well enough to be in the hornline as long as he can get his playing up to snuff. Hooray for him.

The end is here

Grades are trickling in:
15-212 - A
15-393 - A (would have been really upset if it weren't)
15-354 - A (hardest class ever)
15-113 - A (knew this one)
73-100 - A (survived that final)
36-225 - still waiting, it will be an A if it's my final is at least a 76, and the average right now is 83 (for whatever reason my grade has not been entered yet), so I feel good about having survived this semester...

Care to elaborate?

My first exam this week was 212. I studied about half the time that I allotted for it, concentrating the material that I missed in the second half of the semester when I stopped going to class, and making sure I was familiar with all the different styles that were introduced. Luckily for me, there was nothing on factoradic representation of numbers or sieving, but one question did ask us to write topological sort (an entire lecture was spent proving it!). The answers are definitely supposed to be short and the proofs rigorous, and if mine weren't, I knew I did something wrong. My time management was excellent: 100 points to 180 minutes means 10 points = 1 question to 18 minutes, so don't spend more than 18 minutes on a problem until you've gone through the exam! I know so many people that get dominated on exams by getting stuck on a problem halfway through the test and not getting more than 50 as a result. Gotta play the game! A 100 would not shock me, but less than an 85 would.

I actually overslept for my next exam (Music Systems Wed. 10am) because my alarm on my phone absolute failed me! (My roommate confirmed that he didn't hear it go off either.) I woke up at 11:30am and go "Uhhhh shit". I missed the exam, but we still had a laptop orchestra performance we had to prepare for. After two hours of hacking away at my scheduler/arpeggiator code, I gave up and implemented a simple random arpeggiator code into someone else's scheduler/client and went with it. It ended up actually sounding good, luckily the person who wrote the client I used really knew the protocols and our "techno" style sounded pretty good. I'll post recordings from our bboard.

I just finished my Computational Discrete Math take-home final. I got it early, so I can't say much about it, except that I don't think I need to do awesome on it to get an A in this course. Man, probably the most difficult class in terms of material and actual homework difficulty. I went to pretty much every lecture, but I might as well not have since Klaus just snowplows material like crazy. Supposedly, we did not get enough background from 251...

Today I will make up my Music Systems exam, and start studying for Econ and Stats. Econ I probably will not prepare for a whole lot besides getting my notes together and reviewing each experiment. Stats, I think I need a 78 for an A, which should be nothing if the difficulty of the final is the same as the midterms. After than, my third semester of six will be complete.

In hindsight, I wish there were a way I could balance homework time, earning money time, free time, and class time. Earning money time and class time seemed to suffer the most, but I think earning money time will be made up over break as I die of boredom and coding-withdrawal. I really wish I could make time for class time, but the classes I don't go to were just so damn boring and I still rocked the homework and did well enough of the exams! All that bullshit about grades being correlated to attendance is ridiculous; you can't tell me that I should have gone to those classes. If you're good at picking up math, aka you can learn it from a book, don't go to math. If you can learn programming from a book, don't go to programming. On the other hand, I would not have been able to learn economics from a book, or even C from a book (ugh, I will hate 213), so that's why I went to those classes.

Sleep time also began to get weird: beginning of the semester I thought I was particularly good at getting away with 6 hours of sleep and still getting up pleasantly to my alarm. I got awful into the second half to the point where I couldn't get up before 11am. Toward finals week I tried a new way of getting up (setting my phone alarm and putting it on my dresser such that I'd have to get out of bed to turn it off), plus I started consuming caffeine again. I don't need caffeine for the rest of the semester, but I need to figure out my sleep in general.

So I suppose here are my "resolutions" for next semester:
- waste less time (less time wasted = more free time and more sleep time)
- go to class (I think it's a good idea to have professors know you in order to become a TA for better classes and get recommendations later on.)
- be more active (I think I've gained back all my drum corps weight and I'm not too thrilled about it. I'd like to go nuts over my four-week break and lose about half of what I've gained back, and not by diet either: I ate whatever and however much I wanted on tour and still lost weight, bitch.)

I feel next semester will be even more demanding than this semester. It surprised me how demanding taking five classes in a semester actually is! And my dad got pissed when I told him I was only taking four last semester...

Crown camp this weekend, I'm not going 'cause I'm not marching. Crown banquet this weekend, I'm not going because I have exams on Monday and I can't afford to fly down just for this, especially so close to when I'd be done anyway.

I'll have more on LJ later...

Carnegie Mellon Univeristy

I'd like to think that my friends may have taken as long to catch my error as I did, but I just noticed that the signature that I append to all my outgoing mail had an atrocious spelling error. Considering that this goes on email I send to professors and potential employers, I'm not really thrilled about the fact that this went under my nose for about four months.

Consider myself halfway through exams. I'm finishing up a take-home that I don't think I have to do that great on. 212 is long in the bag. Tomorrow I'm taking an exam I actually overslept for on Reading Day. I then have Stats and Econ back-to-back on Monday to finish off the semester and then party time 'til I'm back in Raleigh on Wednesday.

Hope everyone has fun (and has good auditions!) at the Crown camp & the banquet.

Salvaged

The 113 exam was easy, lucky for me I reviewed and figured out how to do the practice problem I was stuck on this morning. Whew. I have salvaged my grade in that class, and I probably won't have to do the extra credit hw due tomorrow (or just do a half-ass job on it just in case).

Stats, 212, 393 to finish the last hell-week of the year.

Tchaik FTW

I just finished my last Computational Discrete Math ever. Guess what comes on WCPE right when I finish? Tchaikovsky's Fourth, yeah baby. How are these related? Maybe because CDM has been about nothing but despair in being unable to grasp abstract concepts like groups, rings, finite fields, Turing machines, etc. It's fate that I will not understand this shit, sometimes I think I will, but actually not.

WHY has no one ever tried to field this show in drum corps or marching band? I know Hunter had talked about it a little when I was there. At least the finale, I think that would make a great closer.

What's left:
15-113 programming exam Thursday - I am actually nervous about this, aka I might fail and have to drop!
15-393 better be done Thursday night
36-225 hw due Friday
15-212 prog due Friday night
15-113 prog due Friday night
15-212 exam Monday to kick of Finals week.

As they say, BUSH LEAGUE.

An actual update

I got offer a second interview with Microsoft for an internship as a software engineer. I put my first preference as the Raleigh campus, the team there is working on Visual Studio, I think my work would be with Visual Basic. I'm not sure if that would entail me flying down to Raleigh or if I would still interview in Redmond, but it'd definitely be cool to stay at home, or even get my own free apartment and car yet still be in town.

In other news, I don't think I will be sleeping in the next 48 hours. Caffeine and I are now in a long-term relationship.

College hoops: Of course this makes sense

Looking at the latest polls for college basketball, I'm trying to figure out why people can presume Pitt is better than North Carolina. Look at who Pitt has played, NO ONE. What about UNC? We lost to then ranked Gonzaga (who lost to Butler who seems to be pretty good), and we beat ranked Tennessee, then NUMBER ONE Ohio State, and Kentucky. Obviously, Pitt should be ahead of us. Duh.

To be fair, I have not seen Pittsburgh play. Maybe when Pitt goes on the road and beats Wisconsin and Oklahoma State, we can talk. Unfortunately for me, I will not be watching much college basketball until after finals. Boooooo college.