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So it’s been pretty close to a month since I updated.  Pretty poor effort on my part I suppose.  I haven’t been playing much Gears of War… which as my wife will tell you, is a pretty clear indicator as to how much free time I have.  There’s a lot of random stuff I want to say so I’ll just bullet point it all.

• Went to NY
  • The Central Park Zoo is pretty cool
  • Polar bears are awesome, this one was doing laps and scratching his back on the wall
  • The Waldorf=Astoria is nice, but not nice enough to justify the price.. there was a big model competition while I was there.  I’ve never seen so much luggage in all my life.  I now wish I had taken a picture, it was unreal.
  • A lot of walking around town, which was fun
• Finished semester last week
• Got a 3.9! Whee!
• Thoughts on the semester….
  • Operating Systems course was weak.  The professor had a distributed systems background, but was pretty light on OS knowledge.  However, the book was great.. reminder to self.. read the book in free time
  • Interactive Graphics was a lot of fun and a great learning experience..  The projects were very time consuming, it can be difficult to debug 3D programs.  Teacher provided most of the notes, which I like.. lets me focus on the lecture.
  • Comparative Programming Languages .. everyone was lost!  We got hung up on the implementation details of ML for a few weeks.  The course isn’t in depth enough that I could write my own compiler.. it’s also too in depth to be useful day to day.  The university should probably just ditch this and offer a course that provides a simple overview of language features along with an optional course in compilers.
  • Functional Programming was a really enlightening course.  It felt great to think about programs in a different way.  Everything recursive ends up being so elegant in a functional language.  Definitely going to keep my feet in the functional pool.
  • Statistics 2 .. it was statistics.. 🙂
• Taking the summer off of school
• Landed an internship
  • Only been there a week, but definitely having fun
  • So far, writing some simple JavaScript

Speaking of JavaScript, there’s a fantastic series of videos on Yahoo Video with Douglas Crockford.  It takes a lot of time to watch them, but you will definitely learn something.

This ended up being really long, I should probably avoid bullet points from now on.