Notes from the End of the Week

1. I only teach one class on Fridays. I let them go early. I really just needed the week to end.


2. I finished my computer science homework! A week in advance. I haven't turned it in yet because I'm trying to get more style points by error-checking a few of the non-mandatory cases.


3. I have to say that if anyone who passed the prereq courses is complaining about the CS homework, they are a bunch of whiners. Although I claim to know C, I haven't actually used it since 1996. I've never used C++ before. My advantage over many of my classmates, I believe, is that I have an intuitive understanding of things (and by "things" I mostly mean "pointers") even if I'm never entirely sure what series of characters to type in order to communicate my understanding to the compiler. My main problem when looking things up on the internet is that the internet does not use consistent syntax coloring. When I look things up, I have trouble figuring out which stuff is "words that are meaningful to the compiler" and which stuff is "the name that we're giving to this particular instance of the concept."


4. This morning I got to talk to the registrar's Data Diva! I will get data about student performance in math class! I've been begging for this for years, and it's finally coming. Guess this means that I now have a good reason to learn R.


5. I have a modest grant of "funny money" (can only be spent on "research" expenses). I think that since I'm researching student success that I will need a 1920 x 1200 monitor, several statistics books, and maybe a copy of BBEdit.


6. Success of the day! I got a new drivers license! I got the renewal notice in the mail saying that I couldn't do renew-by-mail because of some stupid rules about the war on terror or the war on vegetable-pickers and day laborers or some other important foreign policy initiative. Since I couldn't renew by mail, I had to go to the County Clerk's office, which slapped a 20% "convenience fee" on my renewal. Could I have avoided this fee by going to a different county? Unclear.