Nearing the End

It's almost the end of my Junior Year at college. Its a little insane to think about. I can still clearly remember a lot of events from Freshmen year, and next year will be my last here in undergrad land. It's crazy.

This school year has been really surprising for me, the fall semester was probably the hardest I've ever had (probably the two grad level classes I took that did it) but extremely rewarding, I learned Matlab from one of those course and got a reputation as the one to go to for Matlab help because of the 'throw you off into the deep' approach of my professor. From that course I worked with two grad students and got a paper accepted to GECCO, and one of the grad students is off to present it over the break, therefore getting it, and me, published.

I got to be lectured by one of the most prestigious roboticist of today, Josh Bongard. He's an amazing lecturer, and a solid guy. Gives good suggestions for projects and stuff to (he suggested a 2-1/2d mode for the wiimote that I want to do but dont have time). He's really cool. Anyway....

The fall semester was willed with rediculous amounts of work and frustration, but then after the break, things took a change for the better. I started dating a wonderful girl whose made this semester seem to fly by as I looked forward to seeing her every few weeks when she visited. Its pretty amazing how having someone that's important to you can motivate you to do a bunch of work at once so you don't have to do it later that way you can hang out with them when they visit.... wow that was a long winded sentence and could probably have been reduced... anywho.

This semester has been a juggling act, too many classes, or rather, one class with an inconvenient amount of busy work (physics) that really caused my other classes to have to play catch up every now and then and such. I was lucky that my professor for my Differential Equations class doesn't collect homework, and allows open book and open notes on tests. Which makes sense becuase in the real world you're going to have tools at your disposal, its not like your boss expects you to know the integral of sinh of the top of your head (its cosh btw)

Overall though, the semester has been rewarding, an independent study I had is wrapping up and I did a minimal amount of work and managed to make a good number of connections with professors along the way, which was really nice. I learned alot about multi-threaded programming by doing my Crew project with the Wiimote and creating a smartboard.

Oh good lord, its 4:15 in the morning... I accidently got side tracked from writing this blog about 2 hours ago by my friend and I exploring the wonders of functional programming. Ruby is such a cool language.

I must go to bed now or else I'm so screwed for tomorrow.