Today was the annual ACM Fireside Chat where CS students get to discuss their pet peeves with Dr. Roman, the department chair, and other CS faculty members. This event always leaves me a little worked up. I won't even be going to school at WashU next year and this year's event was no exception. There was a great deal of discussion about moving the ACM lounge from its prime 4th floor of Lopata location to a less prime location on the first floor of Urbauer. Dr. Roman seemed to cave a bit toward the end, as he is no longer thinking in terms of ACM not having its own lounge anymore, and is trying to think of ways to partition the space so that both ACM and the graders can have separate, adjacent spaces. And on a different subject we discussed whether a class such as cs306 should become a prereq to cs342, hopefully eliminating the need for 342 to teach design patterns, C++, and UNIX all at the same time. I also managed to put in a few gripes about CEC, mainly for historical purposes. Anyway, it was a very good Fireside Chat. Thanks to Jim, Ben, and James for putting it together.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 30 April 2003 at 1:08 AM

I've written three papers in the past three weeks. The first (for my masters project) was 11 pages. My Modern Japan paper was about eight pages. And the one I wrote this weekend turned out to be 27 pages. Admittedly, I used huge margins, double-spaced type, and had lots of figures, whitespace, footnotes and a bibliography. But still, it's just shy of 5,000 words. If only it were about something I cared about instead of cs554. Anyway, it's time for bed. Tomorrow I have a presentation that I need to finish making slides for and a final project that I need to generate some results for. I've also decided to spend a few hours organizing my room tomorrow. I have a year's worth of clutter that I need to at least make a start on.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 28 April 2003 at 2:27 AM

My first final exam of the semester is over. Everything went very well except for one thing. Every time I looked up from my exam and gazed down toward the front of the room, Dr. Pless would see me and laugh. He's been doing this all week. He'll see me studying for his exam and he'll laugh. Or he'll see me walking through the M&M lab and tell me that I need to study more. But his mind games didn't work on me. I thought the final was easier than the midterm, and I'm thinking that I did pretty well on it. I guess I'll need to wait for the final grades to be posted to be sure, but I'm pretty confidant about this. Now if only I felt the same way about cs554...

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 25 April 2003 at 12:34 AM

I spent some time last night cleaning my room. I had planned on spending a few hours on it, but the whole process turned out to be much easier than I thought it would be. You see, buried under a thin layer of papers and clothes were plastic bags filled with junk from the last time I cleaned my room. I had just been too lazy to carry the bags of trash out of my room, so they'd been sitting there on the floor for a while. So all I really needed to do was move them out of my room, rearrange a few papers, and put some clothes in my laundry basket. Now I just need to clean my desk.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 21 April 2003 at 1:52 PM

I have to give a talk about my masters project tomorrow. I ran through it today and everything went just fine, so I expect everything will be fine tomorrow as well. The abstract is here. I didn't spend much time on the abstract, so be prepared to be unimpressed, should you follow the link.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 15 April 2003 at 10:52 PM

It appears that there's a significant correlation between being a CS nerd and playing the trombone. It turns out that Chris, Charlie, and I all played the trombone in the past. However, the reverse is not true. I've known a lot of trombone players, and most of them are not CS nerds. But now that I've discovered this weirdness about trombones, I'm wondering what instruments everyone else plays. Leave me a comment and let me know.

Comments: 8 Posted by david on 10 April 2003 at 11:08 PM

Apparently the Scots don't know how to use combination locks. Earlier today I found myself writing an email to an a faculty member explaining to him how to open a locker secured by a standard, dial-based combination lock. The email went something like this.

Steps to use combo lock.

dgw

I think these instructions are pretty good, but I bet Bill he still has to have someone help him with the lock.

(In his defense, he claims that combo locks don't exist in Scotland and the first time he ever used one was about a week ago, when he had to get an American to help him open the lock. Apparently we're good for something after all.)

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 3 April 2003 at 12:15 AM

I have recently discovered the beauty of cygwin. For those of you who don't know, cygwin is a Linux emulator for Windows. It lets me run x applications without having to reboot my computer or remotely log into another machine. Which is very cool because now I don't need to install Linux on one of my machines.

On a different subject, I've been awake since about 6 this morning. I don't know why I didn't go back to bed, but I didn't. I got up, cleaned my room a bit, and tried to decipher some of the Robonaut API code. For those of you who don't know, I'm working with the Robonaut simulator as part of my masters project. For whatever reason, the simulator is super-flaky, and the API is very obtuse. My project is to design and implement an API that will make it possible for people to play with the simulator without spending months and months figuring out how to get it to move. Or, in my case, spending months and months trying to figure out how to get the sample applications to link. It's kind of a frustrating experience.

Tonight we grade more 527 assignments, but I'm leaving at midnight, whether we're done or not. I just don't have enough energy to stay awake for another marathon grading session.

Comments: 2 Posted by david on 2 April 2003 at 4:56 PM