It's that time again. The deep breath before the plunge, the intense apprehension just before gulping down some really bitter medicine, the time spent in an airplane waiting for it to take off… it's Dead Week. Exams begin on Tuesday for me. "Three hundred lives of men I have walked this Earth and now I have no time." It's always like that, isn't it? (And boy do I love that quote!) I hope you caught the reference.
Anyway, tracking back a few weeks, for Thanksgiving break, James and I went to Cincinnati (in the state of Ohio) to spend four very enjoyable days with Kimberly and her family.
Traditional things to eat for Thanksgiving are pies and turkey. Since I couldn't eat turkey, I invested as much effort as possible in the pie department. The day before Thanksgiving, everyone in the house got together and we made three delicious pies - apple, cherry and pumpkin (I've never had pumpkin, and to me, it looks about as appetizing as a three weeks' dead frog that got run over by a car). My part in baking the pies was basically peeling the apples and stirring the sauce, both of which I think I did with aplomb if I may say so myself.
Now usually I'm not a great fan of board-ish games, but this one week I really felt like playing all kinds of the stuff like Catchphrase, Scrabble, Taboo, Telephone Pictionary and The Naked Game™ (sigh, no article on Wikipedia I can link to)… and I had loads of fun playing 'em. Telephone Pictionary is possibly one of the most entertaining and least demanding games I've played and The Naked Game™, with a sum total of ten people including four parents, two of which are Finnish, is simply hilarious.
One of the most satisfying things I did over the course of staying with Kimberly was fixing all the computer problems her dad could throw at me. The best part was that none of them required something weird like tweaking the registry or something that's actually not possible to do without rewriting the OS, but simply things that normal people don't know about and features that are cleverly hidden in Windows. Of course, the fact that they're cleverly hidden might shed some light on the mental stability of Microsoft engineers, or maybe you can just call me a hater. Nonetheless, fixing stuff makes me happy.
Pictures from the trip should be up on Facebook, depicting our adventures in and around Cincinnati… James watching ducks, my glasses fogging up because of the 50º temperature difference between the greenhouse and world outside (Fahrenheit of course; damn these Americans!). Oh yeah, it was pretty cold there… the mercury is basically in love with the freezing point of water in Cincinnati.
Moving a few thousand miles westward, I should probably declare my major as Computer Science at the beginning of next quarter. I'm finally enjoying my CS programming class; unfortunately, it's at the end of the quarter. I just wish I'd gone to office hours for this class in throughout the quarter like I did for my previous CS class because it really does help and makes sure my programs are bug-free and high-scoring. Sigh… those grades are never going to come back. But, moving forward, I'll probably doing Compilers next quarter, which is taught by my very own Academic Advisor and it's rumoured that he half-wrote compiler-theory himself. Oh, there are just too many brilliant people here… way too many. Also, I think I'll continue with both Arabic and Chinese, schedule-permitting, and hopefully do some kind of minor with both of them. Probability Theory? It's this required class I have to take for CS. It's like getting an injection except for the fact that it's going to be like getting an injection every other day for three whole months and a bad grade to top it all off. Winter's not looking too hot for me. Nyeh, heh.
But, sigh, I'll just have to suck it up… for now, let me get to my first "take-home exam" ever… I'm excited.
Anyway, tracking back a few weeks, for Thanksgiving break, James and I went to Cincinnati (in the state of Ohio) to spend four very enjoyable days with Kimberly and her family.
Traditional things to eat for Thanksgiving are pies and turkey. Since I couldn't eat turkey, I invested as much effort as possible in the pie department. The day before Thanksgiving, everyone in the house got together and we made three delicious pies - apple, cherry and pumpkin (I've never had pumpkin, and to me, it looks about as appetizing as a three weeks' dead frog that got run over by a car). My part in baking the pies was basically peeling the apples and stirring the sauce, both of which I think I did with aplomb if I may say so myself.
Now usually I'm not a great fan of board-ish games, but this one week I really felt like playing all kinds of the stuff like Catchphrase, Scrabble, Taboo, Telephone Pictionary and The Naked Game™ (sigh, no article on Wikipedia I can link to)… and I had loads of fun playing 'em. Telephone Pictionary is possibly one of the most entertaining and least demanding games I've played and The Naked Game™, with a sum total of ten people including four parents, two of which are Finnish, is simply hilarious.
One of the most satisfying things I did over the course of staying with Kimberly was fixing all the computer problems her dad could throw at me. The best part was that none of them required something weird like tweaking the registry or something that's actually not possible to do without rewriting the OS, but simply things that normal people don't know about and features that are cleverly hidden in Windows. Of course, the fact that they're cleverly hidden might shed some light on the mental stability of Microsoft engineers, or maybe you can just call me a hater. Nonetheless, fixing stuff makes me happy.
Pictures from the trip should be up on Facebook, depicting our adventures in and around Cincinnati… James watching ducks, my glasses fogging up because of the 50º temperature difference between the greenhouse and world outside (Fahrenheit of course; damn these Americans!). Oh yeah, it was pretty cold there… the mercury is basically in love with the freezing point of water in Cincinnati.
Moving a few thousand miles westward, I should probably declare my major as Computer Science at the beginning of next quarter. I'm finally enjoying my CS programming class; unfortunately, it's at the end of the quarter. I just wish I'd gone to office hours for this class in throughout the quarter like I did for my previous CS class because it really does help and makes sure my programs are bug-free and high-scoring. Sigh… those grades are never going to come back. But, moving forward, I'll probably doing Compilers next quarter, which is taught by my very own Academic Advisor and it's rumoured that he half-wrote compiler-theory himself. Oh, there are just too many brilliant people here… way too many. Also, I think I'll continue with both Arabic and Chinese, schedule-permitting, and hopefully do some kind of minor with both of them. Probability Theory? It's this required class I have to take for CS. It's like getting an injection except for the fact that it's going to be like getting an injection every other day for three whole months and a bad grade to top it all off. Winter's not looking too hot for me. Nyeh, heh.
But, sigh, I'll just have to suck it up… for now, let me get to my first "take-home exam" ever… I'm excited.
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