Wow, I'm done with final exams two days into finals' week. So cool! I would've had another exam today (at 8.30am too - I don't think I've woken up that early on even a single day this quarter - stayed up though) but I took it yesterday instead.
Chinese went well. I don't think I'll be getting an A+ like last quarter because I messed up on both the oral exams and that's like almost one entire percentage point off my grade, then I haven't been getting full scores on my quizzes like I was getting last quarter, but the midterm was nice. And as for the final, I don't know, it was very tricky and I feel I must have made at least a couple of blunders. So, it really depends on how many blunders I made on the final and where their cut-off is - 98% or 99%. In anyway, I'm guaranteed an A in Chinese, which is good enough. And Arabic's already given me an A, which was expected, because there isn't really much to mess up on those Arabic tests (I mean, there is, but it's not easy to mess up).
Physics? I should really pay more attention to this subject. I'd not been to a single TA section this quarter and I went to only about, I don't know, four of the lectures? This would be okay if I was actually good at physics but it doesn't work out for me because I actually suck at it. Still, the midterm was dead easy and almost everyone, including me, got a full score or somewhere in the 95-100 range. The final was comparatively ten times harder. In the last two lectures, they did some funny stuff involving differential equations that we hadn't touched throughout the rest of the course and that was irritating, so I messed up on the questions involving damped oscillations, and by messed up, what I really mean is I didn't do them. So screw it, I thought. I'm expecting a B+.
Same for CME - probability, that is. Towards the second half of the quarter, I discovered that the key to success in the CME course was simply going to the office hours one night before the homework was due and sitting there with other CME peeps and just doing the entire problem set for a six or seven hour stretch. It's awesome because you can check your answers with the TAs and they're okay about letting you know if your answer is right or not. For example: "Hey, I got 20.34 for this one. Is it right?" "Nah, the answer's 10.89, did you check if np was ≥5?" So, the midterm was good, and I scored above the mean (huge surprise - no, really, it was, considering the fact that I thought I was going to fail the class) and on my last homework, I finally managed to get a perfect score. Of course, there is the homework that I didn't submit at all (that was my breakdown point during this class) and so that's a good one-seventh of one-third of my grade. We'll see. Maybe the extra credit problems will make up for the missing homework. They're awesome. You type in like two commands into MATLAB and print it out, and you get one entire percentage point on your final grade. I bet they're going to get rid of this next quarter.
What else is left? Ah, yes, CS. I have no idea what I'm going to get for this class. The final project came out nicely I believe, although it is quite a CPU hog even on my dual-core machine. However, I really screwed up the last homework. Apart from that, it was normal. So I don't know what I'm looking at. I assume it's a high B of some sort because the final project is like 50% of the grade and there were no exams for this class! Let's see, there is a grading session for the final project today, so we'll get to find out what the professor and TAs think about it.
Next quarter? Nothing too exciting. Going to have the second quarter of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric (known as PWR or "Power") and I don't like writing for grades because I'm pathetic at it. So we'll see how that goes, though I'm not keeping my expectations high. There's Chinese again, my saviour and morale-booster. There's Arabic, which is a very interesting language but I don't like their style of teaching (though I'm switching to a different teacher, so we'll see), there's Physics again, which I'll really need to work harder for because it's going to have more difficult concepts next quarter and I really should find out if my TA is male or female and not simply whether s/he is Korean or not. Seunghwa? That sound like a guy to you? Does to me. What else? Ah, CS 154. Yes, that ought to be… interesting. It's another one of those maths courses and it's about Finite Automata and Complexity Theory. Hoping I won't suck completely. It's like CS 103B on steroids and 103B was hard-ish. More office hours for me!
Let's see, on the geek side of things, I actually purchased a copy of Vista Home Premium Upgrade for $89 (plus tax!) and it runs really well on my MacBook Pro. I like it and I think OS X could use a couple of features that it has. Of course, the Flip 3D is completely useless and I simply use the Alt+Tab which also has live previews now. I really like the Sound Manager which allows you to turn down the volume for individual programs instead of the entire system, so you can mute your IM client if you're watching a movie or playing a game. The network stack has been remade of course but it introduces a problem that Vista doesn't acquire IPs from DHCP as well as XP used to because what it does is that, when it wants an IP, it shouts it out to everyone on the router, i.e., sends the message to the broadcast address. That's okay, because all computers do that. However, what it expects is that the router will shout its IP address back to it, which doesn't happen in the routers in my dorm. The routers in my dorm actually whisper the IP back to the computer and Vista doesn't recognize that. Hence, I have to manually configure my IP settings to get Internet until either Microsoft or the IT staff come out with a fix. But, in general, I think it's a solid OS and, as long as it doesn't catch any viruses or spyware, I'll leave it on my MBP for fun and games. Incidentally, I did manage to find a driver for Mac OS X called NTFS-3G which lets the Mac write to the NTFS Windows Vista partition which is extremely useful, and it seems to be stable for now. Hasn't crashed or anything.
So, well, that's the update for now. Looking forward to Harry Potter and the... Deathly Hallows? Yes, in July. So exciting, I'm re-listening to all the books.
Labels: English
