So, as it turns out, grade-wise this past quarter has been the best one ever, academically speaking, and guess what, good grades make me happy. No A+'s to boast about this time around, but I did get four solid A's. Well, that's going to keep me happy for at least a few days and perhaps give me momentum for the next quarter. And talking about next quarter, out of the five classes I planned for it, three of them are at the exact same time and none of them are televised. Argh! This means for some major replanning of my remaining four terms and I am not really in a mood for that.
Secondly, progress on the Sinitic front is that I now have a good grasp of around 3000 characters (3186 according to this test), can now understand 95-100% of a basic conversation with a native speaker and can watch and understand a movie such as Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix, provided that there are subtitles (no, not in English). However, as much as I am proud of my progress, there is a long, long way to go still and I shouldn't get too cocky. Also, since this is one of the three classes next quarter that are at the same time, will it get the boot? Gasp! Only time will tell.
By the way, the Mac OS X Cocoa programming class went brilliantly and now I am extremely, extremely comfortable with programming using Objective-C and the the only limit is now my own creativity, which is as it should be.
Another thing I've figured out is that I will never have absolutely anything to do with computer graphics. All the introductory class did to my interest in the field was to quell it completely - it was hovering close to zero anyway. A couple of assignments were interesting but it's really not the kind of programming or math that I want to be doing. This doesn't for a moment mean that I don't appreciate computer graphics, but I sure as hell won't be doing any of it.
Interestingly enough, in the class I thought I'd do worst at, the humanities class on the Politics of Technical Expertise, I managed to score one of those aforementioned A's and it was actually fairly interesting - the topics under discussion were interesting and raised issues that I'd never really thought of before, like our blind faith in DNA fingerprinting, how scientists and science interact with society, etc. It did get weird at times because, unlike all the classes I'd taken before it, this one just had three freaking people, including me. But, good all in all, I feel.
Anyway, I can enjoy good sleep for another, let's see, three more days. So, I'm going to go get on that.
Labels: English
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