zero

Apparently I can't use a calendar, because I've been under the impression that Ace Combat Zero came out next month, when in reality it came out earlier this week. So last night as soon as I figured out I was breaking Physics Rule #1 I ran down to the store and bought it. And beat it. It's rather shorter than Ace Combat 5 and doesn't have nearly as good a story, so I think AC5 is my favorite of the series so far. I'm still going to give ACZ a working over though.

Unfortunately it's going to be a busy weekend so I won't have much time to mess around with ACZ any more right now. In particular, I have to double grade exams for 213 this weekend. We're down another 50 students or so from last term though, about 200 now, so at least there aren't as many to grade overall. We've lost so many students compared to first term that we can now fit all the students into one room for exams while before we needed two. The intro physics series here is a rough one.

pseudo coup

Last week I found a great new way of getting through my three hour business class while staying sane. I take all my class notes on gridded paper so I can do graphs easier. I figured out that I can copy Sudoku puzzles into some of the squares in my notebook and do those while looking like I'm taking notes. And the puzzles only take like a third of the page up so I can put real notes alongside if anyone says anything interesting. This way, I don't go mad listening to proposals about air quality-testing lichens and biodiesel byproduct diapers. I'm glad I'm not an MBA.

I'm doing really well so far in my scientific computing class. After my initial troubles with Java I'm getting the hang of things and I'm probably the furthest ahead in the class by a good margin. For example, last week's program was originally due Wednesday but was pushed to Friday. I was putting the finishing touches on my programs on Monday. This week's programs are different so I want to run some stuff by the instructor before I keep pushing. I think that is an interesting class, it's not just about coding but now we're getting into the physics that can be done with it.

I'm only about a quarter of the way through this new term but I'm getting close to being halfway done with my Master's degree. I'm going to have to start thinking about what I'm going to do for an internship next year. I'm almost out of the PSM core and can start getting into my own classes now. Next year should be good with computational physics, electronics labs and solid state physics.

i think i know my geography pretty damn well

I've finally gotten to grading this week's prelabs. My old red pen has just about had it, but they didn't have any more like it at the store so I bought a couple different kinds and I'm trying them out to see which is best. It's important to find out now because the 213 midterm is next week and that means exam grading. An inferior red pen just won't do.

I kind of feel like I didn't get too much accomplished this weekend, but I did finish the coding for this week's scientific computing homework and that's a major part of my workload for the week. I still think Java is insanely uppity but it'll take more than that to stop me. I did have to write in some bizarre stuff to get it to work fully though.

MIA

Just finished the first week of labs I TA. The first section was a little rough but by the third one I started getting back in the groove again. Lots of familiar faces in my sections, which is good. The students all seem to be distressed that one of the instructors from the last two terms (Pat) apparently isn't teaching this term. I knew he hasn't been around, but I thought he was just out for the first week or something. None of the students know where he is, so when somebody brought him up in lab all the rumors started flying. One of the students said they'd seen Pat at Safeway, so I said at least we know he's not dead. I told the students I'd look into it.

culture shock

Spring term has started and I've now had all my various new classes. Comps (quals) ran at the beginning of the week, and Vincent and I just sat on the sidelines and watched as all the other first-years joined in. Vincent and I don't have to take comps because we're PSM. It's just kind of odd because this term I finally start my major deviation from the normal course of physics.

I now have a proper MBA business class, which is composed of about half PSMs and half MBAs. It was kind of funny because there was definitely a bit of culture shock going on there. I thought it was going to be a lecture class, but it's another one of these case study classes which I'm not completely sold on. Still, we're finally getting some business training, which is a good thing.

I'm also in a scientific computing class as a prep for computational physics next year. The odd thing is that my department programs in Java. I don't know why. I don't know Java, but it's loosely related to C++ so I'm getting by pretty well so far. Vincent only knows Fortran so he's having a rougher time. I think I did work with some Java back in my SOAR days, but that wasn't writing code, just kicking it around until it compiled.

In my crash course on Java I'm finding out all these little idiosyncrasies Java has that make me shake my head. It is like C++, but 50 times as uppity. The structure is much more restrictive (like 4x won't be intepreted as 4 * x) and it seems like everything takes twice as many lines as C++ to express (like how declaring an array takes two lines of code instead of one). I tried formatting some numbers, and the process was to use a good sized command to format the number, but it got returned as a string, so it had to be parsed back into a number using another good sized command. It practically took up a full line just to say I wanted less decimal places. And there's some really weird stuff about how it handles objects.

I also discovered one of Java's dirty little secrets - it can't even add properly! For some reason Java can't express the number 0.1 properly. Java's proponents blame it on binary numbers, but C++ certainly didn't seem to have any problems. They claim it doesn't matter unless you're doing taxes or something, but any way you cut it I don't like it when I add 0.2 to 6.0 and get 6.199999999999 back. Not appreciated.

I'm not a big fan of Java.

As for my engineering bug, I made a major find at Borders last weekend. I found the other book by J. E. Gordon, who wrote the slightly eccentric but very interesting book on structures I like. This one (The New Science of Strong Materials, or Why You Don't Fall Through the Floor) is more about material science, but it's still good. I love the way this guy writes, these books are good reads.