This is what I do...

So, I'd absolutely love to put a bunch of effort into some long writeup relating to a bunch of crap that only I'd care about, but...I'm just too busy. That said, while I'm not huge into putting personal information about the details of my life online, I'm going to go through and let you all know what I'm doing, anyway. Mostly, I'm busy with classes, so I guess I'll start by describing the basics of what that entails.

Advanced Conversational Japanese is a lot more intense than the first two years were. After only speaking Japanese intermittently, mostly for the purpose of practicing grammar patterns, suddenly being dropped in an environment where the professor only speaks English when absolutely necessary is a bit of a shift. Also, it seems that, as a class, our handwriting is terrible. We regularly receive packets of sheets for practicing Katakana and Hiraganna of the variety used by small Japanese children. I'm managing well, though. I haven't scored below a 90 on any of our first three tests and I'm exceedingly well prepared for the test I have tomorrow; mostly, though, I'm just reminded on regular basis that I love this language.

Intro to Psych is...meh. It's an interesting enough class, it's not terribly difficult, and it meets a graduation requirement. There's really nothing bad about it, and I'm regularly entertained by my prof., but I feel like it's time that could be spent just as well elsewhere.

Intro to Public Speaking is a joke. Having been involved with theater since I was 11, I'm more comfortable in front of an audience and have a stronger public speaking voice already than 90% of the class. It will be worthwhile to learn to speak better from an outline and to be more physically involved in my speaking, but we haven't talked about any of that, and I doubt we will (in 6 weeks, we've only actually talked about speaking skills twice). Honestly, the only thing at all engaging about the class is going to be speech preparation. This weekend, I'll be hitting the books and preparing an informative speech about the Catholic theology of Intercessory Prayer (to the Saints) and Purgatory and how these beliefs (and the Protestant confusion relating to them) stem from the differing concepts of the Communion of Saints between Catholicism and Protestantism. When time for a persuasive speech comes about, I'll be tackling the much lighter subject of Graphic Novels and why more people should read them.

Computer Science stuff comes next. I'll try and make it as simple as I can for the lay folk in the community.

High Performance Computing is a class I'm incredibly glad I'm taking. Learning how to write code in parallel has been interesting, and once we get to less "embarrassingly parallel" problems, things only promise to get more interesting. So far, we haven't done much beyond domain decomposition of simple problems and being reminded of the intense performance cost of Object Oriented code, but as we approach more fine grained parallel problems, it will become easier to see the attitudes we're going to need to adopt to make more consumer level programs function in parallel.

...Speaking of consumer applications, Software Engineering has also been a real eye opener already. I'm working as a member of a team of 5 to produce a single product by the end of the semester, and it's definitely a more exciting feeling tackling a larger project and starting to understand the work that needs to be done. The project itself takes a bit of work to describe and make it sound as cool as it is, so I'm not going to try now. Once I finish a final revision of the vision statement as well as our supplemental specification, I may post them here. In any case, the most important lesson I've learned (or am learning) so far is that I can rely on other people in group projects, it just requires effective communication of responsibilities and a willingness to trust. I've donned the role of chief program architect for now (once we're building the database interaction model, I'll suddenly become less useful), so I've done a lot more work than the rest of the team at this point, but they all want to be right there and understand how this is being put together so that they can do whatever they do best to help it along, which is awesome.

Anyway, I'm typing this because I really don't want to work on my High Performance Computing code right now. I much prefer C++ to C, but taking incredibly procedural code and making it OO just isn't my idea of fun (right now =P). Unfortunately, we have a strict schedule of access times on the cluster, so I need to get this done if I want to run my benchmarks tomorrow and hand it in on time. So...have fun, all, and thanks for reading.