EPT
- I'm a 4th-year undergrad who's majoring in math but going into software (for now). I went to California all week to interview for full-time jobs at tech companies. Luckily, I think they went pretty well, and I got to see some friends who graduated a few years before me. Also, it's much warmer in California than it is here at school.
On the flip side, I had two group projects due this weekend, a research meeting tomorrow---well, today, actually---that I've done no work for [well, I tried, but I had to get some sort of API session key which arrived when I was busy with interviews], and a test Wednesday. Also, some friends and I were going to do some security competition, but no one did jack and it fell apart. Ah well.
One group project is for a "guided math research" class, and the other is for a web programming class. Both projects were rather time-consuming this weekend, since we had to write a paper for the math class and deliver some usable product for the programming class.
In the math class, I hadn't been able to work on the problem much (yes, my fault), but did some stuff on Thursday/Friday between/after interviews. Luckily the two others in my group are good friends of mine, and better at math than I am to boot. I got back on Saturday and we wrote most of the paper, except one friend wrote a bunch of proofs ending in "and now we use a computer program to verify that this is true." For a mathematician, this is disgusting, or at least not very satisfying... but oh well. We managed to turn it in today; it's a first draft, but I'm expecting we're going to get marked down hard. Sucks.
In the programming class, I did a little work at the beginning of the week, and my group members did a little bit as well before today. For a bit of background, this class is taught in Ruby on Rails, which is, in my opinion, overly magical: it does all sorts of ridiculous string manipulation and automagically strings things together for you in somewhat poorly-documented ways. There are lots of tutorials online, but these are particularly good at telling you how to do one narrow thing without giving you an understanding of how the language actually works. Plus, Rails is written so that certain common ideas are very easy, so it's impossible to figure out how to do more complex things.
So it's often Google, Google, Google, and I spent roughly 40 hours on my last (individual) project for this class. Theoretically, being in the class should help, but although the professor is an excellent lecturer, he tends to cover the non-abstract things a week or two after we use them in our projects... sigh.
So it's not really looking good going into today. We worked on it for maybe 11 hours, and got about 90% done, but there were bugs, so we didn't manage to submit on time. There's some funny system of "slack days" in the class, where if we turn in an assignment n days late, we lose n slack days, and we have 5 slack days for the whole class. I have one left, so now we need to turn it in tomorrow.
Except I have to do like 8 hours of work on research tomorrow, in addition to classes and choir rehearsal, and then I have to do this project, and then do a programming challenge for an interview. Goodbye, sleep! I hardly knew ye. - Relating to the test: it's in a "general requirement class" (freshman biology). I haven't really been following the material for the last week or two, so sucks to be me. More infuriatingly, though, I originally had an interview scheduled for Wednesday, which I discovered was a test day. I asked the course administrator (the class is huge so there's some lady who's just in charge of logistics and whatnot) if I could take a makeup exam, but she flat-out said "no."
Maybe I'm just really entitled, but I guess having not taken any 500-person classes for a while made me think that all classes would be reasonable about schedule conflicts... - My brother has an upcoming presentation (potentially worth big bucks if he does well) that he wanted me to edit. Because I run Ubuntu and only have LibreOffice *shudder*, he sent it to me as a PDF.
It turns out that PDF annotation is (apparently) really difficult. Adobe Reader doesn't support it unless you have some weird permissions, Evince (default GNU document viewer) lets you insert annotations from some super-secret menu except you can't move/delete them, and Okular (another open-source document viewer) is somehow unable to actually save the annotations to the PDF itself.
I started doing the annotations in Evince, but got pissed because I couldn't delete them. So I went to Okular and did them (for like an hour), only to realize I couldn't send the annotations to my brother in a format he could read.
3 hours of Googling and apt-get-ing and make-ing random packages later (during which I somehow managed to uninstall my printing drivers, which are part of poppler-utils; eventually I fixed this), I gave up and manually copied the goddamn annotations into Evince.
I love Linux. - How do I fix my sleep schedule when I don't have any self-control? This is more of a rhetorical question.
Well, that was cathartic, hopefully. School is always such a grind, but I think I'll miss it when it's done. The real world is scary
I wonder if I'll be able to make friends outside of work next year, considering I'm a rather boring person who doesn't drink. Oh well, we'll see...
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