HOLY CRAPS, it's 2010! Still waiting for that flying car.
A new year, a new decade, a new semester, finally a new post. This may be a non-blogging record for me.
It has recently come to my attention that I have not posted anything to my blog for quite a long span of time (in Internet reckoning) or indeed given my few anxious readers any indication that I am in fact still alive. 'Alive' is an ambiguous term, which I here use in the biological sense, in that my body is in fact metabolizing.
Other than that, what have I been up to since my last real post 5 months ago? Well, a lot. As I pointed out then, I was about to undertake a brutal academic gauntlet of courses, projects, and gnashing of teeth. I managed to survive the first semester, rumored to be the worst- except for the other two which are just as bad.
I'll save you the gory details, but let's just say that it was an intense 4 months. While most grad students take a course load of about 8 credits, we take the equivalent of 17 (51 "units"). That's more than I ever took as an undergraduate, plus I have a (very) part-time research assistantship with CMU's CyLab and the Software Engineering Institute to help with financial things like feeding myself. It was all fairly interesting stuff, but 70 hours per week is more than I care to spend on academics. My courses included 3 of the core MSE courses: Managing Software Development, Methods: Deciding What to Design, and Formal Models of Software Systems. I also took an elective Usable Privacy and Security, and a lamentably required technical communications course (being the only native English speaker in my branch of the program) which amounted to little more than English Grammar Quirks, Editing Tips, and Tangential Etymology.Thus was my demise. Somehow I managed to pull it all off with a 3.5 term GPA and a bit of income.
In the meantime I also grew a beard in recognition of No Shave November, an event which is unique in that it actually takes less time and effort to participate than not. It all started on Halloween, when on a sudden impulse I decided to become Chuck Bartowski. I shaved my entire face for the first time in 4 years, just before November 1- the perfect setup for an entire month of unregulated beardage. Why, you ask? Because it's manly. And to top it all off, I removed it in stages to produce several varieties of beard in the process, then shaved my head as well. (It grew back already.)
This was soon followed by Christmas break, wherein I retrained myself to sleep and be lethargic. I even got in a couple games of Civ3 and some serious Mount&Blade action. It actually worked all too well, despite my initial difficulty in reminding myself that I had nothing in particular to do. "Nothing to do" actually sums up the whole vacation quite well, as it was one of the most uneventful 3 weeks in recent memory. In fact I could probably describe everything I did in a single 140-character tweet:
eat, sleep, gaming, Avatar, movie marathon, friend's wedding in TN, visit friend in hosp, buy Xmas gifts 12/23, stock up on food, return 1/9
Yep, that just about does it. The wedding in Tennessee and surrounding road trip was by far the most noteworthy event of it all, but I will not go into detail. As indicated, I came back to the Pittsburgh last weekend just in time for classes to resume.
And that brings us to 2010 and the second-worst semester of them all. I'm starting to wonder if the only real difference is that this time around we have the confidence of knowing that
we've already survived it once. If I can manage, I'll follow up with a brief rundown of this semester's torments and maybe some other posts that don't remind me of my unfortunate plight.
If it doesn't kill you, it will only kill your blog.