From my notes, v2

In my experience, there are two kinds of class projects: those that have the students apply the concepts from the curriculum to some concrete problem, and those that encourage the students to explore some related subject outside the usual material. Most of my projects as an undergraduate fell into the first category. In graduate school, the latter has ruled the day.

The project for my formal methods class is of the second sort. With my stress level growing as the project due date nears, I have found myself in an awkward position where the time spent in lecture actually seems detrimental to my success in the course. This resulted in the following things being recorded in my notebook today:

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Macrohard Doors

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Satan-colored dot
obstructed your progress!
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 >Fight    Ham sandwich

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Yo dawg, we heard you like monitors, so we put a monitor in your monitor, and now you can lock while you lock.

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I really, really need to graduate.

Venting, addendum

Retrospection is a slippery slope. Part of my trouble is that as it gets closer to Christmas, and I spend time visiting my family and people that I haven't seen very much in the past couple months, I keeping thinking back to how nice it was when I was an undergraduate and I only had maybe one project hanging over my head as the end of the semester approached, and then to how good it felt to finish my last final exam and know that I wouldn't have any more worries for the next few weeks. This thinking is toxic. Every time it hits me, I am prevented from doing any sort of work for at least the next few minutes.

Knowing that this is what it's like to approach the end of a master's program, I'm really glad that I decided not to continue on for a Ph.D.

Also, as a follow up to a previous post, thank you, Bob Stoops!

Venting

The formal methods project that I've been ranting about for weeks is still not going well. I had hoped to set it straight over Thanksgiving break, but I found it to be nearly impossible to visit people and research at the same time. T minus eight days on whether I get this thing done or collapse like the old left front tire on my car.

Also, I've had Parry Gripp's "Smiley Cat" playing in my head near-constantly for the past couple days, and I think that the incongruity between that song and the stress that I'm going through with this project may be physically hurting me.

Blacked out

The Lions won just now, on the last play of the game, and I didn't get to see it because they couldn't sell out Ford Field today. I didn't even get to hear it because the one Lions radio partner that I can pick up in East Lansing decided to carry the MSU basketball game instead.

Yes, I could have bought tickets and seen it in person, but that would have cut into my futile-attempts-at-starting-my-formal-methods-project time.

Update on primarily irrelevant things

• The MSU-PSU game was much more of a blowout than I expected it to be. There's something wrong with the MSU secondary, and it's going to have to be repaired by next season for us to move out of the pile in the middle of the conference. We did put up one half of pretty good defense, though.
• The U of M-OSU game was less of a blowout than I expected it to be. The Rose Bowl will not be pretty.
• Cal did their job and knocked off Stanford for us. I don't think it's possible for the Pac-10 to send more than one team to the BCS at this point. Unfortunately, unless there's some factor that I'm missing, we may still need Oklahoma to do something about Oklahoma State for the BCS to stoop to picking up PSU or Iowa.
• I can't get the Clang static analyzer to work on my laptop, and it's driving me crazy, because it looks like it may be the only free tool that does enough analysis work to be usable as a test subject for my formal methods project, and it's too late now to try to pick up a different project. The abundance of pointer/alias analysis research made me foolishly think that I would easily be able to compare several different algorithms and their usefulness in static analysis, and it is now clear that there is precious little software that actually uses that research to do anything — and no, optimizations don't count. At the beginning of the term, I had reassured myself by saying that I only needed to barely pass my classes to graduate, and now it's looking like I might not even be able to do that. Such is life.

On class

According to either Harmonix or Microsoft, "International Waffle Symposium" is not a, "classy," enough band name for use in Rock Band 2's Xbox Live play. The actual classiness of the name is debatable, but I still find it rather frustrating because I know that when they say a name is, "not classy," they really mean to say that it is, "brutally offensive," and I have no idea what the problem is with that name.

It would help if I knew whom I should blame, but that seems moot given that I am once again out ideas for names (and no, "sickofhavingbandnamesrejectedcapriciously" doesn't fit in the name entry box). That and the schoolwork thing that I've been complaining about for weeks, anyway.

From my notes

In class today, it occurred to me that "Therac" sounds like it should be the name of a philosopher. I'm not sure why. Maybe I parse it as a portmanteau of "Thoreau" and "Dirac" somehow.

Regardless of how I came up with it, consider the following sentence for an example of what I mean: "I believe it was the great John Therac who said, 'Bzzt!'"

Also, the work deluge for this semester has definitely started now.

From the road

License plate frame I saw today, on the way back from the store:

HEY! Christian Businessman
Who are you discipling?

I did not realize that "disciple" could be used as a verb.

Crushed

About once or twice a semester, when I was pursuing my undergraduate degree, enough pending work would accumulate in my classes that I would find myself nearly overcome with a constant feeling of dread, as if it were almost guaranteed that I would fail to accomplish one or more critical tasks and fail my classes as a result. In graduate school, the feeling has come once every month during the beginning of the semester, and then turned into a near-constant paranoia once I get within three or four weeks of the end of the term.

This semester, it has arrived a week early, five weeks before exams start. I am leaving this post as a testament either to my ability to pull through stressful situations, or to the dramatic crash that killed my career before it started.

There will be a few weeks' delay as I determine which one it should be.

Also, I really wish the spasms in my right bicep would stop.

The Roflcopter has its revenge

I don't like that it was predicated on Ricky Stanzi's injury. I don't like the fact that now, unless Texas, Florida, Alabama, Boise State, Oregon, Cincinnati and probably a few other teams all pull a choke job, the Big Ten isn't getting any BCS bids other than the Rose Bowl.

Even so... Roflcats!