And now I am sick

I am both amazed and terrified every time I succeed in getting off the couch.

Trucking along

I'm getting close to done with my work for the semester. The long-dreaded formal methods project is essentially complete, with my paper having been submitted Tuesday night and my presentation for this Monday already 85-90% complete. The project for my graphics class is an almost guaranteed disaster at this point, but it's so far gone that I've given up on worrying about getting it to work and am instead trying to just make it presentable, which actually seems like it won't be that hard. In my networks class, the paper is being handled by the entire group, and I managed to heroically cough up four and a half pages of draft today, very nearly completing the sections that I said I would write.

The problem is that I have about a paragraph and a half left to go, I'm tired, and either my upstairs neighbors or the people living next to them have decided to throw a Loud Student Party. I don't think I've encountered any of these in my time living in Spartan Village. I am very grateful for that fact, and I am saddened that I am now being reminded of why I dislike Loud Student Parties so intensely. There is a constant stream of bass noises coming through the ceiling. There are people half-yelling things indistinctly. And, most irritatingly of all, there are periodic shoutings of, "Woo."

They aren't Ric Flair. They don't have the right to say that. And they certainly don't have the right to interfere with the overtaking of one of the many obstacles between me and my degree.

I hate people when they're not polite...

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.

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.

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.