televised and diagnosed

Now that makes twice this week I've been on TV. Sunday, singing the National Anthem. Tonight, on TVO's "Going Global", with my POL108 class. Thursday is the midterm for CSC263 (10am, 8 hours away) and the callback for the National Anthem singery.

And I'm taking salmeterol-fluticasone and Biaxin for what turns out to be a Bronchitis infection, a big chunk of the reason I've been so brain-dead and strung-out the past few weeks.

And I handed in my CSC363 with a brief reprieve based on my illness.

Yay.

musical update of dooooom

A few of us TX alums (Sahra, Matt, Meg, Dave, I) went down to the ACC, we were looking for a gig to play.

We sang the national anthem while warming up. The CBC guys there saw us; filmed us; put us in a segment.

We went into the Pt(78) lounge under the ACC, gave 'em our renditions of O Canada, and The Star-Spangled Banner.

Apparently liking what they saw and heard, they called us back.

I'm reviewing solutions to the second assignment. Good Lord some of that stuff is complicated. I should check out the Graph, Lazy, and Verification problems -- though the Calculator thing has usage of "Apply" which makes a difference...

two for now

There are two extant challenges facing me at the moment, besides the ideas for the game programming club's upcoming competition. (I'm currently thinking: "Paddletech", "By a Very Thin Thread", and "Ping Semeitai!") They are the midterm on CSC324 -- with all Sorts of Scary Scheme Syntax to digest -- and the assignment for CSC363 -- with all sorts of Turing Machines to explain and work out.

Not a ton of progress made on either, at the moment.

Singing was fairly busy today, and will be likewise in the morning. With the Varsity Jews I sang at a Bar Mitzvah at Holy Blossom Temple today. That was sort of neat. I had to solidify the two songs we were singing; I really didn't need to have the binder with me since that didn't make any difference whatsoever; I was too nervous to look at it. And I practiced with a subset of Tonal Ecstasy Alumni (Matt, Sahra, Meg and Dave) for an audition tomorrow. Basically, in case there actually is a hockey season this year, the Air Canada Centre will need a few people (or groups thereof) to sing the National Anthems before various games. This little quintet is hoping to be one of those groups.

I guess we'll see.

The computer assignment and midterm really should have taken some precedence. But I'm trying to make them coexist, and along with that, to have some time to be otherwise creative.

And yet, still sick and unendingly exhausted...

I belive a :P smiley is in order.

graph theory

If you ever get a chance to see or here Prof. Derek Corneil speak, I highly recommend it. He is awesome. He makes graph theory.... connect (I hate myself).

I met Profs Roweis and Balakrishnan today, not realizing that they were, indeed, they. Funny. And I saw Prof Wilson, playing chess with Michelle.

Michelle, as it turns out, is Prof Deibert's CitizenLab honcho in the area in which I'm working on my paper. So I am... subordinate to her.

Oh dear.

not real news

Being pretty sick influenced me to miss two fairly important lectures today: Prof C's lecture on Kant, and Prof P's lecture beginning the idea of complexity theory.

I need to sit down tomorrow morning before school and write out the following on the Major Calendars (the portable one, and either the Big Desk One or the Little Dresser One):

1. The due dates of all assignments for all courses -- 108, 263, 320, 324, 363
2. The dates of all tests for all courses -- 108, 263, 320, 324, 363
3. The office hour schedules for all courses
4. The Study Sections for all courses, and what'll need to be covered and when
5. A "homework catch-up" for all courses as well.

Also going to grab some transcripts for me mother, viz her SSHRC proposal.

And then?

Tomorrow... Derek Corneil gives a little speech; I'd missed both the Microsoft and EA sessions this week due to sickness and urgency of 324 assignment. I will start the 363 assignment tomorrow night after Varsity Jews choir and Synagogue choir. I will start studying for the 324 and 263 midterms on Friday.

I've gotten to the point where the assignments aren't ever going to be "late" again. Now I just need to unlearn the concept of "too early", as M R has suggested. In Hillel's words, "If not now, when; if not for myself, then for whom?"

Or, as per the Categorical Imperative, I must act in such a way as to be able to will that the maxim for my action be a universal moral law. Which basically means "whatever you have to do, get it done with time to spare" is really how I hope people would think in general.

So I should think that way in particular.

Hmm.

state

Question 2 is half-finished.

Question 3 is done.

Question 4 is in progress.

Question 5 is being attempted.

Questions 6-8 are apparently lost causes.

That's 35/75 if all goes right.

That's bad.

324 > 320?

I barely slept and feel awful. Not awful enough to be able to justify not finishing the 324 work, but awful enough not to be able to attent Political Science 320 in which Kant's Grounding on the Metaphysics of Morals will be presented by Prof. Chambers. I've asked her whether I'd be able to make the class up later, or attend office hours to that effect, and I've asked somebody in the class whether notes would be obtainable.

But to be honest, though it causes me spiritual pain to miss this lecture, it really is the only thing that can be defended, both medically and academically.

we meet again

Okay, so that digression into 263 wasn't altogether productive, and I'm getting back to 324. We learned the basics of ML today, and dweeby me managed to figure out what "ML" stands for. Also, we got to see Strong Typing in action, Java-style. I actually liked the little historical discussion on Algol 60: I didn't realize how far back all of those syntactical decisions went, which look so lame and illogical in C and Java.

Algol 60's history tells us something profound: that it used to be even worse, and that they had to beat the lexical structure with a stick to make it look more like pseudocode. And then C came along and made it look like Machine Language again (no, that's not what ML stands for...)

ow, Mr. T

Well, so Clubber wins the first round again. I didn't get much of assignment 2 done at all, mostly due to anxiety and exhaustion. I need to go hand in the vestiges now, but I'm not losing hope.

I just need to start the next assignment right away.

Dammit.

ADDENDUM: And whatever I'm handing in, it's NOT GOING TO BE LATE.

an uphill battle

Hmm... unfortunately this is the part where I confront my assignment from "Class 263", the class that beat me last time. But just like in The Legend of Zelda, Custom Robo or Super Monkey Ball 2, one defeat does not a story make. Just like in Rocky III, I shall harden and inure myself and rise to Class 263's Clubber Lang of an assignment... and I shall defeat it, as Robocop beat ED-209.

With a massive handheld cannon.

more victory

We're on a roll: I've crammed more working programs into my "submit" directory. I've managed to make little "selector" programs, though I need to specify my by-contract stuff.

All in all, I think I'm getting the hang of the basics.

Now for a school day... then the theory questions. Ack!

SCOOOOOOOOOOOORE!

WOOOOHOOOOOO!

I did it! First try, no errors, wrote the recursive procedure I needed for assignment 2 part 2.

I did it.

I can do it.

Take that, sense of crushing despair.

and still going...

Well, making that blog entry didn't get the procedure written. But that doesn't mean I'm giving up. Forward!

(note: I submitted this post via e-mail. Isn't zhat veird?)

curse, then recurse

I've written some recursive procedures now. I am attempting to generate my own such procedure ex nihilo. Wish me luck, all. I think I can do it. The logic looks sound. The question is, can I do it instinctively, at 2:15am, or should I sleep so that I can meet my sadly underestimated commitments tomorrow? Because I really don't want to deal with those commitments. I'd rather try to get my work done. It seems like I never can.

But this part, at least, I will get done. Because I now know how to do it. You know what? I'll keep at it 'till 2:30 and then call it a night.

progredio

I've made a bit of headway -- basically kicking a couple of stupid MS things out of my system config, and then getting a bunch of assignment pages loaded. And so I march onward! I've managed to do some fun compound procedures and tracing, and that's encouraging. I was able to point a fellow student to PSFTP so that he could upload/download files to his CDF account.

Bryce has generously offered to give me Scheme guidance, though he'd personally rather work on the game we're trying to concoct. (for which X-Men Legends has suddenly become a dramatic inspiration!) I may take him up on it, but for some reason I can't formulate my questions in a useful way right now.

Oh well.

I'm hitting the Allowed Procedures List to figure out what I can or can't use on the assignment questions. That will help focus my reading. :P

And the printer's not only nearly dead; it's really most sincerely dead. Further tongue-protrusion.

things get worse

Printer just died. I can't print out the new specs to the assignment which have been revised again, just a few days ago, and it turns out that my old version of the assignment was missing big chunks.

This whole semester is starting to go downhill. My body's falling apart, my schoolwork is falling apart, my relationship fell apart a while ago but is still subjecting me to stress, and this whole rant really belongs on the Kinra blog... or LJ... or something.

Anyway, I know that I can wrap my head around this stuff, but I've just re-read the specs and it's jarring. They want rationale; do they want proof? Why doesn't Prof. M have any autonomy in how this class is taught and run? There are mysterious TA cabals, capricious decisions by Prof. P, and bizarre and byzantine methods of deciding when we get access to the course materials.

Ack. For now I just want to try to finish these assignments. And yet no further progress has been made.

et alia

I've made a minidecision, which is to expand this blog's purview to include Political Science mumbo-jumbo I may encounter in my journey to the west. Oh, and note that my little essay project is gonna fit in along the border between the two (POL and CSC) which is as it should be.

So, I guess I should congratulate myself on cracking a little bit of the assignment, specifically the "min-max" thing where you get a list of values and can return the minimum or the maximum thereof. I've done a little "cond" thing with gt/lt ops and a little "car/cdr" thing and I'm going to mush them together in a joyous union.

And... let's see. I figured out a lot of the assignment for CSC263. The programming part, though, with its consequent testing, is going to hurt like hell. So it's still going to be 324 for a few hours at least.

Scheme!

Schemes I'm Scheming

I'm mucking about with Scheme on the road to completing the second programming assignment in CSC324 at the University of Toronto.

More as, well, this story develops or something. So far I've convinced myself that I can competently compose Lambda expressions and do a bit of listy stuff. If I can get car-cdr recursion happening, I'll be a happy recognizer indeed.

Unpleasantness

I'm not sure that this was the most forthright way to get a blog started. Kant would be irked; I'm not exactly doing this in a categorical-imperative above-the-board way. Still, I have a blog, called "recognizer", here on blogspot now. And so I can participate in the conversation on this forum as well.

Good work.

But evil.