School and Such

So school started a few weeks back. I am doing fifteen credits, five classes with three credits each. See I can still do math. All of my classes are Monday Wednesday and Friday, so on Monday mornings, I get up at 7:30-7:55 am depending on the day. Usually it is Lindsay who starts pushing and poking me saying “You have to go to class” “I’m too tired, just a few more minutes” “No, get up now.” “Okay. grumble grumble.” Then I turn on the sink and shower. This is a requirement with the tankless water heater, because for some reason the shower doesn’t pull enough hot water to turn the water heater on. Then I wait for about 5 minutes for the water to heat up. Finally I leave, hopefully before 8:10; I park at the bottom of Old Main Hill and make the walk up it and to the engineering building.

At 8:30 I have ECE 5530 Digital System Design. The professor is this nice little ?indian? guy. His english is good, so that works nicely. The class is fairly “easy” compared to some of the others, and focuses on designing digital systems (duh.) like counters, adders, latches, and flip-flops. I have a lab for this class Thursday morning at 7:30. We use a Linux-based design suite. (You will see this as kind of a trend.) Some notable people in my class are Zeke Susman, who I work with and has kind of been my trainer on the internship thing I’ve been doing. Also Nathan Breitenbeker. I have been with some classes with him in the past, but never really got to know him. You will soon find out why he is a notable person.

At 9:30 I walk clear across campus to the institute. I am taking the Gospels. I have the class with Lindsay. It is good. I kinda like her a lot. She is very cute. We are going through the four Gospels by author, which I am a fan of. We had to choose as a class between the “harmony” or individual approach. A=We are taking it from Brother Harding. He is a good crazy guy. Also in my class is a kid named Nathan Breitenbeker.

At 10:30 I walk back across campus to the engineering building. I have ECE 3620 Circuits and Signals. I fairly much hate this one. It is a bad mix of differential equations, electrical circuits, linear algebra, and hard. My professor is named Chet Lo. He is from Hong Kong. He also speaks mostly well. I have been able to do the assignments that we get once a week, but they take a goodly amount of hours. Nathan Breitenbeker is taking the same class at the same times as me.

At 11:30 I get a little break from all the exercise and only have to walk a short distance to the fine arts building. People there look weird. Well, I guess in the engineering building, people just look different levels of the same goofiness, but in the fine arts, you might see long wavy blonde haired boys in rocker attire (complete with skinny jeans), sad introverts with cutoff jeans, long white socks, and cowboy boots, girls seeming to be having make-up contests (see who can where the most…). etc. It is always exciting. I go there to study and appreciate the “Masterpeices of Music” (MUSC 3010, which I am taking for a depth creative arts credit.) I also have this one with Lindsay. She is still cute. Our professor is a nutter. She is a music lady, who talks like she is teaching preschoolers. We spent a few days with the elements of music (forte means loud…) Then watched some sweet and by sweet I mean lame VHSs about non-western music. One memorable quote. They were talking about a Japanese musician. They said “He died just a few years ago, in 1959.” Now we are starting Medieval music, like Gregorian chants. It reminds me of evensong. Mostly Lindsay and I play computer games. It is a good break.

At 12:30 I go across campus again, this time to Old Main. I have CS 3100 Operating Systems and Concurrency. Our professor is American. He speaks alright and isn’t even too0000 weird. Everytime I go to class, I remember why I am not a computer science major. Those guys are NERRRRRDY. In this class we do all of our programming on Linux. Some of them look and act like they are in love with it. They are dressed like geeks and lack social skills and stuff, but the class is pretty fun. There is one boy in my class named Nathan Breitenbeker. He isn’t too nerdy.

At 1:30 I trek back across campus to the engineering lab building. I have ECE 5930 Computer Systems. It is kind a weird thing, because it is also a distance education class, so all of the lectures and stuff get recorded so one person in some other place can watch and participate. It is a good class and I am learning a lot about assembly language, compilers, how computers work and all that stuff. Our first lab homework was to solve fifteen “puzzles” where you could only use bitwise operators and no flow control statements, like if-else statements, for loops, or anything like that. I spent a lot of time on it, like at the family reunion, and in my other classes, in the car, in the shower, during runs, etc. Lindsay can probably attest to the random mutterings of things like “100010001, wait, that doesn’t work,. 0100101010, ah, that might be better.” Kind of annoying, but she’s the one who married an engineer, not me. Our next lab is a data bomb. He gives us an executable (aka program). It asks for six passwords to defuse the bomb, or else it explodes and sends him an email and we lose points. I have to decompile it and then examine the assembly code and figure it out. It takes my whole brain. If Lindsay talks to me while I am working on it, sometimes I freeze up and have to reboot. My lab partner is someone by the name of Nathan Breitenbeker. He is sometimes helpful. Also, we use the Linux Lab computers.

After all these classes, I sometimes go back to the Linux lab to work on one of my many assignments. Then I walk all the way back across campus and to my car. Six trips across campus per day. Who needs to exercise. I go to work if it isn’t too late, usually one to two times per week, for two hours. I come home and do other stuff and homework.

On Tuesdays, I get up fairly early because Lindsay has an early lab, and I go to work. I work 8 or so hours and then come home. It is good. Right now I am starting this little project to research and find a replacement embedded real-time operating system for our VCUs. Embedded systems and real-time operating systems are two classes that I still have to take in the future, so I am kind of swimming in deep water. I mostly understand what I am doing, at least enough to do it, and I keep asking questions so I don’t get too lost. Also I work for 6 hours or so, so I work between 15 and twenty hours.

So that is school and work. The end.