On Classes And Projects

I finally got the rest of my textbooks in the mail from Amazon, so I can do all the (boring) recommended reading. I may have said something like this in my last post, but the first few chapters of any textbook seem rather unnecessary. If it's not things that are almost common knowledge, the ideas are simple enough that I can fully understand it from the lectures, and I don't need to read the chapters. Hopefully things will get more interesting over time.

Classes are progressing slowly; I don't have any real challenging work to do yet. My second real lab is tomorrow. Technically I should be having three or four of them a week, but right now it's only one or two, which leads to rather boring afternoons. Though sometimes it means shorter afternoons, since the labs go for two hours and the lectures (usually) only go for one hour. Which is nice.

I'm spending a fair amount of time with my team, since we all have the same classes and we have two big projects to work on. They're nice guys, and it's good to have friends outside the flat. One of our projects is the Instant Messaging System, the other is an in-class project about something like e-mail notifications, used to teach us how to do project planning and other aspects of software engineering. I don't see the point of having two projects at once except to test our ability to organize it all.

Another thing that's a little overwhelming is that in four out of five of my classes, 80% of my grade depends on my final exam. On top of that, I'm pretty sure all of my exams are in May, even for the classes I'm taking this term.

It's helpful, though, that I share a couple classes with two different flatmates. That means three out of the eleven people in my flat are in Computing Science (including me). If I need help at crunch time, I'll probably get it.

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NOTE: I've begun a new short story. Not quite sure how long it will be yet, or how often I will work on it, but here is the first part: http://elizabethmuir.blogspot.com/2010/10/dreams-part-1.html