Overwhelmed Yet?

The weeks are flying by, blurring together. Work is steadily piling on. I've worked a lot on one project the past few days, but I have many more waiting to be truly started.

A list of all my projects:

• An Instant Messenger program (as a group), for which I am mostly designing and implementing the interface (this one lasts all year, the others are done by December)
• An email notification system (as a group), which is mostly to practice the process of planning projects and writing reports rather than learning to code
• A program that takes a mailing list, reads through it, and tells you of any possible duplicates
• A web-based calendar like Google Calendar (as a group), but we're all focusing on the interface design because it's for my human-computer interaction class
• A program that takes a long list of words and creates "word ladders" from them (i.e., given "flour" and "bread", it comes up with "flour → floor → flood → blood → brood → broad → bread")
• Extending a compiler (which I don't know much about yet)
• One more that I will get tomorrow in class, and I know nothing about.

The mailing list program is the one I spent all weekend on. I was really stuck for a long time, and today I finally went to see my professor about helping me. He pointed out the problem to me in the half hour I was in his office, then I spent twenty minutes coding, and it was fixed. Sometimes it really isn't worth trying to learn things without help. Or overestimating your abilities.

There's a bit more I could do for that program tonight, but I'm stuck again, and this part isn't a big portion of my grade. So I decided to leave it for tomorrow's lab, where I can get help from the teacher again or a TA. Instead I hope to go out to the student union with some flatmates to get a break from nonstop lectures-labs-study-sleep.

Oh, and this weekend: more shopping downtown, and then Halloween. Which will be epic.

Photo: A group of street performers just after playing something on a busy street in the city centre. Note: it is a typical occurrence to see groups like this on a downtown street. I love it.

Differences

Classes have been going for a month now. It doesn't feel like it's been that long. Maybe more like two weeks. I'm definitely getting more work to do, but I'm not feeling extreme pressure (yet). Perhaps in the next couple weeks, when I get a few more projects from my teachers...

I've learned a few things (that don't have to do with computer science). The term "candy" is very rarely used here. Instead, "chocolate" or "sweets" is typical. Something I've already mentioned: "chips" means "fries" and "crisps" means "chips." Yeah, confusing. When talking about paper money, a "fiver" (or "tenner") is their equivalent of "five dollar bill," instead of saying something like "five pound note." Also, "can't be arsed" means "can't be bothered." And Irn Bru (popular bright orange soda) is intensely sweet.

The list of things I miss about home is growing, at least food-wise: easily accessible Asian food (including sushi and noodles), Skippy peanut butter, Kraft Parmesan cheese (for pasta), pop tarts, and chocolate chips. I'll probably add to that list over time. I mean, how do they not have chocolate chips? Chocolate "chunks" just aren't the same...

All that aside, Scotland's been good to me so far. Even if it doesn't always feel this way, I'm sure there's more good to come.

Mornings

Work's starting to hit me, so it's been less convenient to blog. Or maybe that's just an excuse.

I've begun to jog in the morning, and today was the first day. I finally have proper shoes for it. Last week I went to the park across the street from my flat and checked it out for running, and took some amazing pictures. I went early, so the sun had just come up. You can see all of Glasgow from a viewpoint at the park. With a place like that so close to my flat, I don't have a good reason not to get some exercise.

I also found out for sure that I don't have any exams in December. Good news: I get to have a month-long Christmas and New Year break, and I bought my plane tickets home yesterday. Bad news: I have nine exams in May. Yes, nine. Four of which are for classes that will have been over for five or six months. And all of them count for 80% of my grade for that class, except one that's worth 50% (though I've already mentioned this). It's just overwhelming.

Otherwise, I'm making good friends, going out on the weekends sometimes, and generally having a good time. Now, I've got to get some sleep before classes tomorrow.

Cheers!

~

Photo: One of the pictures I took at the park, posted on deviantART. I photoshopped it a bit, but the original pictures are gorgeous too. Physically being there in the quiet morning air was better, of course.

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.

~

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