Time Flies

Wow, so a month has gone by since my last post... yeah, that's pretty much 'cause my family got back in town almost a month ago. Which is certainly a good thing.

...

And... wow. I wrote that about two weeks ago. Didn't get very far on that post, now, did I? Let's try this whole thing again, shall we?

So, it's been a long time since I last wrote anything; as I'm reminded by that first line above, my family was still out of town last time I published a post. Now they're back, summer is pretty much over*, and school started today. Right now I'm signed up for six classes/seventeen credits. If I stayed in all of them, I'd graduate this semester. But I'd probably have no job or family, and be little more than an empty shell sitting in the CS computer lab, mindlessly writing code; just about half of the core CS curriculum is on my schedule right now. So the plan is to attend a few sessions of each class, figure out how many of them I can juggle without going crazy, and drop the rest. As it stands now, the lineup is:

• CS372, comparative programming languages
• CS460, databases
• CS472, automata
• CS453, compilers
• CS397B, PHP+MySQL
• NS302, Navigation and Naval Operations

That last one is a Naval ROTC class that was added because I was told it would be an "Easy A", and I needed the upper-division credit. I usually view such claims with skepticism, but this one was made by the instructor, a Marine Corps officer who apparently I worked with both in DC and Okinawa; and now we're both here ~ it truly is a small world.

Anyhow, I've only been to one class so far, compilers. The instructor seemed pretty reasonable:

• Easy to understand
• Doesn't take attendance
• Doesn't allow much in the way of in-class interruptions
• Doesn't care if we comment our code
• Doesn't care if our code is pretty as long as it meets the specs
• There don't seem to be ANY group projects
  

The downside:

• This class will be a LOT of coding; I'd be writing a compiler that can handle a subset of C.
  

Unfortunately, I expect that particular downside to be true of most of my classes, so most likely, this one will stay.

* Though not in the "No more 100 degree days in Tucson" sense, of course.