I missed all my classes today because I had to go to court. The police officer who gave me my ticket was in the hospital and was unable to come to court (hah). As such, the prosecutor reduced my sentence from 85 in 55 to 78 in 55. The judge waived the fine and assigned me 40 hours of community service, to be completed within six months. In recitation, the students took a test.
I got checked off on my multiprocess paging assignment for Computer Architecture. In Economics we had our last test before the final. Adam and I went in search of K-Mart, but never found it. Adam wanted to buy the latest Audioslave CD. Disapointed, Adam and I instead went shopping at Publix for groceries.
In Health, we talked more about heart disease. In Computer Architecture, the teacher went over thread synchronization and synchronization methods, such as spin locks. Bored out of my mind, I decided to skip my remaining classes and head back to the apartment. I studied lots of Economics tonight.
I made shrimp alfredo for lunch. I installed and configued Quack, a Scheme-mode for EMACS. I wasted most of the day listening to the 8 Mile soundtrack. Nicky and I watched Monster’s Inc. and afterwards went to Waffle House.
I slept quite well. Nicky, Adam, and I went to the AMC Theater to grab tickets early for the Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets evening showing. It was a great movie - lots of humor, special effects, and relatively true to J.K. Rowling’s book series. Gilderoy Lockhart was exactly as I had imagined him when watching the film.
It rained again today. In Computer Architecture, we had a quiz on the round-robin paging algorithm, and covered threads and interprocess communication. In Statistics, the teacher lectured on two-way ANOVA. We also had a quiz. And in Circuit Analysis, we discussed the transfer function and the Bode plot. Luke introduced me to theorem provers.
At night, several TAs (Luke, Drew, Sanjay, Juan, to name a few) and I left the College of Computing for dinner at BBQ Corner III, a chinese restaurant. I had BBQ ribs and duck. Afterwards, we watched the 10 PM showing of 8 Mile at Regal Cinema. We really wanted to watch Harry Potter but it was sold out.
After the events of the previous night, waking up at 6 AM was a very tortorous event. In Economics we discussed Gross Domestic Product (GDP). My IBM hard drive arrived today, and I promptly installed it after returning back to the apartment. I then took my ritualistic Thursday evening nap.
The day began as usual. In Health, we talked about heart disease. Computer Architecture was cancelled, and I finished my multiprocess paging simulation. I also had a test in Circuit Analysis. In recitation, the students learned about graphics and basic graph algorithms, primarily breadth-first and depth-first searching.
After recitation, I left for the ECE Computer Lab to meet with several Digital Design Lab TAs to go to Burrito Art for dinner and trivia night. The dinner was graciously paid for by Dr. Collins, the Digital Design Lab professor. I ordered a steak burrito, and it was very tasty. It also came with a fortune cookie. I guess that’s where the ‘art’ part comes in. Our table was in first place for most of the night. We missed the last question, and it bumped us all the way down to 3rd place. That was sad. Still, I had a good time, and met some new people. And hey - free food!
I went to bed later than usual that night.
The weather was quite nice outside, despite the moments of light rain throughout the afternoon. In Economics, we began our introduction to macroeconomics. My PIC microcontrollers from Microchip also arrived in the mail today. The night was spent studying problems for Circuit Analysis.
In Statistics, we covered one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), and looked at various computational formulas. In Computer Architecture, we discussed preemptive and non-preemptive scheduling algorithms, including shortest-job-first (SFJ), priority, round robin, and multilevel queueing. In Circuit Analysis, we had a substitute teacher. We were introduced to frequency response.