I was making my way to a table of friends at Trudy's when somebody stood up from his table to greet me. He turned out to be a former student of mine from my Perl class, who's now interning at a company that uses Perl for everything. It was my first concrete evidence that my teaching actually made a difference for somebody, and I have to admit it ( Read more... )

Argh. When I got my PowerBook back, I brought my data up to date by copying (well, rsyncing) everything from my external backup hard drive. I had formatted this hard drive using FAT16 for compatibility with our Windows machines. In hindsight, it's obvious that my backups wouldn't preserve my file permissions. In the absence of hindsight, I didn ( Read more... )

Tonight's season premiere of Heroes introduced still more cast members, making me wonder how I ever held so many characters in my head at once last season. Then the discussion afterwards reminded me of all the characters I had forgotten, which the premiere didn't have time to address. I hope the second season doesn't stretch itself too thin. ( Read more... )

At lunch today the topic of commercials came up in conversation, or maybe it was Dr. Pepper, or love. For whatever reason, I brought up my new favorite commercial. So effective is this particular commercial on me, so squarely do I seem to fall within its target audience, that I immediately developed a craving for Dr. Pepper. Unfortunately, after ( Read more... )

The beginning of this semester has been more hectic than it has any right to be. I'm developing code for every aspect of my academic life: my coursework and both my independent and lab research. I find this creative design work very engaging but very time consuming ( Read more... )

I remember talking to Nate a week or two ago about how I had always enjoyed taking classes and feared research. In the weeks leading up to this semester however, I began to perceive classes as somewhat of a distraction from my real work. Oddly enough, my growing ambivalence towards classes has reassured me about my decision to become a graduate ( Read more... )

Not much happened today. Tomorrow is the big exam in which the nonmajors will get to demonstrate their assembly language hacking and circuit building skillz. I held two separate office hours today instead of the usual one, and I had a couple of visitors the entire time. These included Ms. Jones and Ms. Smith, the two really cute girls (IMHO) in ( Read more... )

NJ: I attempt to teach von Neumann architecture and how to program in assembly to non-majors in 45 minutes.

DM: Hmm. Well, roll for it. You never know.

NJ: Hrm. Is critical failure bad?

DM: No, that's bad.

It occurs to me that I haven't gone shopping, except for quick grocery runs, all semester. Huh ( Read more... )

So far I have had just one visitor to my office hours. Her name was Radhika Dave. She seemed like a smart enough girl, but she just wasn't accustomed to thinking like a computer. I think I was able to help her. Towards the end she apologetically admitted to not being good at this kind of stuff and good-naturedly told me that I'd probably see a ( Read more... )