Musings from the Comfy Lounge

So I am writing what I believe to be my frist post from the Comfy Lounge in the MC (my previous posts have been almost exclusively written from the SLC Great Hall or from my room in V1, with the exceptions of the 2 or 3 I wrote over my work term). As I sit here, the first thing I think of is how much I need a new pair of earphones considering my left one crackles and breaks up and the case that came with them broke a couple weeks ago when I dropped it on cement by accident. But that probably doesn’t interest any of you. I’ll get to the point, as there are several:

First off, my CS exam went just as predicted. With the exception of the confusing question I mentioned in my last post, I lost 1 mark on the entire exam. I didn’t in fact, miss any pages (thank God!), although a lot of course material was mysteriously absent from the test. On the other hand, it seems there is a great divide in CS 241 between pre-midterm and post-midterm. Before the midterm the course was pretty easy and the homework was quick, but the last assignment (*technically* next assignment considering it’s due tomorrow although I finished it on Monday) took me about 2 or 3 hours (about 6 or 7 including time it took to debug my first program and figuring out how best to do the 3rd one). It’s still nothing time-wise compared to CS134, though, where every programming assignment took me a good 5 hours easy (due to sheer volume of code required and not much else). This week’s assignment had to do with scanning. Unfortunately I can’t think of a way to get into detail about exactly what that means without taking up a lot of space and annoying the tl;dr people (for those who don’t get the reference, “tl;dr” is short for “too long; didn’t read”). Next week’s assignment is on parsing (which is hard to explain unless I explain scanning first), and then 2 assignments on code generation (where you basically, with the help of a scanner and parser, read in a program in one language and output it in binary so it can run on a computer). By the end of Assignment 10, I’ll have written a complete compiler for an incredibly rudimentary language (a very small subset of Java called “WL”). I have no idea what Assignment 11 will be then, but we’ll see.

Continuing in chronological order, I’ve dropped Math 146. I wasn’t doing particularly poorly in it (my estimated grade overall in the course to date is about 75%), but the assignments were taking a very long time to do and were just doing generally nasty things to my schedule (particularly the part of my schedule where I’d prefer to be sleeping). As such, I’ve dropped (unfortunately) to Math 136, which will have less homework (time-wise) but will also be much less fun (given the absence of Professor Marcoux, who is awesome) and be absent of the people I’ve become friends with in the Advanced Math classes. Oh well…there’s always Facebook and MSN

From what I’ve seen from my friends taking Math 136, they’re doing now what we did in Math 146 in the first 2 or 3 weeks of class. Then again, they’ve also been doing for the past 2 months what we just started (Interjection: MAN, I HATE THESE BLOODY EARPHONES!!!…sorry). It seems like it’s going to be really easy though; on Assignment 1 or 2 in Math 146 we were asked to prove a theorem. In Math 136 on this week’s assignment, they were asked to give a counterexample to the inverse of the same theorem (yeah, a single example, no proof, no generality, nothing, just a single counterexample. Now you know why I liked the advanced sections…). Oh well…I’ll grin and bear it for a month, get my 90, and get out. Not like it can be too much worse than Math 138…

Speaking of Math 138, the first Maple Lab was returned. Basically a Maple Lab is an assignment using a computer program called Maple (which is free to use on the UW servers but can be purchased from the CHIP for $21) where they give you a bunch of commands and a set of questions and tell you to use the commands to answer the questions. They’re really easy, but really time-consuming. As it turned out, my printer somehow forgot to print the last page of the assignment, but Nataliya allowed me to redo that page for credit, which I did. She seems like a really nice person, but she really needs to learn to teach better…*sigh*…

Course material-wise, we (somehow) finished Epsilon-Delta in about a week (don’t ask me how you can cover E-D in only a week…we spent about 2 months on it in Math 147…) and are dealing with limits of sequences and series (which I believe we glossed over in Grade 12 at my high school and did using E-D in Math 147) right now. I honestly have no idea how we’ve managed to spend about a week on that, since the basic premise is “the limit of a sequence is equal to the limit of the function defining that sequence”. But oh well…

Breaking chronological order for a moment, as I don’t think I’ve mentioned it, the Circuits midterm marks were posted the other day (I didn’t actually get my exam back, but given my mark and the amount of questions I answered, I can pretty much guess where I went right and wrong, as my estimate for my maximum possible mark on the exam based on what I answered was about 3% off what I got). I passed by a fairly wide margin (compared to what I was expecting anyway). I’ve spoken to a couple people who have taken DHW in the past and they said ECE 222 (which I’m taking next term in lieu of CS251) is pretty easy, so I think I’ll stick with DHW (assuming I make it past Circuits). If the current trend continues, I’m expecting somewhere between a 65 and 70 overall in the course by the end, and I’m OK with that given the material and the marking spread on the midterm (after doing a quick analysis of the exam marks in MS Excel, I found I’m about 4 spaces short of dead middle of the class mark-wise, and considering a good chunk of the class is repeating the course, I’m satisfied with that).

I think the big problem with Circuits is that the assignments don’t at all prepare you for the exams. In the textbook and tutorials and such, they deal with very easy problems; you are given 4 or 5 elements, a voltage or current source, usually obviously in series or parallel, and there may or may not be a trick to it, but it’s very rudimentary. Then on the exam, Professor El-Saadany prepares a huge circuit with 15+ elements, 7-10 sources (both Voltage and Current, some dependent some independent), most of which are neither in series nor parallel, and then you’re expected to solve it. That’s probably the biggest problem with the course; the preparatory material doesn’t do its job. Oh well, we’ll see what comes of it at the end…

Jumping back to chronological order, but still on the topic of Circuits, something kinda weird happened yesterday. Every Wednesday I have a 3-hour session of class blocked off as a lab. 4 times during the term we have a real lab (the second was last week, in which I got a very good mark despite doing an assignment by myself that was intended for 2 people), and the other times we have what is called a CDT. Basically a CDT is a 3-hour open-book test where there are TAs who help with questions and such. A couple of the TAs are really good, but some of them are not so much. So anyway, there was a CDT yesterday. My group had finished 3 of the 10 questions and were about halfway through the 4th when there was a 30-second blackout in the WEEF lab (the main Engineering computer lab in E2), which shut off all the computers, meaning we had to start over, an hour into the session. Instead of making us do that, though, they decided instead to let us finish for the day. I’m not exactly sure how it’ll be graded (considering my group had gotten none wrong of the first 3 questions while a friend of mine had lost 10 marks of the 6 or 7 her group had answered, so it wouldn’t be fair to give a mark based on current progress). So I basically got a free 2-hour break yesterday afternoon. And for those wondering why the WEEF lab doesn’t have backup power, I wondered that myself before thinking “why do I care? I get free marks and a 2-hour break from class”

We got our midterms back in Japanese class last night. As predicted, I once again did well in it. I made sure it made up for the fact that I botched the first term test, and it did. I did make a couple silly mistakes (notably mixing up the words for “to walk” and “to open”, which are very similar…apparently you can walk windows…or something…I dunno…), which I attribute to screwing up 2 midterms in the 2 days prior. Next week is our reading test where we have to recite a passage from the textbook and we get graded on how well we speak. In 101, we had to memorize the passage, which is why I completely screwed it up, but this term Misato-sensei says we can read from the textbook and memorizing will be worth bonus marks. Learning my lesson from 101, I’m going to give up the bonus marks, since I think I can do a really good job of it if I read it over a couple times and understand what I’m saying and use the textbook as a guide to where I am at any point.

In other Japan 102 news, we’ve been given our final term project. It’s the exact same as 101: Write a short skit (10-15 minutes) on any topic you want as long as you try to use as much vocabulary from 102 as possible and use very little from outside the course. Unfortunately, one of my group members doesn’t see it the same way I do, so we’ve decided to try to take a Japanese fairy tale and modernize it so it can be more “meaningful”. I dunno…we’ll see how it turns out since 4 of my group members (out of 5) are in favour of the idea. I just hope we can do a good job of it, especially considering the story was originally written in native Japanese, which we are nowhere near. I equate it to trying to tell the story of Snow White to someone with rudimentary conversational English knowledge (and thus having no idea what the words “dwarf”, “witch”, “magic”, etc. even mean). But they didn’t like my alternative idea, so we’ll see how it works out. I just hope we don’t waste too much time on his idea if it turns out he’s wrong…

And that’s pretty much a quick rundown of the past week as it’s been here. As always, feel free to contact me at uwmathblogger@gmail.com if you have any questions or comments. Until next time,

Lyle Waldman

5 down, n to go (for some n (- [1, 2], n (- Z)

W00t! I’ve had a midterm for every one of my courses! And now I’m done! (for about a week and a half till my Math 138 second midterm…)

CS241 was pure easy. Like, if I could name a course that had a really easy midterm, it would definitely be that one. It was easy on the order of CS134 (well, then again, I know people who have trouble with CS134, so I suppose I should say…well, no…I can’t say it was *easier*, because it wasn’t. It was just different.). I definitely should have studied more for it though. Not that I did particularly badly (I’m putting my range preemptively based on how I felt at the time at somewhere between 87% and 94%), but I studied for it only slightly more than I studied for Math 138. Not that it posed a problem given the end result (or the pre-end result).

What I liked about the CS241 midterm was that it was almost entirely theoretical. If you knew your theory really well but couldn’t read or write Assembly or Java to save your life, you could have easily managed a high-70, if not an 80. On the other hand, if you had no clue what was going on in the class theory-wise but had post-doc command of Assembly and Java, you still wouldn’t be able to pass. It was that kind of thing. Then again, CS theory is right up my alley, so I found it pretty easy. What I didn’t like was that a couple of the questions were phrased ambiguously which caused me to lose a couple marks on the last question because I wasn’t sure what the question was trying to ask; there were 3 possible answers given the phrasing of the question, and after asking Nomair about it twice, I still had no idea what I was supposed to do, so I picked one and went with it, but showed my work so I’ll probably wind up with 1 or 2 out of 4 on that question.

My only fear about it now is that since it was such a long exam (11 pages!), there’s a chance I may have missed a page…that happened to me once in high school where I had a 13 or 14-page Math exam and got 0 on a page because the pages stuck together and I didn’t see it. The reason I think this may have happened was because there was a lot (and I mean A LOT) of course material that wasn’t covered on the exam (like a good 1/4 of what we’ve done so far). I triple-checked my exam (yeah, I finished that early), so I doubt that happened, but I just hope it didn’t…

In other news, the Math 138 midterm was returned. As predicted, I failed. Oh well…it’s only worth half the midterm grade…it just means my maximum mark in the course is now about 90% instead of 100%, and I’m going to study my ass off for the second midterm in a couple weeks (although given that it’s likely going to be mostly differential equations and trivial e-d…). It sucks to fail a test though, especially when you know that you could have easily gotten a 90+ with an hour’s worth of studying…oh well, lesson learned and no point crying over spilt milk…

On the topic of failing, Professor El-Saadany said our Circuits midterms are going to be handed back on Thursday. I can’t wait [/sarcasm].

On a slightly different topic, some of you may have noticed the title of this entry. I’m considering dropping down from Math 146. Not because the course is particularly difficult or obtuse, but it’s just insanely time-consuming. Each assignment takes a good 5 or 6 hours to do, which is just way too much given I have 4 courses this term which each give me non-trivial homework and a fifth which gives me optional homework I’m unable to do because I’m so damned busy with the other 4. I’m also somehow not enjoying Math 146 as much as I enjoyed Math 145…I don’t really know why…probably the homework issue…I think I’ll talk to Professor Marcoux about it tomorrow after I hand in my assignment and I’ll see what he has to say. If Math 136 is just as time-consuming, I may stay in, but I don’t really know the course differences, and he’ll probably be able to give me a good handle on what I should do. Also, I believe the Math 13X courses all have 2 midterms, meaning if I was to drop down, I’d have 7 midterms instead of the 6 previously advertised (9 if you include the Japan 102R term tests).

In other other news, those of you subscribing to the Admitted Students Forum might have heard about a lecture series Professor Ragde is giving (apparently the one today wasn’t the first). I went to his lecture today which was primarily on thread manipulation in Scheme. Of course, as I took CS134 and not 135, I had no idea what was going on half the time (ok, not quite, as PR (as he is commonly known on the forum) had taught me a bit of Scheme over my last work term via e-mail, but I was lost for the most part), but I got the kinds of concepts he was talking about and it was actually pretty interesting and I learned a lot (most of which will likely come in handy when I take CS350 in a year or so *shudders*). After the lecture, one of the other people there (of course, I was the only one there who hadn’t formally learned Scheme before *sigh*) was discussing what I presume was an assignment question with PR and I was listening in and I found out about a really neat data structure I’ll share with you (unfortunately it’s already almost the end of June so you are all probably in exam season so none of you will be able to take advantage of this, but it’s interesting anyway if you’re a CS geek like me). Basically it’s a special binary tree built using an algorithm that emulates a LinkedList except each method is run in log(n) time (LinkedList methods generally run in n time, while array methods generally run in either constant time or n^2 time…you’ll learn all about time efficiency in CS134 and likely also 135 or 136). If I ever get the chance to implement it somewhere, I’m going to do some code analysis on it and see exactly how it ticks. Unfortunately, by the construction of the course, getting into any further detail than that won’t help you in CS134, although it would be awesome if it did. I’m planning on going to the (apparently last) lecture in PR’s series next Tuesday, and this time it won’t conflict with my CS241 midterm.

That’s about it for now. I can’t wait till tomorrow when I finally get my Japan 102R midterm back…As always, if you have any questions, feel free to e-mail me at uwmathblogger@gmail.com.

Lyle Waldman

So many posts…so little time…

Well, for my 4th post this week (or first post this week, depending on whether your week begins on a Sunday or Monday), I’m going to put a little bit of a less-emo spin on it, and try to get out a lot of material in the 10 minutes I’ve allotted myself (it’s 10-to-midnight as I begin and I’m a bit tired so I want to get a lot of sleep tonight). Jaa, hajimarimashou! (for those who don’t speak Japanese, that is roughly equivalent to “so, let’s begin!”)

Well, for starters, I haven’t gotten any of my terrible terrible midterms from last week back yet. Apparently they’re all marked though, as Professor El-Saadany said the class average was 70% on the midterm, and apparently a couple people got 98%! Don’t ask me how…Perhaps if you convert that number to binary and flip the bits you’ll get somewhere closer to my mark…To be honest, I think I’d be better off not finding out what that mark was. At least if the same types of problems appear on the final, I’ll be ready for them, eh? Shoot for a 75 now so it doesn’t drop my average too bad…oh well…

Shoot. 5 minutes left. I’m not sure if this was covered in my last post, but apparently what I wrote on Monday was only half of my Math 138 midterm. That could be good or bad. On the good side, if I failed (which I think I probably did because I got too cocky with it, not because the material was particularly obtuse or difficult), it means I can theoretically get up to 75% of the 30% of the midterm grade, meaning I can still get up to a theoretical 93% on my final grade (roughly; doing fast math in my head as I write). On the bad side, it means I have to go through that all over again. Oh well. I won’t get as cocky about it next time, and I’ll actually open my textbook…

Speaking of Math 138, for those of you who aren’t sure about doing Math 147, apparently you can’t escape from the awesome awesomeness (take that with whatever level of sarcasm you deem appropriate) that is Epsilon-Delta. That’s right. We’re doing E-D in Math 138 now. But it’s not the obtuse, hard stuff from Math 147, no it isn’t. Instead, the E-D section of your homework assignment this week (which I made a point of getting done this weekend) was a linear function (mx+b!) and a constant function. So…yeah…trivial cases ftw!

And it is now midnight. Oh well. I have more to say, time be damned.

It appears there was more to CS241 than it appeared. In Friday’s tutorial Colin (the TA, who is awesome) went over the material and he managed to span 3 blackboards using bubble diagrams based on material to study for the final. That’s not saying *that* much, considering his bubbles were pretty big, but it makes me think that this might be an exam worth studying for. I’ve taken good notes in class that I’ll read over and Colin’s hosting a Q&A session in the place of Tuesday’s lecture which I’ll go to, and hopefully that’ll be sufficient. To be honest, I didn’t think we did that much…

And I swore to myself after last term that this would never happen again, and it didn’t, but it almost did. I *almost* pulled an all-nighter Thursday night. Unforutnately, having 3 midterms to study for 3 days in a row and not studying the weekend before and not having any time on one of the days makes for some very very bad times, and by “bad times” I mean “staying up till 3:30 am doing Math 146 homework”. Luckily this time I had done my CS241 homework a few days in advance, so I didn’t have that keeping me up like I did last term. Unfortunately for one of my friends who stayed up till 3:30 with me, he was not so lucky. To be honest, I have no idea how one can spent more than 30 hours awake in a continuous span. I just can’t do it. At 3:30 I went back to my room and crashed for 4 hours, after which time I went (groggily) to my Circuits, Algebra, Calculus, and CS tutorial. At some point I have to read over the Algebra notes I took that day; they’re cohesive (barely), but I was writing without actually thinking about what was going on. At 12:30 I had 2 choices: I could go back to my room and sleep for another 4 hours until Cheese Club (and risk missing Cheese Club), or I could stay up, go to Cheese Club, and crash afterwards. I chose the latter. Good thing too; there was some particularly good cheese on Friday. After Cheese Club, I walked (groggily) to my room and promptly crashed, intending on sleeping till about 10, waking up, having some dinner, perhaps watching some anime, and then going to sleep again around midnight or 1 am until about 10 or 11. That didn’t quite work. I wound up waking up at about 2:30 am and tossing and turning for about the next hour or so, waking up again at 6, 8, and finally getting out of bed at about 10 am after roughly 16 hours of almost-sleep. Despite my sleep clock being thrown completely off, I managed to get most of my homework for the week done (except Math 146), so I’m pretty much in the clear and easy this week. This makes for some very fun times.

As the job search goes, I apparently do not suck quite as much as my last post would have one believe. Despite what I would consider a terrible interview (I wasn’t able to answer a lot of their knowledge-based questions, didn’t have any questions to ask them, and only took about 20 minutes of the allotted 30), I ended up actually getting the RIM job (yeah, that’s right, laugh all you like…I got a RIM job, ha ha ha). It’s going to be fun. RIM is really close to campus (next door, literally) so I don’t have to give up my DDR for 4 months, and they’re going to let me take Japan 201R during my work term, which is awesome. On top of all of that, they give me a BlackBerry to carry around for 4 months! It’s like they say: He who dies with the most toys wins, eh? Now if only I can think of a way to get them to let me keep the thing after I finish work…:D Now all I have to do is find a place to live, although I hear Columbia Lake Village has co-op openings (CLV is on the northwest corner of campus, while RIM is along the East edge, so it’s about a 15-20 minute walk to work in the morning, which isn’t bad…it’s comparable to the distance from V1 to the Engineering quad), and then I have to learn to cook…stupid cooking…I just know I’m gonna screw SOMETHING up…it’s as Murphy says…

Well, it’s now 12:30 (almost) and I’ve long overstayed the time I planned to use. Jaa, mata (See you later!). Sayounara, oyasuminasai (Goodbye and good night)! Until next time,

Lyle Waldman

4 Down, 2 to go!

Well, Hell Week is officially over for me. I’m through all 3 of my midterms this week, and after 2 really really bad ones, I feel really good about my Japan 102R one (then again, I said the same thing about my CS125/133 tutor interview and look how that turned out, so I guess I won’t know for a week anyway). I studied a lot for it, but I’m not entirely sure how well it paid off considering of all the vocabulary I learned by studying, I only got to use 1 or 2 words on the exam. But I feel much better. I went into the exam really nervous because I studied 2 or 3 things really heavily, but not so much on the rest, but I think I did well still. A couple of the exam questions were a bit confusing, and I probably made a lot of stupid mistakes due to the fact that I was really nervous after my last 2 (my hands were literally shaking as I was doing the first couple questions on this exam), so I probably could have done better than I did, but I’ll take whatever I get. Oh well; apparently the schedule for final exams is up already and Japan 102R is my first, so I won’t be nearly as nervous for that as I was for this midterm and I’ll do much better for sure

If I was to complain about one thing (cause, y’know, I have to complain about everything just to give a full picture), I’d say Misato-sensei doesn’t give us nearly enough time to do the tests or quizzes. The first term test we had half an hour which wasn’t even enough time to finish the test, nevermind double-check my answers or anything (hence I probably would have gotten at least 5% higher than I did if I was given an extra 15 minutes), and for the midterm we were given twice the time for a test only slightly less than twice as long. I was able to finish the midterm with relative confidence in my answers, but I had no time to double-check. An extra 15 minutes would have done wonders for it.

But overall, yeah, I’m confident in this one, and it was just the confidence boost I needed before my CS241 exam on Tuesday

Until next time,

Lyle Waldman

3 down, 3 to go (a.k.a. Effing Circuits…)

Yeah, I swore. Get over it. But seriously…effing Circuits. My MTE 120 (a.k.a. Circuits) exam was today…man, was it hard! It started off pretty easy, good old physics; memorize a formula, plug in some numbers, get a number write it down, repeat. That was the first half of the exam. Then we actually started the circuit diagrams. Professor El-Saadany…I dunno…these questions weren’t like ANYTHING I’d seen before. The circuit diagrams he gave us were ridiculously huge, and unless you knew the trick, it was just impossible. So far, in 2 exams over 2 days, I’ve almost broken down in both of them. At least, though, after talking to some other people, I wasn’t the only one to have problems…nobody I talked to said they got any of the circuit problems, and I think I at least got part marks on one of them, but Professor El-Saadany said there’s no bellcurve coming. Man, I can’t bloody wait till this course is over…I’m seriously considering dropping out of DigiHard and just going for a regular CS major…I took DigiHard out of interest, but if DigiHard is going to start getting DigiHarder (yay, a pun! See? I can make puns even while depressed!), it’s really not worth my time. Robots are cool, but not that cool. And otherwise I can start filling out courses for my East Asian Studies minor (I think I’m actually going to do it for real, no jokes) or take some business courses or something else interesting. Redoing Grade 11 physics…it was hard enough the first time…I knew there was a reason I didn’t take Phys 121…

In other news, it appears I suck in a non-academic way. Of my 4 job interviews I’ve had thus far, I’ve already been rejected for 3 of them, including the CS125/133 tutor position I was really hoping for. The only one left is my RIM job, and as far as I’m concerned, they’re not taking me; they just have yet to reject me, considering how confident I was in the tutor position.

So yeah, as of right now, I’m not feeling the love. I’m just worried about my Japanese exam tomorrow…with the luck I’ve been having so far I’m afraid of what will happen then…I suppose all I can do is get a good night’s sleep, study my ass off in the extra 3 hours I have because of no Circuits lab, and cross my fingers. The Japanese exams, at least, have been known to test on material that has 100% definitely been covered in class, perhaps with a word here or there from stuff we were supposed to do outside of class, but I should be able to get a good mark with class stuff. I guess we’ll have to see, then…

Until next time,

Lyle Waldman

2 down, 4 to go?

Well, my Math 138 midterm was last night. Let me put it to you this way: I knew everything. 3 hours before the exam. During the exam, not so much. Unfortunately, between the 4 course professors and the course TAs, they either couldn’t or didn’t come up with a list of practise problems, from the textbook or otherwise, to help us prepare. They gave us a list of chapters in the textbook and kinda said “go”. What they failed to mention is that there are 70+ questions per section, so you can’t be sure which ones to go to. If they’d given us 10 or 20 practise problems from the term material, it would have been fine, but as is…I dunno…I’m going to talk to Nataliya and/or Professor Wolczuk (who teaches the tutorial and is apparently the course coordinator or some such).

So yeah, things aren’t very fun by me right now. I have 2 more midterms this week (MTE 120 tonight and Japan 102R tomorrow), both of which I have to study for, followed by CS next week. Apparently, though, the Math 138 midterm was split in half, so I have a second midterm for that course in about 3 weeks, which will hopefully boost my mark a little bit, since I’d look at a fail as a good mark on this one. At least it’s only worth 15% and I’ve been doing well on assignments…

Anyway, in other news, I apparently have another interview today. I got an e-mail from CECS at about 2 pm yesterday telling me I was expected at TC (I can never keep straight if it’s Tatam, Tatum, or Tatham Centre…one of those 3 I think is a boxer, and I know it’s not that one…) at 10:30 am today for an interview. So here I sit for the next 45 minutes, since I just finished Circuits class and don’t want to go anywhere (TC is right in-between Eng quad and Arts quad, which is a good 10-minute walk from V1). I may end up re-reviewing for the interview, but honestly, it’s my 3rd choice (after my tutor position and RIM job…for once I can say “RIM job” without someone making a wisecrack at me…), and if they’re not going to give me at least 2 or 3 days notice to prepare, especially during midterm season, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to prepare properly.

In other other news, a lot of non-academic stuff has happened of late, most of which I’ve likely forgotten about, but I’ll post what I can remember. FEDS (the FEDeration of Students, a.k.a. the UW Student Council) organized a trip to Canada’s Wonderland on Friday. As I was planning on going home for the weekend anyway, I picked up a ticket. But, in the past, I’ve never gone to Wonderland for more than 5 or 6 hours at a time, so I figured I’d go to my morning classes, maybe skip CS tutorial, and leave about 11 or 12, getting to Wonderland at 1 or 1:30, and staying there till 6 or 7. No. FEDS decided to make it a day trip. I found out literally the night before that the bus was leaving at 9 am, meaning I’d have to skip all my classes that day. Unfortunately, the ticket was non-refundable, so I had to go. Then again, it was a good thing I went. Going to Wonderland and intending on spending the better part of the day by myself, getting bored around 3 pm, and leaving without really telling anyone where I was going, I started off my day. After I had gone on two mildly disappointing rides (it’s really not that fun when you’re dead tired and alone), I met up with a friend of mine I’d met randomly in the MC one day who also decided to skip her classes. I wound up joining her group, and the 5 of us wandered off, eventually meeting up with one of the FEDS VPs and a friend of his who joined us (so we were 6 in the end). Apparently our token Artsie was also a University employee who manages/hires/etc. the Off-Campus Dons, so I wound up making a connection after all was said and done. So it just goes to show: you never know who you’ll meet by skipping 4 classes in favour of going to Wonderland for the day (of course, I do not advocate skipping classes…that was intended as a joke)

Last night was the second of 5 UWGamers events this term, entitled “Don’t Study”. Every term (or for the past 3 at least), UWGamers has hosted a night for Nintendo DS and Sony PSP enthusiasts to join and game. One of the UWGamers members also brough a Nintendo Wii, and Super Smash Bros. Melee ensued amidst the Mario Kart DS, Tetris DS, and (eventually, once I finished my Math 138 midterm and decided to go back to get my mind off my terrible terrible mark) even Ouendan (the Japanese import version of Elite Beat Agents). I don’t think I’ve ever heard so much swearing or trash-talking over a Nintendo game in my life. It was really fun, even though there were only about 12 of us at peak hour. At one point I went by the OCD office (which happened to be practically next door to the room the event was being held in) to bother my friend from Wonderland who joined us for about 5 minutes to play a game of Tetris.

Anyway, my interview is now in about 20 minutes, and I’m out of things to say for this entry, so, as always, you can contact me at uwmathblogger@gmail.com. Until next time,

Lyle Waldman

A dedication: Math 146 (a.k.a. Professor Marcoux: Damn, he marks fast!)

Well, as the title says, this entire post is going to be dedicated to talking about what has happened in Math 146 over the past couple days (perhaps with a small blurb at the end about other stuff). So, without further adieu:

In my last post, I mentioned that I had a small problem with an assignment in Math 146. I have taken “grab that assignment” off my to-do list. Turns out that, after Professor Marcoux looked at it, I wound up getting 14 marks back on an assignment marked out of 100. Man, dontcha hate it when that happens? I mean, man, why do I have to go through the trouble all the time? What a pain…and I’m sure Professor Marcoux wasn’t thrilled that he had to redo his marker’s work either…

I also mentioned in my last post about my Math 146 midterm. Well, it appears Professor Marcoux was able to mark that as well (he told me during the exam that he was marking those himself) in only 2 days (you’ll quickly learn to appreciate any mark that takes less than a week to return to you, especially major term tests, here at UW). I did, let us say, worse than I had hoped, but sufficiently well to warrant staying in the course. I made a bunch of really dumb mistakes like only stating half a definition for something or using hand-wavy logic when I really shouldn’t have (i.e. at all). I didn’t beat the class average, unfortunately, but I didn’t fall significantly short of it. If I really tried hard, I could probably argue for enough marks to get myself to the class average, but Professor Marcoux, in marking the midterm, rounded up all my half marks (e.g. if I got 3 1/2 on a question, he counted it as a 4 in final marking), so it pretty much evens out in the end anyway, so I’m not going to bother (plus, after asking him to remark my only assignment so far this term and then asking him to remark my midterm for what amounts to less than 1% of my final grade…I don’t want to make a nuisance of myself, y’know?)

Anyway, my laptop is running out of batteries and I forgot my AC charger in my room, plus I have a Japanese test to study for, so I’m going to cut this entry a bit short. Until next time,

Lyle Waldman

One down, 4 to go! Again!

Well, midterm season is upon us once again. To think it was just over a month ago I was unpacking my stuff and preparing for a new term, and already I’m being tested on things I’ve barely started learning. One thing I realized very quickly about life at UW (and University in general): Midterms tend to come very quickly, and you don’t often do much in class before they come. To be honest, I find them kind of pointless because you only get tested on one or two things; kind of an “intro to the course” kind of thing. Seems like a waste to me, but that’s how they’ve been doing it for 50 years (at UW anyway; longer elsewhere), and I’m not one to change it.

So, anyway, my first midterm was tonight. It was for Math 146. To be honest, I was thinking it would be harder. There was one topic Professor Marcoux probably should have gone into more detail about (or perhaps I missed that class), which I lost a couple marks on, but it was a minor thing. Otherwise, I think I did pretty well. No real complaints. Most of the questions were pretty standard fare; no obtuse proofs like Fermat’s Little Theorem from Math 145 or continuity or E-D proofs from Math 147. Most of the proofs came down to “Quote definition for great justice”, or something very close. Then again, you know what happens the second you say “oh, that test was easy”, right? Oh well, it’s been said, it can’t be unsaid. Now let’s hope Murphy’s Law decides (for once) to let me off easy this time

As for the “minor problem” with my Math 146 assignment, it’s been resolved but I don’t know what the resolution with it was yet. One of my assignments was marked, let us say…incorrectly…and Professor Marcoux looked into it. I’ll go pick it up one of these days, probably about the same time I go get the problem with my Maple CD key fixed, call Dell to ask them why the heck my desktop icons keep rearranging themselves, and create more flash cards to learn vocab for Japan 102 so I don’t bomb the midterm as badly as I bombed Quiz 1. It’s on my to-do list.

In other news, the first of 2 parts of my CS 125/133 tutor job was today. It was more of an info session than a job interview. Basically the manager of ISG (Instructional Support Group; they manage a bunch of CS course-related stuff…the presentation was informative to a degree but not as much as I would have liked) gave a presentation on what ISG is/does and what the job entails. It sounds really interesting, for sure, plus they say they allow us to take an on-campus course while we work, meaning I can take Japan 102, 201, and 202 all in a row, which would be kind of cool since I felt I wasn’t using my Japanese enough while I was on my last work term (despite having a coworker I saw once in a while who spoke Japanese). The second part of the interview (the one-on-one part) is on Wednesday. Unfortunately I did my math wrong and thought June 6th was a Thursday, so I set my interview time to be in the middle of Calculus class, so I’ll have to skip it again. Oh well; at least I’ll go to the tutorial…I find I learn more in the tutorial anyway, especially since Professor Wolczuk is entertaining as well as informative.

In other news, it appears my midterm schedule sucks. After updating my wall calendar for June, it seems I have midterms next Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and of those 3, I have to really study hard for 2 of them. What a pain. At least that means I’ll be easy as homework goes next week…and thank God for those 5-hour Tuesday morning breaks…

Anyway, it’s after midnight now and I really should be going to bed. Until next time,

Lyle Waldman

Another update

OK, so it appears I am unable to think of catchy names 5 minutes after finishing 7 songs in DDR. Lesson learned. On with the important stuff:

So I haven’t written a new post in 2 weeks, hence it’s about time. Wow, 2 weeks. A lot happens in 2 weeks. Part of my “almost full weekend” included going to Downtown Kitchener (I’ve been told the terminology is “Uptown Waterloo” and “Downtown Kitchener”; I’ve never heard “Downtown Waterloo” before) for sushi at a place called Ye’s. It’s an all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant. For $15 (for lunch; it’s probably more for dinner), you get all-you-can-eat sushi with a small caveat: Every piece of food you order (they have stuff besides sushi) which you don’t eat costs you an extravagant amount of money ($1/piece of sushi, $2/piece of everything else). Between the 13 of us who were there, we had well worth our money and didn’t leave anything over. I personally ate what would probably equate to well over $100 (retail; if you know much about retail sushi prices that’s not actually that much, sadly, which is why I don’t eat sushi very often), and it was really good. I’m going again tonight for dinner, and this time we’re numbering about 20 even though I’ve been told the reservation is only for 15. We’ll see what they come up with I guess

My “full weekend” also included my first CTRL-A show. Unfortunately most of it conflicted with the time I was out for sushi, but I caught the last 2 hours or so of it (the show was about 14 hours in total). I caught 2 episodes of Samurai 7 (which is pretty good from what I’ve seen) and a movie called “Origin”, which would have likely been much better had I not inexplicably fallen asleep for the last 45 miuntes of it (really, it’s good from what I saw; I was just really tired). Apparentely there’s another CTRL-A show going on tonight, in which they’re showing Mai-Hime, which I’ve been dying to see, and this time it doesn’t conflict with sushi (or at least the Mai-Hime doesn’t).

In other news, classes are pretty much the same. I started listening to Nataliya once I realized that trying to learn concepts and using those concepts to do homework simultaneously isn’t the best of ideas; I have (again, inexplicably) wound up getting above 80% on all my assignments thus far (I don’t count marks lost due to forgetting to add constants to my integrals; they do take marks off for that though, so when you take Math 138 remember your constants). I am still abstaining from taking notes though due to the fact that Nataliya erases boards eratically (i.e. she’ll erase a board she just used that people are still trying to copy from instead of erasing one she used at the very beginning of class). Makes the lesson difficult to follow if you’re jumping in in the middle or you miss something. Math 146 assignments are getting harder, but not significantly, although I had a minor problem with my last assignment (Assignment 2) which is being resolved; Professor Marcoux will hopefully get back to me at some point next week with the resolution. These assignments are still pretty easy compared to some of the stuff from Math 145 though, and they’re definitely much easier than Math 147 (although that’s definitely opinion; a lot of people think the opposite).

CS241 finally decided to start about 2 weeks ago. Up till my last post, we had been doing “applied computer science” in Assembly (i.e. writing assembly programs). Assignment 3 and 4 was a 2-part assignment to write an Assembler (essentially a compiler for the Assembly language) where each part of the assignment was to implement, with syntax-checking, error-checking, debugging, etc. a different instruction or set of related instructions in Assembly (as we’ve learned it, there are only 32 instructions split into 10 parts, so it wasn’t that hard). It was really interesting. In CS134 we were given a class and had to write based on the class we were given; in this assignment we were allowed to change the class we were given and, for my solution, I had to change pretty much all of it to get it to do what I wanted. It wasn’t really explained what was going on with it either, so it was kind of a puzzle to figure out what it was, then how to modify it. But then again, that’s my thing, so I guess I found it genuinely interesting while other people would use the same word with a slightly different meaning behind it. This week our assignment deals with relocation, which is a concept a bit too long to explain in a blog post so I probably won’t say much more than that.

My Circuits class (MTE 120) is currently studying the various electrical circuit laws (Kirchoff’s and Ohm’s laws). It’s kind of a review of Grade 11 and 12 Physics, but I can’t seem to get it (again). I’ll work on it though; I have no Algebra assignment this week and I’ve been told CS is pretty easy, so I’ll have time to do some MTE problems.

And last but not least, Japan 102R. Well, it’s not bad. We had our first of 3 major in-term tests (2 quizzes and a midterm) 2 weeks ago. Let’s just say I should have studied more. I didn’t do particularly badly, but I made a number of really silly mistakes (including writing “Kanata” instead of “Kanada” for “Canada”…”ta” and “da” are very similar and I was in a rush because we weren’t given nearly enough time for this test…half an hour when I think we should have been given no shorter than 45 minutes). Apparentely I wasn’t the only one who had problems; I beat the class average, but that’s not saying much when the class average is 69%. I’m going to take up my practise from last term of making flash cards with vocabulary on them to study from…when I have time…between Calculus and Algebra it seems I never get anything done these days…so incredibly time-consuming…

In other OTHER news, the first UW Gamers event also occured during my brief hiatus. It was pretty small; although UWGamers rented out the entire SLC Great Hall, they wound up taking only one side of it, and there were barely 15 or 20 people attending. It was fun to go to, but I would have liked more people and more equipment, although the club isn’t really responsible for either of those (their equipment is limited by who brings what and how many TVs they can borrow from the University; UWGamers doesn’t actually own any equipment of its own but borrows the equipment of its members when necessary). I wound up playing A LOT of Super Smash Bros. that night, which was probably not the best of ideas considering I was then up till about 12:30 am doing Calculus homework which was due the next day. Oh well; there are only 5 or 6 Gamers events this term, and if I’m going to miss all the CTRL-A events due to class and homework (and sushi), I should at least go to the Gamers ones.

In other other OTHER news, I reformatted my computer this past weekend. Apparentely the Linux partitioning program, GParted, doesn’t like modifying other partitions much. Without getting into the details, I think I wound up accidentally corrupting a system file, so I spent 8 hours total last weekend reinstalling Windows and all the programs I use. So now I’m back with a bigger hard drive (apparentely Dell installs their own utilities partition or some such thing and takes 4GB of your HD space), no corrupted partition data, and an Ubuntu virtual machine which will let me boot to Windows no matter how many times I update it.

In job search news, I’ve had 2 interviews so far this term, with another one next week. The first was for a company called MapleSoft, creator of the awesome awesomeness (although sometimes buggyness and laggyness) that is Maple. If you take Math 137 (and possibly even Math 147), you’ll become quick friends with Maple. Essentially it’s a graphing calculator that doesn’t cost $200. It’s more than that as well though; it differentiates, integrates, graphs Riemann Sums, and makes coffee (and if you’re really really nice, sometimes lemonade). OK, maybe not that last one, but you get the idea. The only problem with it is that after reformatting my computer, my license key for Maple no longer works. It’s on my to-do list.

So that aside, I had an interview with this company to write online, interactive questions for a textbook company they have a contract with. About halfway through the interview, the interviewer (who was really nice by the way) looked at my resume and said that I had a lot of CS experience, but the programming in this position was minimal, and asked me if I was sure I wanted to be there. To be honest, I was thinking the same thing when I went into the interview and told her so. We went on to discuss some other things that would be open to me at Maple which would suit me better, but we’ll see if I get a job offer for that.

My next interview was at the prestigious RIM, or, more specifically, for a subsidiary of RIM called SlipStream. I’m not quite sure how that one went. It sounds like an interesting company and interesting position, with a fantastic location (about a 3-minute walk from the northeast corner of campus). Unfortunately, I think I may have said some things I shouldn’t and didn’t say some things I should, but from the description of the types of applicants they wanted, it seems they want more a combination of personality and knowledge than just one or the other, which I think I showed well, so we’ll see how that one goes.

Next week’s interview is for a position as a CS125/133 tutor, which means many of you will likely be seeing a lot of me in the fall if I get that position. I think it would be an interesting experience, especially since I’ve been an “unofficial” CS tutor since Grade 10. Overall, I wouldn’t be terribly upset if I was to get any of the jobs I’ve been interviewed for; they all seem interesting in their own ways. I have to wait about 2 weeks until I get final word though, so we’ll see what happens.

Until next time,

Lyle Waldman