Today is not a good day. Tons to do, but I can’t focus on any of it. Instead I’m enumerating past mistakes and punishing myself for them mentally. Not really productive or fun. It’s sad, because this week started out really great, and is destined to end great, but the middle sucks horribly. Could have had a perfect week!

Bahh, enough bitching. Here’s a brief rundown of my classes and my impressions of them so far:

Com Sci 229: Awesome, Jim is the god of code as usual, and I’m learning a ton from him.

Cpr E 308: Class hours are boring and trivial thus far. Lab is interesting and some fun.

Cpr E 489: Not sure what to think. Lab is kind of tedious, material is interesting, but it jumps between being simple to understand and fairly involved. Usually when a class does that, it’s only going to get worse.

Engl 314: This class is, forgive me, bullshit. I doubt I’ll learn much that’s worthwhile from it. It’s mostly about technical communication in the workplace. That’s right, folks: it’s a class about writing memos. I’m oversimplifying it, of course, but it seems like my time could be better spent doing other things considering I’m already a better writer than most of the engineering college (that’s not saying much, believe me).

Com Sci 311: This course is going to figuratively kick my ass in front of a crowd of people and then throw me into the gutter. It’s algorithm analysis, meaning a mix of advanced algebra, theoretical math and proofs. Those are three of my least favorite things in the world. The only thing about this class that I am actually good at is designing an algorithm to solve a problem, but that will only get one so far. I consider the existence of this course to be conclusive proof that there is no God. I can’t do a mathematical proof for that, though, because I suck at them. You’ll just have to settle for broken linear reasoning in this case.

The great thing about the classes I’m in this semester is that two of them deal heavily with UNIX-based development in C, and the lab of another is done completely in the Red Hat OS. In layman’s terms, as I figure stuff out in one course, I’ll be able to apply some of it to others (shell commands, fun tricks in the C language, etc).

At the end of this week I’m taking a weekend off and going to Minnesota with my friends Brett and Mike. Epic amounts of fun will be had, no doubt. Not sure about everything we’re doing yet, but we are positive that we’re going to Buffalo Wild Wings and seeing Avatar in 3D at the IMAX. At least that’s something to look forward to while I suffer through today. And actually, today just got a little better; not only did I get to vent a little bit, but I managed to procrastinate my horrible 311 assignment a little more! Two birds, one stone.

-Ryan