New Semester

So obviously, my good intentions about blogging more often didn't work out so well upon returning to Hopkins-- but hey, life is complex. So what're the cool (seriously!) things that've been stealing my time away from the Blogoverse? * I spent a week in Chicago with Caitlin, which was a blast; got to see all the big museums, look at the Bean, eat really great food (including having pizza at the self-proclaimed "Inventor of the Stuffed Crust Pizza"), and generally relaxing. * I did a large number of interviews with all sorts of fun people. No, I won't say who they were all with, but I will say that all but one were quite enjoyable. (One was pretty terrible... but that's fine, as the company in question was highly sketchy at best. Note to recruiters: If you find my resume on Google, that's fine. If you find my resume on Google then cold-email me and get my name wrong (for the record, my name is spelled correctly on my resume)-- that's less than fine, but I understand. If you do all the above, *then* reveal that the company for which you're recruiting's mission is targeting spam by stealing personal information from social networking sites-- OK, that's not so good. Thank you, best wishes to you in your future lives, but no thanks.) * I spent a bunch of time developing the first part of a new syllabus for the Java lab course (the one I really teach, as opposed to the Java primary course, where the professor teaches and I just grade/hold office hours/etc.). Hopefully I'll be able to talk more about that soon; I'm still waiting for final approval on the new plan from my boss / the course professor. And now, classes have started at Hopkins; today's the third day of the new semester, because Hopkins has extraordinarily short semesters. This is my last semester with any undergraduate status, and it should be fun-- I'm taking all those courses I really should have taken before: * Operating Systems - Pretty much what you think it is. * Programming Languages - the department chair's introduction to life, the universe, everything, and OCaml * Digital Preservation - A cool one-credit seminar on techniques of keeping data around forever * Information Retrieval - A course on, basically, "doing neat things with the Internet as your data source." * Understanding the Supreme Court - my fifth Constitutional Law class, and my third at the Ph.D level-- with a professor I really enjoy * Computer Programming Workshop - this is just a name for, essentially, "creating a Java lab syllabus on the fly." But it should be quite enjoyable * Violin lessons, as always. I'm also enjoying all the stares, gasps, and cries of amazement every time I pull out my OLPC, which is coming with me to every class; not only do I get more battery life, a faster recharge time, and better WiFi than other laptops, but it also weighs nearly nothing and is indestructable-- entirely unlike most laptops. So it's a fun time. I *did* get the dreaded alt-key-stuck bug, but while I could have spent a month without the laptop and shipped it back to be fixed, I just used the power of Linux to implement the fix the OLPC people came up with, which works perfectly well (I didn't need a left alt key anyway). The other big OLPC advantage is that I can bring my laptop and sit in Starbucks for a few hours on occasion, since I have the OLPC's free year of T-Mobile WiFi-- I'm not sure I'd actually pay money for Internet in Starbucks, but it's quite nice simply to *have* it. And at the end of the year, who knows? Maybe I won't be able to live without it. That's all from me for now-- nerdy blog posts are upcoming, but first, I have to go sketch out how to best torture educate Java babies.