Almost There

It’s crunch time boys and girls. There are less than two weeks in this semester, and provided that all things go as planned (and I’m confident that they will), I will be able to close the door on my junior year of computer science. Yes, summer is on its way and thankfully it doesn’t include school classes. Not that I don’t like the learning environment and the challenges that come with learning, it’s just that I am feeling somewhat burned out and am looking forward to a break.

In the past 16 weeks I’ve covered a lot of ground. It has been a lot of good fun. I just have to stay focused for a few more days and finish out the semester. Still on the to-do list are a short write-up about the last phase of our compiler, a written assignment, and a final in compilers; a final in algorithms; and a final project in team software practice, it actually is quite a bit of fun as we’re programming a game of steal the flag to be played with PDA’s on an ad-hoc wireless network.

I haven’t been on my bike since last Saturday. Things have just been that busy. Things for this weekend aren’t looking much better, but after spring semester is out of the way, I should be able to focus on some of those things that I haven’t given much attention to in recent weeks.

I have done quite a bit of reading on the web, and I am quite impressed with the number of excellent essays target at the pedagogy of computer science in recent weeks. I hope to be able to write more about this in the summer, not that I am one of the scholars whose opinion really counts on the matter, but I do have a lot of opinions to share.

A friend shared a poem with me a couple of days ago; I’ll leave you with my favorite lines:
Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,


- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Rainy Day"