Hell Week In Progress

Sorry about the lack of updates. My hell week of assignments on top of assignments just began this week. Started off tame too.

Anyways, I am going into “silent running” mode until I get a handle or break from the onslaught of work. Today by itself has 2 assignments due. The cryptography assignment is proving a worthy adversary. At least the writing is done, and I learned LaTeX. The hard part of proofs is now what I must face.

Dorian, over and out.

The Plague (Part 2): Repulse

More late breaking news from the quarantine zone at home. My brother managed to infect both my father and me. Fortunately I seem to got it easy. After a super-tiring day with a headache, frozen limbs (thanks to the combined efforts of two bus transit systems), starvation and a light-headedness, I got up this morning more or less refreshed and feeling better.

Yesterday’s day-off comes at a bad time for me. University work in writing, cryptography, radio and ethics classes all need attending to. The writing needs interviews and work. Cryptography and ethics requires research and write-ups. And the radio class has a proposal due today.

So much for easy non-rushed living. And my projects just went on hold again. Nothing like a cocktail of illness, university and transportation all conspiring to put everything except the urgent on hold.

In Search of Sanity and Coffee

I slept in today. Yesterday turned out too crazy for even me. I started off the day with a single plan: catchup. So what did I do? I wrestled with Kontact to work with my Palm. I decided to fix things… by backing up and wiping out my old KDE settings. The wipe out worked, and the backup not so much. That is the way I started my day.

Next, I “chilled” out by blogging and trying not to freak out about the loss of all my emails, contacts, and pretty much everything else.

Audio Docs class followed, and a changing of groups. My group remained the same with Rob, Masha and Amanda (a totally unrelated new Amanda), and a new girl joined our group whose name I forgot. I got randomly picked to record a sound on campus. Fortunately my partner finished 3 years in radio, worked in the CBC and confidently recorded everything. I helped “assemble” the mini-Disc recorder. And I held the bag. And provided conversation. Yes, I am hopeless.

In my absence, my group decided upon on using my idea (my obsession with Ewa) for the documentary project. Apparently the prof used my story as an example, and my group understood it as good. Rob started writing up the script, Masha organizing the project, and Amanda helping Rob. Yes, I feel touched with their decision, but the whole thing just started so spontaneously. Anyways, I promised to contact everyone, as soon as I got my email back.

I asked Masha about meeting up after class, but she said she had work. I then bumped into Kat, and asked her for coffee after 4. She said maybe, as I should of expected. Next I ran off to my cryptograph7 class.

Professor Charles Rackoff had already begun explaining to the class, why Max’s idea of a project on quantum cryptography did not work for the class. Basically, he did not want us dealing with physics especially when the class dealt with “classical” cryptography. Max’s second idea of hard drive cryptography sounds better. I got assigned the task of looking up on it. Cute.

Charles then quizzed us on the “obvious” and beautiful definition of pseudorandom number generators. I am starting to comprehend it, and the rest of the course seems to follow suit. Now I understand the theory, but I can not see myself thinking in pure theoretical-mathematical terms. My cavemen mind can understand art, writing and programming. My learning of mathematics is similar to my learning of dating. Me thinks me thick-skulled.

After class I met up with Kat, who passed up my offer for coffee, free lunch and a pleasant chat with old soup. Yes that is right. She preferred to go home and eat old soup instead of my company. I passed by Masha again, and foolishly proposed coffee after she finished work. She works at one of part of the university. Proposal refused politely and with tact. And not over lame, old soup.

My day ended with Rudy and company working on the average run time of algorithms. Algorithms and statistics are even lower down my mental understanding than cryptographic theory. And I just passed the algorithms course (probably out of the kindness of my prof), and never ventured back into that neck of the woods. So I tried helping Rudy’s group, even going off to figure out combinatorics. I re-learned that part, but still was mostly useless. Eventually, Rudy decided to end my suffering, and go home.

Went home, eat dinner and crashed into bed. Depressing dreams of living in a dystopian universe followed. I ventured out of bed late morning. Watched some old BBC Narnia stuff, cleaned around the house, and now in the process of resurrecting Kontact. Next I must undertake the task, of catching up two lost days and tons of homework.

I guess this puts off my writing my first epic scifi novel, and my blockbuster game. Tomorrow promises to keep me busy, until late night today. Yummy.

Chillin’ and Dreamin’

Elation!!! I finished work for yet another course, Business of Computing, and an assignment for the Foundations of Research course. So all the work for my Computer Science courses out the way, I can concentrate on the assignments for my two other courses. Staying up all night, sure wore me out but nothing a make-up nap did not help.

Right now, I am sit chilling and relaxing. I can finally concentrate on my “other” projects. Well after I finish my assignments and write my exams, but you get the point.

Taking about my side projects, I am pleased to say the justCheckers project is moving along well. I am impressed the amount of attention project received lately. A lot of this attention comes from the increased ranking on SourceForge.net. The ranking seems to increased, thanks to migration to Subversion and the recent updates to the site. I set up a wiki that should speed up development of specifications. Maybe we will see a new release soon too.

In other news, Arnold Rosenbloom – my professor for many past course including this semester’s brand new Informational Security (CSC347) – will post my article on RSA cryptography and its demise thanks to quantum computation. I plan on resurrecting the SiteChunks project. Also as promised last Friday, I will post an update to the Self-Experiment: Fast Personal Context Switching, later on today.