Ups and downs while the world goes round

When was the last time I blogged? Nothing keeps a student busy like the finals and then getting over the finals. And life doesn't exactly give us a break in this hard time, always with the ups and downs... here are those form last week.

I passed two more finals: correcting codes and concurrent programming. One is the well deserved result of hard work, the other the well deserved result of making the wise desicion of picking a mathematical class for computer science students and putting my knowledge of algebra to use.

I failed one final: artificial intelligence. Getting sick two days before the exam doesn't help, but those two days wouldn't make a difference if I was ready earlier.

I broke my new sunglasses. I guess carrying them in a backpack with the laptop wasn't a great idea.

I went to see the movie "Sex and the City". With Boyfriend. He survived.

A headhunter called. She was a bit rude and her company doesn't have a website, but it's nice to see I'm wanted and tell her twice what I earn to see what happens.

We almost finished the team project. The teamwork went great and now we're really good friends.

The presentation of the team project was a disaster. Ubuntu 7.10 wouldn't cooperate with the projector, so all we got to show were the bits that we had on another laptop.

There must be something more, but that's all I remember for now.

Howard Webb dead on the web

Despite anything I said about TV being boring, and despite having the concurrent programming final exam today, I couldn't resist the temptation of watching the Football game yesterday evening. My country was playing against Austria.

We did great, scoring a goal in the first half, fair and square. But, in the second half, (actually, the the 92nd or third minute) when players were fighting for the ball, the referee, Howard Webb, gave Austria a penalty shot, and they scored, ending the game 1:1. Everyone in Poland is disgusted and frustrated about the injustice of the situation. More info on the game here.

Fortunately, in Poland, people have the excellent habit of openly expressing their anger in a sane and open way (I'm beging ironic here in case you're afraid I'm supporting agression). So, when I decided to google for Mr.Webb, one of the first results was a poem almost impossible to quote or translate due to the amount of obscene words (the ones with the dots). His English Wikipedia page is semi-protected due to vandalism, and so is the Polish discussion page.

Better yet, here's what Grono.net, one of Poland's biggest social networking webiste, looked like this morning (8 a.m.):
Again, the obscenity of many of those pictures make them unworth quoting, but this one is quite funny:


As for now, 9:30 a.m., more people have noticed the trend and there are now recursive pictures (and boy, do I love recursion):


The guy is dead. At least on the web.

Geek gets prepared for school

I decided yesterday to prepare for today's classes, like this page (which I printed and hung above my bed many years ago) advices to do. The task wasn't hard, as I have only two: concurrent programming and computer networks.

I started with networks. There was a lecture yesterday, which I did not attend (still busy with the stuff from the first semester), so I checked the lecture's page to see what had been done. 404. So, as the page wasn't set up yet, there was nothing I could do. I was done with networks.

Moved on to concurrent programming. The thing with this class is that it has both a lab and an exam and I tried both last year but failed the exam. Fortunately, I'm done with the lab. So, I opened my notebook and looked for the second class. It was an introduction to asynchronous communication. Easy. I decided to skip this class. But, does this mean I would go to school for only one class? No way, I can learn those networks by myself.

So, in ten minutes, I was prepared. Plus, I'm free today! (Well, not really free, as I still have a lot to do and I'll have to go back to those networks.) Bottom line: always prepare for school the day before.