thehowe_v7.1

Hrm, yes, thoughts. Well.

For one, I'm gradumatated. Again. Like, for real this time, as in "see you later Ann Arbor, I'm off to the real world to get a job and stuff" for real. It feels.... good? I don't really think it's sunk in yet.

Also, entertainment. Over the past few weeks I've discovered not one, not two, but three incredibly awesome webcomics that have been around basically forever but nobody ever bothered to tell me about: The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, The Order of the Stick, and Questionable Content. You should read them. All of them, all their archives, in one sitting. Like I did. Totally worth losing 12+ hours of your life.

And yes, I realize that "Gradumatated" is not the correct spelling. It is, however, 327% funnier. How do I know this? Science.

For the past week, U of M's campus newspaper the Michigan Daily has had several stories about an offensive Facebook group started by MSA President Zack Yost. In today's letters to the editor several students expressed shock and dismay at both the MSA reps for being such tools, and the Daily for sensationalizing the story.

All right kiddies, gather around. I've been here for six years now, and apparently it's time I explained something to all of you. Many things change at U of M over the years, but there are some immutable constants upon which the university's community is founded:

1. The MSA is an ineffectual group of blowhards that waste countless reams of paper every so often to get elected to a governmental body that has no real power and does nothing more than meet every week to feel important, boost each other's egos, and boost up their resumes.
2. The Michigan Daily is a joke of a newspaper. It is good for three things and three things only: laughing at the constant plagiarism and poor editing, laughing at the ridiculous crime reports, and doing the crossword/sudoku during class. If you want to read real news, go get a real newspaper. Or, if you're not living in 1990, go look on the internet.

The fact that the president of MSA has turned out to be a total jackass shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody. The fact that the Daily is blowing the whole thing totally out of proportion to try and fill their pages with something approaching actual news also should not come as a surprise to anybody. You kids aren't nearly cynical enough to be college students.

I read an interesting article today on trying to get more women to major in computer science in U.S. colleges. What grabbed my attention was the techniques they're using to draw more women to the field:

"Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs Dr. Blum and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon instituted to draw more women into computer science."

This disturbs me. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for more women in the field - but not if it means changing what computer science is. Moving the focus away from programming skills in computer science programs is like moving the focus away from engine mechanics skills in car mechanics programs. Sure, you can probably be a car mechanic without a strong basis in how an engine works, but you're not going to be a good one.

They worry that the decrease of women joining the field is a bad sign, and I agree. I don't think the answer is to try and downplay one of the key proficiencies that a computer scientist should have.

Over the past 6 months I've started reading some good computer science / programming / software engineering blogs. Looking back over my own posts, I realized recently that my chosen profession is not a topic I have actually ever written about in any detail. A non-zero number of my peers maintain blogs where they talk about all kinds of interesting aspects of the field and projects that interest them. Why don't I do the same?

I've decided that the reason is that, while I do enjoy computer science, I don't love it. At least, not with the passion that some do. Sure, I enjoy the intellectual challenges and puzzles involved with coding. Sure, I can get excited about seemingly bizarre things like "elegant" code. Sure, I can get into long, drawn out debates about coding styles, algorithm design, and the like. But, and this I think is the key difference, at the end of the day I get to a point where I just have to stop. I like it just fine, but I can only take so much of it.

It's because I can only take so much thinking about computer science that I don't write about it, I think. I'm in school; I practically spend all day every day thinking about designing software and the various problems associated with it. In my free time, the times which I post to this blog, the last thing I want to do is think about it some more.

Does that make me a bad code artist? Maybe. Probably. People who have that twenty-four hour passion for all things programming are going to be better than I am, merely by the fact that they spend so much more time thinking about it.

On the other hand, I think that not being so obsessive is going to make me a better person. There are, after all, only 24 hours in a day. By not spending all of them thinking about code, I'll free up brain-time for other interests, making me, I hope, a more well-rounded individual.

Well, time to start another semester. I'm hoping this one will be less hectic than last semester was. In retrospect, I think I bit off a bit more than I could chew. I'm taking one less class this semester, and I don't have any early classes, so hopefully things will be a bit more manageable.

That's all, just wanted to give a quick update before the semester starts. I'm sure I'll have more to say later.

P.S. bonus points if you can identify where I got the quote that titles this post.

I'm currently sitting in the library working on my last programming project for the semester. Just now I happened to glance at the monitor of the guy sitting behind me. He's playing Warcraft 3. In the library. During the last week of classes.

I think he's just doing it to rub it in all of our faces that he can. The bastard.

A quick update from the front lines:

Well, this semester has turned out to be stress city. I bit off more than I could chew this semester, and unfortunately didn't figure that out before the drop/add deadline. I've got projects due and exams coming up in the next two weeks for two out of three of my classes, and since they're both early classes I slept through my alarm a few (okay, many) times, so I have to do some major time studying to catch up. In my third class I have two major projects due in the next two weeks, one of which is the project from hell: it's worth 50% of my grade, we were supposed to have started a month ago, and I have basically nothing done.

Hurray!

(tears hair out and runs away crying)

Well, my path for the next 1.5 years has been set. This summer I'm going back to Amazon as an intern in the Web Services group. Web Services is a big part of the "Web 2.0" movement, and is a fairly exciting area in the world of web programming these days. Definitely exciting stuff.

Also, although it's not officially official, I've been accepted to the U of M CSE Master's program, so I'm happy about that. It's only a three semester program, which I think is a happy medium between getting in more good classes and not being in school too much longer. Like I said, I'm waiting on the official notification from the School of Graduate Studies, but my department accepted me, so as I understand it it's essentially a done deal.

Well, seeing as how I'm back at school with some time to spare, I thought I'd to a quick & boring housekeeping update. Break was nice, got to do lots and lots of nothing (as my dad said, I was "decompressing"). Read some good books, watched some good movies, generally just had a good time. Christmas was nice, as always. Got a bunch of DVDs, a few books, and a gargantuan Star Wars lego set. No complaints there. Troy got an mp3 player, but I had to help him pick out which one. We ended up choosing an iPod - it's overpriced and toolish, but it's fairly idiot-proof, so that worked out fairly well.

I thought I should make official mention that I've instituted a new site feature. I like to call it the "Angstblocker." Or maybe "Angstblocker 6000," I haven't really decided yet. Anyways, the way it works is, I mark the entries that I deem too full of angst to unleash upon the general public. From that point on, in order to view said entries, you need to be logged on as a member. Not a big deal, but worth mention.

My class schedule is looking to be quite nasty - my worst semester yet. I've got sixteen credits of upper-level computer science classes, with three separate groups to juggle for group programming assignments. On the plus side, the time-schedule my classes fit into is probably one of my best yet. We'll see, but I suspect I'm not going to have much free time this semester.

It's been awhile; life's been busy. The project cycle has been pretty vicious this semester, and when you add in the stupid busy work from non-engineering classes, I've been kept pretty busy. Deadlines for applying to grad school are coming up in a few months, so I should probably start working on that. I don't think I mentioned it here, but I did get a job offer from Amazon. A very generous offer. So that was nice. Even though I'm doing grad school, the job offer extends into an automatic internship offer, so I'm pretty well set for this summer, which is also nice.

News from home: apparently OE is doing exceptionally well in football this year. I don't really know all the specifics (my eyes kind of glaze over when people try to tell them to me), but apparently this team is the best in at least a decade, which is pretty cool. On a sadder note, apparently some kid in Troy's class commited suicide. I guess Troy sat next to him in classes the day he died, so he had a really tough time with that.

What else... I saw Dahlke a few weeks ago! He was in A² for a checkup, so we caught up over lunch. A big article appeared about him in a medical journal a few months back, which was neat. Apparently his cancer treatments were really experimental, and kind of a big deal, which I wasn't aware of. On a more selfish note, I also learned that I'm even more pathetic than I was previously aware of: apparently Loren Hunt has a girlfriend at Alma. The fact that Loren is now socially more successful than me is really pretty pathetic.

Moving on... work on the new website is progressing nicely, despite my lack of free time. It's currently about two-thirds of the way complete, with only the photoalbum, "about me" page, and some administrative stuff for me to finish. I expect I'll be cycling the links on the thehowe.com front page sometime early next month. At that point I'll also be shutting down the blog replies functionality on v5.0, since some of the changes I'm making for v6.0 have broken the old code.