the end... for realz

Tough, silly, and chill,
Strike a balance to recall,
Another year passed.

Yeah, it's gone, alright. Hard to believe that a year ago today I'd already started my job at Google and moved to California, but a lot has changed since then. I'm pretty sure that I spent time last summer (and over the past school year) growing up... but not so much that I won't be excited to get water guns in the mail (thanks, Mom and Dad).

This last semester was dandy. I got cut a break from homework, but that left time to explore other interesting things; I'm getting really excited about logic programming and miniKanren, which was, incidentally, the PhD thesis project of one of my AIs this semester. He's trying to get me to convince the NLP people in Deutschland that they want to use it for their research. :)

I guess this is the part that I think about what I'll miss when I'm overseas this summer, but I don't really know what to say. I'm actually pretty terrified of the move. It's one thing to move across the country to California and meet up with someone I know there. It's an entirely different thing to move 7 timezones across an ocean to a country where I don't even speak the language and have never met in person anyone within 3 hours of where I'm living. It's scary!

But I suspect I would be denied the opportunity to expand myself if I didn't do things that terrified me once in a while. Skydiving was a blast! :P

So this is the last entry in this blog... I don't live next to 666 anymore, and I guess I'll miss it a little bit, at least. The painting we did was a lot of fun, but I learned some stuff about what kinds of people I can live with and what kinds I'm not so good at living with. Let's hope that Mathieu and Titilayo are the former. :)

(next posting will be on awesomehaus.blogspot.com)

before

Before I even
Move in, my nerves are singing,
Anticipating.

I'm fairly (or unfairly) convinced that this year is going to rock. After a long summer of R&R in sunny California, I'm ready to get back and hit the books like a madwoman. My schedule this semester could potentially kick my ass, but that would be okay. The college experience, right? Anyway, the classes I'm taking this semester:

S403 - Honors Modern Algebra
S311 - Honors Calculus III
M490 - Putnam Seminar
B403 - Some kind of algorithms class I don't remember the name of
B490 - Graduate Design Patterns
E190 - Yoga

I'm thinking of adding in another class (that's only 15 hours there, so I'm really, really tempted): Graduate Operating Systems. And I'm also considering the possibility of changing yoga for something more adventurous... like... umm... I dunno, actually. Maybe rock climbing. That would be pretty sweet.

Some of my stuff is moved in to the apartment, and I'm going to do the rest of the move tomorrow. Things have been complicated by the fact that our minivan drowned in the flood, but c'est la vie. From what I've seen of the apartment so far, it's going to be pretty nice. Hopefully a step up from what comes to mind when one thinks of "college apartment." But I guess that remains to be seen.

But I'm hoping for a healthy amount of diversion from classes this semester. This summer taught me a lot about kicking back and enjoying life, and those are lessons that I intend to continue following. I'm planning an Election Day party that I'm pretty excited about, as well as a visit from some of the Canadians (Evan, Jeff, Pat) and a visit to them sometime later on.

:D Bring on the year!