First Week of School

Tired, busy, bored, along with anticipating a ramp up later, this is how I feel about school after a week. Well, technically a week, but with school starting with a half week it doesn't quite mean as much as a week would normally entail. Why not start on a Monday? I have no idea. While it doesn't make much sense to me, there's probably a decent reason for it, though.

As I'm writing this, listening to Pandora, I'm reminded about something very, very annoying about the parking situation. THERE IS NOT ENOUGH PARKING SPACES! Last semester, there was. The change is the giant construction site taking up ~250 parking spaces. The college is building some athletic building or something—I won't be here long enough to enjoy it, so I don't really care what it is; it is merely a loud annoyance to me.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I have no problems with parking because my classes start at 8:00am. That's another annoyance, why would anyone want to schedule the only Calculus II class that early? The only redeeming quality in that regard is that the professor is very lenient on the start time—he didn't show up the first day until twenty after, which was okay with me. However, there is a hidden trap on Tuesday and Thursday. Classes are fifteen minutes apart from 8am-4pm, except for an hour break 10-11am that is not adequately late enough to be appropriately hungry to eat a sufficiently large meal to satisfy me until classes are over. [Post-writing note: I am proud of that sentence, weird as it is.] I really don't want to bring lunch, but it seems I will have to. While there was no other way to schedule it, it is another annoyance to add to the list.

There seems to be a significant disconnect between the staff and students here regarding temperature. I'm freezing my butt off while inside the building. It must below 68 degrees or so. Whatever the temperature, it is very cold.

Just to shake things up, I will say something positive about this semester. My microeconomics instructor, Dudley Salley, is fantastic! I'm not entirely sure where this class' credit will be applied—meh doesn’t matter, it will be fun learning about what I’m doing on the WoW AH. The professor himself said I could learn everything about the course in fifteen minutes since I've already taken calculus—I'm not sure if that reflects well on the content, but it does mean I don't have to worry about this course in the least. In any case, it is very enjoyable to watch Prof. Salley bash everybody's politics and tell the students "if there's no rain, no corn grows [he was giving an example of the direct relationship between corn and raid], what happens then? Hmm, what happens then? We DIE, that's what happens."

American History II is after Economics, and I really haven't had enough classes to be sure how well I will like this class. The professor seems to be decent, but I really don't know much about history—Google and Wikipedia exist for remembering those things. The only thing I can say for sure is that reading historical document excerpts is very boring; however, there aren't too many pages, roughly thirty pages, it seems.

Breaking the smooth continuum so far, I'll jump around the schedule. Calculus II is the first class on Tuesday and Thursday. Not very exciting, I have to admit. It is kinda cool to look back over the class notes and realize a non-math person would be impressed and daunted at the equations simultaneously, yet a math geek would realize exactly what is happening and be like, "meh, just some simple physics." Hmm, when proofreading this post, I realized I have mentioned math class twice. Oh well.

Geology, that class is another wildcard and will be a source of many Evolution vs. Creationism posts. The first lecture produced at least two and, because of time, almost resulted in several more.

Last, but, well, maybe it is least, Computer Science II. The professor has stated the first two weeks will only be review of last semester—half because most of the students really need it, half because he wasn't the professor of the previous CSCI class. I finished the in-class assignment (a few very simple programs), and had the opportunity to leave an hour early. I foresee this review period to be even easier than I thought it would be.

Apologies for the slightly less coherent post than usual, I'm not used to "blogging" in the traditional and mildly derogatory use of the word.