Summer was nice, that job I mentioned didn't materialize and I ended up a month at home without much to do. I went to Europe for a week and almost bought a Macbook Pro, but then I read online about many people having overheating issues, a possible refresh soon, and a new design next year after Ivy Bridge processors are released. I guess I'll just stick to my 3 years old Toshiba laptop, which is starting to show signs of age.

Now I'm back to uni, beginning my 4th year there. Last trimester was madness, I think I lost 2 weeks worth of sleep in the span of 12 weeks. That was, without any doubts, the worst 12 weeks I've ever gone through in my life. I learned to hate PHP, Java and life. Haskell is awesome, but I still need to learn Monads to use it effectively. I didn't have enough time to finish my interpreter, and I don't think I'll work on it in the near future as I'll probably take the compilers course neginning in January.

I've fully recovered from those weeks of madness, and this time I'll be doing Programming Languages I, Computer Networks I, and Linear Programming.
Programming languages has a mythical reputation among comp sci students here, mostly due to evil teachers, deep and complex reading material, and the functional and logical programming paradigms. Mostly evil teachers.
I was really looking forward to it, I appreciate the challengue, but it seems I'm slated for a big dissapointment. So far, my teacher sucks, and people told me he is easy too. My level of excitement over this course went straight to 0 after that.
Computer networks is the most boring course I've ever taken in my life. Its sleep-inducing effects must be studied by professionals around the world as it might help people who can't sleep. I will also be programming in C...yuck. C is evil.
And then there is linear programming, whose reputation is totally opposite to programming languages: quick and easy.

In addition to that, I'll be doing the free online introductory courses on AI and Machine Learning the respective Stanford University teachers will be teaching this trimester. If you're interested you can sign up here:
AI: http://robots.stanford.edu/cs221/
Machine Learning: http://www.ml-class.com/
Databases: http://www.db-class.com/

There is also a databases course, but it seems that the databases course I took earlier this year covered a great of those topics already.

To conclude my blog, where the hell is my backup button? While writing this blog I got distracted by my old blogs list that appear when posting a new blog, and remembered how useful it would be to have a button to automatically export your blogs to a downloadable file. I once sent it as a suggestion through the bug report system (even FSX told me it was a good idea) but it never came to fruition.

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