I haven't been posting much, why? Simple actually, I've been both busy, and not so stressed that I need to blow off steam at anyone who might be listening. Possibly also, I forget... but I tend to try and avoid using that as a reason for anything. So, what have I been doing? Lots and lots of work,a short holiday, and then the work all picked up again. That makes for a boring summary, I know, but it feels pretty accurate.
I don't really need to give much of an overview of what I have done work wise, since my last post was just before exams started at the end of the last term. It is now a couple of weeks into the new term, and I am still trying to find a rhythm, which may take a while considering the CS timetabling technique (take a calendar, put lectures on days, change them a week later) and the fact that there are people in the department who seem to enjoy setting deadlines and schedules without consulting the published timetable, or their colleagues.But, that is not the point, what is done is done. I have a project (yay) which, if I can get through all the literature, should be pretty awesome.
Outside of University, I have not been completely nerdy. I have been playing second team hockey for my club, and trying to keep people coming to my fledgling youth group. The hockey has been awesome, and I enjoy the spirit which the club embraces. It means I have been getting plenty of regular exercise, and working hard on the field. This is definitely good for my health! The youth stuff, well that goes a bit oddly I think. We have been dwindling a little, but not too much, and hopefully things will start to look up a bit, with Youth Alpha starting this week. There might be some new faces, and if we get it right, they will hopefully stay fr the duration of the course.
So, what may come in May? Hopefully good things, although I am sure there will be plenty of stress and hard work. The youth looks like it will be good, the hockey would surprise me if it went bad, and the varsity work? Well it will be hard, and maths will scare me, but I think it will be worth the effort in the end. So all in all, a full looking month, but hopefully a good one.
Thursday, 1 May 2014
Tuesday, 25 March 2014
Long weekends and term endings
This year, the April holidays are all weird. This is due to Easter being late, but it makes for some very interesting times ahead, in the next couple of weeks. This last weekend was a long one with Human Rights day on Friday. I could probably write a post about the meaning of Human Rights day in South Africa, but Friday was actually more a celebration of my mother's birthday for me. The whole long weekend also meant that my family took the time to get away from the business that clogs up our lives. My youngest brother spent the weekend on a Scout camp, building rafts and catapults. The rest of the family escaped to Simonstown, and the lovely sea views of the Simonsberg.
That was most certainly time well spent, no matter how unproductive sea views might sound. Whilst the amount of work I got done was minimal, the weekend away from the rat race was helpful in resetting my mind to a place where my university work is fun again. I no longer feel like I'm drowning, and I can appreciate the beauty and simplicity of Category Theory (whilst still feeling a little lost). I can also focus now on studying for exams. This might be another reason for my feelings of relief.
I have been working on one project per CS course for the last few weeks, and it felt like the work would just never end. Now, I have handed them all in, and I have some time to spend studying for exams rather than focussing on the implementation of the skills we were learning alongside the project. I can go back and do all the readings that I may have skipped while working on the projects. I can look through past papers and come to understand what I am supposed to know for each course. In this, I quite like the structure of my courses, taking only half a semester, and then writing an exam, and writing them off. It is a little scary to be writing exams on absolutely no feedback in terms of marks, but I suppose it just means I must make sure I know everything as well as I can before I go into the exam, not that I would do different in different circumstances.
What becomes fairly odd though, is that I write some exams next week, the week after that I have short vac, and then a week later it is Easter, and so there are holidays all scattered there. There is also Freedom day, and then Worker's day, and then voting day, all of which are holidays. So for the first three weeks of the new term, there is not a one which is a full week. It is a rather spectacular spray of holidays. Lots of time to either do intensive work on a single topic, or else time to relax, visit the beach, climb a mountain, read a book, something of that nature.
So having ramble on, mostly about one topic, I sign off, thinking about what remains of my evening, and realising that eight o'clock hockey practises are actually really late.
That was most certainly time well spent, no matter how unproductive sea views might sound. Whilst the amount of work I got done was minimal, the weekend away from the rat race was helpful in resetting my mind to a place where my university work is fun again. I no longer feel like I'm drowning, and I can appreciate the beauty and simplicity of Category Theory (whilst still feeling a little lost). I can also focus now on studying for exams. This might be another reason for my feelings of relief.
I have been working on one project per CS course for the last few weeks, and it felt like the work would just never end. Now, I have handed them all in, and I have some time to spend studying for exams rather than focussing on the implementation of the skills we were learning alongside the project. I can go back and do all the readings that I may have skipped while working on the projects. I can look through past papers and come to understand what I am supposed to know for each course. In this, I quite like the structure of my courses, taking only half a semester, and then writing an exam, and writing them off. It is a little scary to be writing exams on absolutely no feedback in terms of marks, but I suppose it just means I must make sure I know everything as well as I can before I go into the exam, not that I would do different in different circumstances.
What becomes fairly odd though, is that I write some exams next week, the week after that I have short vac, and then a week later it is Easter, and so there are holidays all scattered there. There is also Freedom day, and then Worker's day, and then voting day, all of which are holidays. So for the first three weeks of the new term, there is not a one which is a full week. It is a rather spectacular spray of holidays. Lots of time to either do intensive work on a single topic, or else time to relax, visit the beach, climb a mountain, read a book, something of that nature.
So having ramble on, mostly about one topic, I sign off, thinking about what remains of my evening, and realising that eight o'clock hockey practises are actually really late.
Monday, 10 March 2014
A bit of this, a bit of that
Really, my life is an interesting mix of different pieces. I have all the "I'm working harder than I have for years" stuff with my honours course work. I have the "yay, I get to play hockey with cool people" stuff. I also have the "I just got bored out of my socks while learning a lot at youth synod" stuff. So, a fairly even mix of everything, yeah? But t is a bit of this and a bit of that.
I spent Friday night and most of Saturday at the Cape of Good Hope district Youth Synod that was held in Hout bay this weekend. It was at the same time really interesting and really boring. The business stuff, where people were giving the same points over and over again, in different words and accents, was not so much fun. But there was also a lot of really useful information that I came out with. Stuff about the Laws and Disciplines of the MCSA that I didn't know. It was also a bit of a networking experience. I could see that in the district there are people who are trying to make things better for the youth of this area.
I was mostly frustrated by the lack of organisation for this weekend, and the inability of things to run on time, and of course, even when everything runs over, pretty much nothing can be cancelled, except for the parts where the person who has come to present leaves because the time is over and they haven't started. I do appreciate that these things are difficult to organise, and that the delegates were all woefully under-prepared, but I do think that it could be made to work. I also think, that if I'm not careful, I might find myself one of the people who has to try and organise such things in the future. Not for at least a year, but this time next year, I will have much more of a feel for what is happening in my circuit, and more of a presence in the district. It wouldn't be a bad thing, but I have to avoid it until I have the time.
That is one bit of this. Other things that happen, I finally handed in the NVP/PCU business plan that has been plaguing me for the last few weeks. I do not have to care about it any more, except perhaps to wonder what my mark will be like. It is over, there is no possible way for me to change it now. I am glad, it is a relief to have that off my shoulders. Not that it means my work load is any less. I have an evolutionary computing algorithm to code up to solve the travelling salesman problem (which is apparently not a terribly hard thing, it just needs to run a zillion times). Also, there is this weird information retrieval thing that I need to help with. When I say weird, I mean we aren't even that sure about what we have to get done, other than the fact that it might well require learning XSLT, to convert the format of about 10GB of XML into the right format.
Besides those two projects there is a write up for the visualisation that has been pretty much created, and we need to try and make it sit happily on a website, possibly through some clever javascript that other people have written. Beyond that there is always maths (which is still cool) and I have been learning tikz, because I have to type up my Graph Theory homework using LaTeX. That is kind of fun though. Writing out these nodes and an edge set and seeing it come out as a nice picture with very straight neat lines.
What else, oh yes, hockey, I have trials tomorrow night. That will be cool, if I don't get lost on the way to the astro, but I'm sure I will find my way. People did actually tell me where it is, and this seems to agree with Google Maps, so I stand a chance.
See, very much a bit of this and a bit of that.
But all very much worth doing. For all my exhaustion, I am having a really good time this year.
I spent Friday night and most of Saturday at the Cape of Good Hope district Youth Synod that was held in Hout bay this weekend. It was at the same time really interesting and really boring. The business stuff, where people were giving the same points over and over again, in different words and accents, was not so much fun. But there was also a lot of really useful information that I came out with. Stuff about the Laws and Disciplines of the MCSA that I didn't know. It was also a bit of a networking experience. I could see that in the district there are people who are trying to make things better for the youth of this area.
I was mostly frustrated by the lack of organisation for this weekend, and the inability of things to run on time, and of course, even when everything runs over, pretty much nothing can be cancelled, except for the parts where the person who has come to present leaves because the time is over and they haven't started. I do appreciate that these things are difficult to organise, and that the delegates were all woefully under-prepared, but I do think that it could be made to work. I also think, that if I'm not careful, I might find myself one of the people who has to try and organise such things in the future. Not for at least a year, but this time next year, I will have much more of a feel for what is happening in my circuit, and more of a presence in the district. It wouldn't be a bad thing, but I have to avoid it until I have the time.
That is one bit of this. Other things that happen, I finally handed in the NVP/PCU business plan that has been plaguing me for the last few weeks. I do not have to care about it any more, except perhaps to wonder what my mark will be like. It is over, there is no possible way for me to change it now. I am glad, it is a relief to have that off my shoulders. Not that it means my work load is any less. I have an evolutionary computing algorithm to code up to solve the travelling salesman problem (which is apparently not a terribly hard thing, it just needs to run a zillion times). Also, there is this weird information retrieval thing that I need to help with. When I say weird, I mean we aren't even that sure about what we have to get done, other than the fact that it might well require learning XSLT, to convert the format of about 10GB of XML into the right format.
Besides those two projects there is a write up for the visualisation that has been pretty much created, and we need to try and make it sit happily on a website, possibly through some clever javascript that other people have written. Beyond that there is always maths (which is still cool) and I have been learning tikz, because I have to type up my Graph Theory homework using LaTeX. That is kind of fun though. Writing out these nodes and an edge set and seeing it come out as a nice picture with very straight neat lines.
What else, oh yes, hockey, I have trials tomorrow night. That will be cool, if I don't get lost on the way to the astro, but I'm sure I will find my way. People did actually tell me where it is, and this seems to agree with Google Maps, so I stand a chance.
See, very much a bit of this and a bit of that.
But all very much worth doing. For all my exhaustion, I am having a really good time this year.
Tuesday, 4 March 2014
University and Reading
So, this is not necessarily a very meaningful post, but I am currently sitting in on a lecture on the fundamentals of mathematics, where the lecturer is going over the logic stuff that I did when I was in first year. The point of sitting in is of course for the times when my undergrad maths didn't quite cover everything it needed to. So, whilst half listening to a maths lecture, I am thinking about what I have blogged about in the past. One of the common topics, is books. Those amazing things where the author provides an escape into a whole new world.
What does that have to do with university and reading? Well, the answer is simple. When I am busy with lectures and projects all day every day, I have less time to read. Well, I don't mean that my daily intake of written words decreases, but rather that the style of writing I read most changes. In the holidays there is time for as many novels as I like, and I can spend the mental energy on trying to read some of those books that come up in lists of books everyone should read, like the Illiad or Paradise lost. During the term, however, I mostly find that I am reading papers and textbooks which expand on topics discussed in class. Interestingly, the types of blogs I find time to read don't change, simply the volume.
I do have some time for novels though, I suppose, judging by the fact of my library books, those suggest that I manage to read a book every two weeks or so. Possibly a little shorter than two weeks. So perhaps I am not all so busy as I want people to think, but then I look around, and realise that there are people in my classes who have time to read all the extra resources posted for each course, and who have made even more progress on their projects than I have. I then remember, also, that these people, are much wiser than me, and do not do extra maths courses simply because they are awesome. Admittedly they don't think maths is awesome.
Okay, now that I have gone so far off that I don't know where I am, and I need a map to return to the point of this post, let me try find a new one. So I do have time to read (and maybe sleep) but I have to choose my reading material carefully. Reading papers and textbooks is very good for my knowledge base, but is it helpful in other ways? Will it help me sleep? Will it help me to solve the problem which makes up the project I am currently working on? I don't know. Will a novel do that? It might help me sleep, but I'm pretty sure it won't fulfill the others, except in a secondary manner.
On that note, I will make a decision. I should continue in my efforts to read through the whole wheel of time series, but I should also try to make time to read important extra material. Also, readinag around the topics on my own is a good idea. Thus may I justify to myself the download of the Principia Mathimatica from Archive.org.
Monday, 3 March 2014
Hmm, distractions...
Right. This should really be a follow up post to "The Big Day", but it isn't. It is more abut what I end up doing when I'm sitting at my computer with a working internet connection, after a long day of working hard at varsity. I guess I can say that yes the presentation seemed okay. I was nervous, my knees shook, but we made it all the way through, and we were given some very helpful feedback to add to our actual written business plan. So, now that bit is said, what happens when a nerd sits at a computer and procrastinates?
Actually, it doesn't matter if you're a nerd or not, the same patterns are followed. I didn't even mean to procrastinate, it just kind of happened. When I want something procrastinaty (I did just make up that word) to do, I am at a loss. But this evening, I sat down, and looked at what tabs were open on my browser and saw, (a) my feed reader, and (b) blogger.
Let's have a brief look at (a) first. Open feed reader, see ooh, there's a new xkcd, goody. Read xkcd. Then see, hmm Shtetl-Optimized has a new post. This is where it gets nerdy, I then remember that I need to find out if I can do my major project with the local complexity theory guy, so go off and find his email address, then remember that I am special and the only one registered for my honours program, so email someone about if I can just email the person I want, and ask them to supervise me. Now, having sent off an important email, I can return to the point where I was going to read the blog post. After reading about a page's worth of the post, I'm starting to skip stuff, this usually means I'm too tired to fully absorb the post, so I go back and mark it as unread, to read sometime that I can actually understand it. That is about it for (a).
Move on to (b). Look at blogger dashboard. Think, I should write a post. Look at dates given for posts written, think, hmm that's odd, it always gets the dates wrong, because of time zone things. Google knows where I live though (yes they are that stalkerish) and they know my time zone, so why does Friday's post show the date as 27/02/2014? Friday was the 28th. So this leads me off to try and set my time zone somewhere, or something like that, so that my posts display the right date, otherwise I might post a Friday the thirteenth thing on Thursday the twelfth, which doesn't sound nearly as spooky. Right, so trying to work out settings in Google, and suddenly I'm on my Google+ profile page. And the last time I posted to that was the day I got it, my 18th birthday. Hmm, all my information is outdated. Fix this, fix that. Add stuff in, maybe I should link to linkedIn? nah, don't bother to find the URL. I did link to an awesome maths blog, Maths Intersection Programming, where I have been learning about algebra.
After that I returned to blogger, linked to Google+, allowing anyone to find out who is writing this weird blog (not that I never tweet that I posted or anything) and my dates are still all wrong. I have no idea how to fix them. If I post in the morning, and it is still the previous day in the states, my dates come out strangled. What a pain.
Interesting thought on this post though, it is a lot more link heavy than anything else I've posted. It is probably also a very different type of post. Oh well. This stuff is such a mish-mash, that I could add in here about my woes with university admin and lecturers who have limited timetabling/scheduling skills, and it would fit. I won't though, I will spare both you and me that rant.
</end procrastination> (Not that I opened that tag anywhere...)
EDIT: So immediately after posting I found the settings to change my blogger time zone... figures.
Actually, it doesn't matter if you're a nerd or not, the same patterns are followed. I didn't even mean to procrastinate, it just kind of happened. When I want something procrastinaty (I did just make up that word) to do, I am at a loss. But this evening, I sat down, and looked at what tabs were open on my browser and saw, (a) my feed reader, and (b) blogger.
Let's have a brief look at (a) first. Open feed reader, see ooh, there's a new xkcd, goody. Read xkcd. Then see, hmm Shtetl-Optimized has a new post. This is where it gets nerdy, I then remember that I need to find out if I can do my major project with the local complexity theory guy, so go off and find his email address, then remember that I am special and the only one registered for my honours program, so email someone about if I can just email the person I want, and ask them to supervise me. Now, having sent off an important email, I can return to the point where I was going to read the blog post. After reading about a page's worth of the post, I'm starting to skip stuff, this usually means I'm too tired to fully absorb the post, so I go back and mark it as unread, to read sometime that I can actually understand it. That is about it for (a).
Move on to (b). Look at blogger dashboard. Think, I should write a post. Look at dates given for posts written, think, hmm that's odd, it always gets the dates wrong, because of time zone things. Google knows where I live though (yes they are that stalkerish) and they know my time zone, so why does Friday's post show the date as 27/02/2014? Friday was the 28th. So this leads me off to try and set my time zone somewhere, or something like that, so that my posts display the right date, otherwise I might post a Friday the thirteenth thing on Thursday the twelfth, which doesn't sound nearly as spooky. Right, so trying to work out settings in Google, and suddenly I'm on my Google+ profile page. And the last time I posted to that was the day I got it, my 18th birthday. Hmm, all my information is outdated. Fix this, fix that. Add stuff in, maybe I should link to linkedIn? nah, don't bother to find the URL. I did link to an awesome maths blog, Maths Intersection Programming, where I have been learning about algebra.
After that I returned to blogger, linked to Google+, allowing anyone to find out who is writing this weird blog (not that I never tweet that I posted or anything) and my dates are still all wrong. I have no idea how to fix them. If I post in the morning, and it is still the previous day in the states, my dates come out strangled. What a pain.
Interesting thought on this post though, it is a lot more link heavy than anything else I've posted. It is probably also a very different type of post. Oh well. This stuff is such a mish-mash, that I could add in here about my woes with university admin and lecturers who have limited timetabling/scheduling skills, and it would fit. I won't though, I will spare both you and me that rant.
</end procrastination> (Not that I opened that tag anywhere...)
EDIT: So immediately after posting I found the settings to change my blogger time zone... figures.
Friday, 28 February 2014
The big day
The big day isn't really anything very exciting. It is in fact the day of the final business plan presentations. The day where every group goes through the wringer. The day where we find out if our work over the last four weeks has been worth anything. It is a nerve wracking idea. Something which is scary for many people, and a fairly high pressure situation is never the most fun experience.
Today, we present to a very small group of people, something which we have been preparing for intermittently. If you walk into our LAN today, everyone will be clumped into their groups, making last minute changes to their presentations, and practising what they are going to say. Every shirt has a collar, and there are even some ties in sight. For a group of CS students, this is rather unusual, where the norm is T-Shirts, with predominantly shorts, some skirts, and some jeans. It is on presentation days that the whole group comes together to make sure everything is working, and groups will help each other out if need be.
Our group going first makes life rather interesting for us. The others will have the opportunity to see or ask what is expected of them, for us, we go in cold, hoping that we have no tech failures, and that we can remember our speeches. Something which is very important, if we stumble over our words, we will feel like we are letting down the team. We are ready though, or at least I believe we are, I can hope.
So, time to go practise. Perhaps, if I remeber, I will post about how it actually goes...
Today, we present to a very small group of people, something which we have been preparing for intermittently. If you walk into our LAN today, everyone will be clumped into their groups, making last minute changes to their presentations, and practising what they are going to say. Every shirt has a collar, and there are even some ties in sight. For a group of CS students, this is rather unusual, where the norm is T-Shirts, with predominantly shorts, some skirts, and some jeans. It is on presentation days that the whole group comes together to make sure everything is working, and groups will help each other out if need be.
Our group going first makes life rather interesting for us. The others will have the opportunity to see or ask what is expected of them, for us, we go in cold, hoping that we have no tech failures, and that we can remember our speeches. Something which is very important, if we stumble over our words, we will feel like we are letting down the team. We are ready though, or at least I believe we are, I can hope.
So, time to go practise. Perhaps, if I remeber, I will post about how it actually goes...
Tuesday, 18 February 2014
Maths, maths, maths
Ooh, I haven't written a post for a while, I'm getting slack. Or maybe I'm getting swamped. Lectures started this week. Officially anyway. Because of this some things have been put on hold. Possibly they shouldn't be, and it will bight us in a week when deadlines loom, but the workload is looking freaky. My work load includes picking up enough pure maths to fill in the gaps, so that I can successfully do a course on category theory (something which is awesome, but I don't fully understand yet) and producing an epic visualisation, which at least I'm not working alone for, and producing a business plan, and attending other lectures. PHEW! That looks like quite a big ask.
On the surface it is big, but I think over the next week or so the boiling pot will settle down, and life will feel like it is structured reasonably again. The business plan presentation is in a week and a half (uh oh) but after that the course can e written off, and there is no need to worry about any of that stuff until the marks are released, and even then the only reason to worry would be if I failed something, which I refuse to do. It may happen that my honours marks are lower than my undergrad, but that is kind of expected, what with working harder, moving to a higher class university, and no longer being the top of the class, as I was for the last year and a half (without bragging).
The maths is scary though. Hence the title. I have had two lectures on Category Theory, and now I know I have to work really hard to catch up. It is definitely possible, and I will sit in on another fundamental course to catch up on certain concepts, but I think most of my catching up will come from doing a bunch of extra reading. So looking through textbooks, and previous lecture notes, and that amazing resource which holds all knowledge, Wikipedia. With these tools, I can grasp enough group theory, ring theory and field theory to follow the examples of category theory. I have already got a reasonable knowledge of set theory (I think), so I should be okay on that score.
With all these things to consider though, is it surprising that I haven't even thought about NVP for days? I have much more exciting things to think about, maths and more maths, and possibly, if I'm bored of maths, I can have a look at my VIS project. When both of those get too much for me, then it is time to start writing out a business plan. Hmm, this strikes me as compromising my work ethic. Maybe I should find my NVP group and remind them of the deadline. I doubt they have forgotten though, they seem to be working just as hard as me, on the courses they are taking.
Oh well, I feel that maths is awesome enough to completely overrule any business strategy or business plan. Just put "we get to do awesome maths" and hope people will pay you for it. That would work wouldn't it? isn't that what academics do?
Oh well, I shall grind my way through the next few days, and hope that maths does not fry my brain, that would be unfortunate. If I survive to the weekend, then I have a whole day (Saturday) to devote to catching up on work that has been neglected due to a glitch in the weighting of the tasks in the priority queue that makes up my mental task manager. And yes, if you're reading this you should know, I am a nerd.
On the surface it is big, but I think over the next week or so the boiling pot will settle down, and life will feel like it is structured reasonably again. The business plan presentation is in a week and a half (uh oh) but after that the course can e written off, and there is no need to worry about any of that stuff until the marks are released, and even then the only reason to worry would be if I failed something, which I refuse to do. It may happen that my honours marks are lower than my undergrad, but that is kind of expected, what with working harder, moving to a higher class university, and no longer being the top of the class, as I was for the last year and a half (without bragging).
The maths is scary though. Hence the title. I have had two lectures on Category Theory, and now I know I have to work really hard to catch up. It is definitely possible, and I will sit in on another fundamental course to catch up on certain concepts, but I think most of my catching up will come from doing a bunch of extra reading. So looking through textbooks, and previous lecture notes, and that amazing resource which holds all knowledge, Wikipedia. With these tools, I can grasp enough group theory, ring theory and field theory to follow the examples of category theory. I have already got a reasonable knowledge of set theory (I think), so I should be okay on that score.
With all these things to consider though, is it surprising that I haven't even thought about NVP for days? I have much more exciting things to think about, maths and more maths, and possibly, if I'm bored of maths, I can have a look at my VIS project. When both of those get too much for me, then it is time to start writing out a business plan. Hmm, this strikes me as compromising my work ethic. Maybe I should find my NVP group and remind them of the deadline. I doubt they have forgotten though, they seem to be working just as hard as me, on the courses they are taking.
Oh well, I feel that maths is awesome enough to completely overrule any business strategy or business plan. Just put "we get to do awesome maths" and hope people will pay you for it. That would work wouldn't it? isn't that what academics do?
Oh well, I shall grind my way through the next few days, and hope that maths does not fry my brain, that would be unfortunate. If I survive to the weekend, then I have a whole day (Saturday) to devote to catching up on work that has been neglected due to a glitch in the weighting of the tasks in the priority queue that makes up my mental task manager. And yes, if you're reading this you should know, I am a nerd.
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