Breaktime

Finals went as well as could be expected. The math final was open notes and books, so I took advantage of that fact to prepare my scratch paper, with an old exam as a guide, with formulas and algorithms to solve each problem, including prepared truth-tables, etc, so that during the test I wouldn't have to spend any time looking anything up or drawing anything, because I'd already done it. My evil plan worked really well and I was right on schedule right up until  the Euclidean Algorithm problem. I know how to solve one of those, but I still messed up a distribution step on the backwards side of it, and had to re-do it three times to finally get the right answer. Not a good strategy for a test like that, but I just couldn't let it go. Foolish pride I suppose. So with that delay I didn't have enough time for the last couple of recursive function problems, which is a pity, because those are fun. We'll see how it turns out.
My computer architecture final was one half-hour after the maths final, so Seri and I grabbed a quick bite to eat (with Clint- a frequent happy occurrence) and dashed off to it. It was mostly a blur of questions and answers. I think I did ok, it was a fun class and I learned a lot. I used to think of myself as somewhat of a hardware guy, but no longer. Once the layers of abstraction are stripped away, how computers really work is just mind-breakingly complicated. I would be just as happy to not ever have to look at assembler code ever again, but I know since I have to take a Senior level compiler design class that that is not to be, at least not quite yet.
So that's it for my first semester at Idaho. I'm in the right place, and I think that they'll let me into the grad program eventually. But I'm not leaving without a degree of some sort. Onward!