Update, and so on.

So I got into Grad School for the fall. This will be good, if I also can get a tuition waiver and a job in the department. But at least in means I'm on track for the Masters degree now and can skip some of the non-CS related Bachelor's requirements. I could theoretically skip the math, but that is such a bad idea, besides, I like the math.
We went to another poetry reading last Thursday. Jory Mickelson, a TA in Colleen's poetry class was reading from his new chapbook. It was good work, possibly not totally butt-kicking, but solid, coherent, playful. He's totally deserving of the MFA he's going to get next year.
And an interesting contrast with the woman that read before him. Whereas Jory's poems had a strong rural western style and voice, Ciara Shuttleworth set most of her poems in San Fransisco. It made me wonder if it is even possible to write anything but a youthful/urban-alienation poem set anywhere near SF, and if not, what is the minimum distance from SF you have to be in order to write something non-alienated? Or at least non-foggy? The fault may be mine. I am a poor critic, and I can't even remember what she was saying. It was trying for urban and edgy and it involved cigarettes.
I got started on my automatic poetry generator project, just an hour or two, enough to realize that it was a huge problem that I didn't have time for. I need a lexer and a parser to go along with my bag full of fridge magnets, also some composition rules. Hm, I wonder if I can't do a touch interface that lets one move the fridge magnet word blocks around on the screen, letting the user supply the polish that the machine probably can't. Hm.

Spring Break

Is upon us. I just hope we can rest. These semester thingys are long and quite tiring. We're half-way through. I've been mildly over my head the whole time. I guess it's fun, but when I get tired it seems a bit frightening as well. I'm working for the Dean of the College of Engineering for the rest of the semester, which is great, except my job involves stuff I can't do yet, like programming our new Surface computers to do Neat Stuff which we don't know what is yet using a optical touch-screen interface I don't know anything about in a language I haven't learned. YeeHaw! I'm a CS major, yes I am, and I'm finding that my ignorance on the subject of Computers and Computing really is infinite insofar as the upper limit of it is undefined. And people are going to ask me how it's going, and I'm going to say that I'm learning a lot. Which is true. I can now write a "hello, world" program in four languages.
Gotta pack.
This here blog needs more pictures.