Day 241

This 4 day week thing has really thrown me off.  It seriously feels like Friday.  But it is not.  It's still Thursday.


This morning was pretty typical.  I woke up, took a shower, and went to the computer lab.  I finished up my grading during the first couple hours there.  And Timbo and I discussed movies and such.  He was surprised that I have not seen any of the 1990s Batman movies.  He and I are both pretty excited about the upcoming Dark Knight Rises, due to release this summer.  I also talked with one of the secretaries in the Math department about getting answer keys for the classes for which I grade.  I think his name is Joel as well.  Anyhow, he was able to get a hold of a book for 125, but the other class (Discrete math) apparently has no official answer key.  Another professor has a PDF of some answers, but they apparently are not completely accurate.  So you know.  Yay.  Anyhow, it's better than getting stabbed.


During Life Con today we worked in the computer lab, learning how to use Mathematica.  Dr. Foley's goal was to pretty much go through the quiz with us.  I'm not entirely sure the point of a quiz when we go through the entire thing as a class, so I guess it's just more of an "assignment" and less of a formal quiz.  I'll take it.  We didn't get as far as he would have liked today due to technical issues.  And by that I mean Mathematica is not his preferred program.  He does most of his work in Maple (what I used at Mount Vernon) and is not as fluent in Mathematica as he is in Maple.  And he didn't have a computer, so he was mainly just going from memory.  So keeping all of that in mind, I was pretty impressed with his ability to teach us what to do.  We got through the first problem in class.  After class was over, Timbo, Dustin and I worked through the next two problems.  Our class is meeting in the lab again tomorrow, so I think the plan is to finish working through the quiz then.  Hopefully we can finish the last problem tomorrow and then make it look nice.


After we finished working on the quiz, I did some studying for FM.  It's difficult to keep everything straight in my brain, even if I just take a one day break.  There are a handful of equations that are at the base of nearly every problem and I have no issue with those.  But those equations are implanted into other equations and sometimes I forget which of those to use precisely.  The symbology of this material is really odd.  I have so many pages of worked problems from studying...I should have kept them all just to see how many I used.  At the end of last semester I probably had close to 70 pieces of scrap paper.  Hand outs, extra exams or homework sheets from the class I taught, the solutions manual for Statistics... Probably around 100.  Now I might have 10 pages left?  Yeah, I would say I've used close to 60 pages of scrap paper working through problems and done (after some rough calculations) over 600 problems thus far.  I'm going to do another practice exam on Saturday and then I think I'm going to start working through problems from the text books. I take the exam 3 weeks from tomorrow.  I feel like that's so close...


Anyhow, the rest of the day was pretty much alternating between FM, eating, and video games.  A couple hours of studying, 30 minute break.  Another couple hours of studying, 45 minute break.  And that just went until about 8:30 when I decided to be done.  And now I'm going to bed!  So, good night!