I got pretty cocky about grad school last year when I had three A+ in a row. This year wasn’t so great. I got an A in Distributed Systems Verification class. This is by no means a bad grade, but I had set the bar higher and now I am grumpy about it. I don’t expect to be terribly happy about my Distributed Systems Engineering grade either, thought the whole class seems to be getting bad grades (at least the grades that are posted on prof’s door) so providing that he curves, it might still not be too bad. I admit to obsessing about it too much, but I have my reasons for this and I am sticking to it.

I still have one deliverable to go, a programming and research project. So far it’s fun and I hope I will have enough time to finish it, being a quarter end at work and all. Even though I am getting flustered about not getting the top grades, I am still happy to have taken this course. For one, I actually get to program in something other than C so I am learning quite a bit. On top of that, even though I did not find some material in the course appealing, at least now I know what approach to research appeals, or does not appeal, to me. So there you go, one more learning experience.

I wrote the Validation Methods for Distributed Systems exam today. Overall, I quite liked the course, though, as always, I will reserve the final judgement for after I receive my grade. It was the first CS course I took in a long time, the last one being FORTRAN77. In any case, it gave me a pretty good glimpse into an area of research I was not familiar with before.

I still have an exam and a project for the other course I am taking this year, Distributed Systems Engineering. This course is a polar opposite, it is very engineeringy in a sense of let’s try a few things and implement the one that seems to work most optimally. I like the project so far. I’ve used Poisedon UML tool and so far I am quite impressed with it. It is a lot easier to use that the Rational Rose tool I used last year. Right now I am using the free basic version, though I might consider buying the actual software (they have student prices) if I have to use UML again. One of the drawbacks of the free basic version is that images are exported with a giant Poisedon watermark on it and you can’t print directly from the application. I was also considered using Eclipse as I’ve heard it was quite good, but with limited time that I have, I was willing to pilot only one new software application at the time so I stuck with the trusty Netbeans.

Geek out.

I really don’t get why graduate students can’t give understandable presentations. I just sat through fifteen presentations and gave two. Most of the presentations were completely incomprehensible and I don’t understand why. Most of the students can speak reasonably coherently. The topics covered are no more difficult than the topics the professor discusses in class, especially since the presentations will generally just give an overview and not go into the minute details. Yet, most of the presentations I’ve experienced in last two weeks were an exercise in twiddling my thumbs and checking the time. I guess once you get to grad school, your speech circuits fuse.

I was picking my winter courses this week. My advisor started laughing when I said I want to take two courses. This should have been a hint, but me being stubborn and all we picked the two courses and off I went.

Then I looked at my schedule and realised that I would have to be away from work 9 hours a week during the prime meeting season (11 to 3, Mondays through Wednesdays). It was obvious that something had to go, but at this point I was still too stubborn to take full responsibility for the decision. I run this by my manager who was too nice to say anything but was obviously against it. He run it by my team leader who politely told me that he would prefer if I only took one course.

Though at this rate I will not graduate until the cows come home, I am relieved to only be taking one course. Two courses a semester are a lot of work and I end up being spread pretty thin. I am still annoyed at the fact that the courses are offered at such ridiculous times, though.

In any case, I am taking a CS course on Formal Software Development. My advisor said that the prof giving this course is good so I am looking forward to it. But first, I have to get my current courses done and over with. Ahoy!