2010.05.13 in

End of the semester

I've mostly spent the semester doing homework; I didn't make as much progress on Clutterhs as I had planned. I hope once that I'm done with finals, I'll have time to make the various changes I want and finish binding Clutter 1.2. The release of Clutter 0.2 is still waiting on those, as well as a release of gtk2hs.

In total, I've completed 58 physics homework assignments, 3 essays, 6 tests, a large number of class exercises and quizzes, and 3 upcoming finals. I've spent countless hours doing nothing but math. On occasion, there was lots of help from Mathematica.

In the 3 physics classes I took this semester (Electromagnetic Theory, Intro to Quantum Mechanics, Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics), in total I did 315 pages of LaTeX/ Lyx homework at an average length of 5.4 pages each. Nearly all of that being just math, with an occasional graph or chart. This is in addition to the countless scraps of paper I occasionally used (although as time passes I find myself just doing nearly all of the simple algebra in my head and entering directly into Lyx.)

I'm rather disappointed to not be going anywhere this summer. I applied to over a dozen different research programs for the summer for physics and astronomy at a wide array of random places; I was rejected from all of them. I finally did get accepted to work on milkyway@home, which is what I'll be working on this summer. I'm glad to be working on this, although I really don't want to stay in Troy. It may be my ideal research project.

I accidentally got accepted to GSoC. I applied as a final fallback in case I didn't get accepted to do research with milkyway@home. I found out after the GSoC deadline, and some time before the selected students were announced I dropped out as a student, at least according to melange. A while later it seems I was accepted anyway to work on the gobject introspection based binding generator for gtk2hs. I'll probably end up doing some work on this over the summer; it might also become what I work on next semester for RCOS. One of the other rejected Haskell proposals is now taking my place.