this and that

midterm blues

This past week was the 5th week of Carleton’s 10-week spring term, infamous as the “midterm” time when exams and papers reign supreme. For me, it actually started during 4th week, and was made worse by a toothache. Here’s a sampling of what I had to do and suffer:

• 21 April: Presentation for History of Mathematics (MATH216) on the Bernoullis. My part of the presentation was specifically on Jacob Bernoulli’s first exposition of the Bernoulli Numbers and his work on harmonic series, while Lisseth talked about Johann Bernoulli’s Brachistochrone problem, and I think it went rather well.
• 21 April: Paper due for Philosophy of Language (PHIL220) on the relation of various theories of meaning and a naturalist view of the evolution of language. It was kind of short (1-2 pages double-spaced), but I enjoyed writing it and I think I did well.
• 23 April: Toothache starts. I woke up this morning with pain in my lower jaw, evidently because of the keen-to-erupt third molars, otherwise known as wisdom teeth or buddhi bangara in Nepali. I spent the next four or five days on Ibuprofen, which sadly had the additional effect of putting me to sleep in the most inconvenient of places (viz class).
• 25 April: In-class Exam I for Math Structures (MATH236). It wasn’t too bad, and although I haven’t got it back yet, I think I did okay.
• 28 April: Implementation of Earley parser for Natural Language Processing (CS357) due at 11:59 pm. I submitted it at 11:40 pm. Enough said. Actually, no. I was using Perl and having not used Perl before made it kind of harder, but I have to admit that certain aspects of Perl made the process easier. I mean, in what other language could one write things like $filename = $ARGV[0] or die; and chomp; ?

At the end of it all, this is what I looked like:

Amrit during 5th week

But then when last Friday (April 29) finally came and I got to shave etc., this is what I looked like:

TGIF !

site updates

Finally, some updates. I now have an album on Gridley gallery. There aren’t many pictures there yet, but they willl be coming soon. There is now also a slightly unattractive links page where you are bound to find something useless. You can get to both places by clicking on the links at the top of this page. Also forthcoming are pages for my courses at Carleton and some software.

other

On other news, I learnt last week that I have been accepted to work next year as a writing tutor for the Academic Support Center at Carleton. I will be a writing tutor for four hours a week and for the remaining six hours of my work-study, I will be an ACA at ITS.

And yes, I am now the top amrit tuladhar on Google’s search for “amrit tuladhar”.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 30th, 2005 at 4:26 am and is filed under general, site update, carleton, this life of mine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.