Chan's Personal Blog

There we have it ladies and gentlemen, I have finished all my exams and school work. School is out. That was the last exam of 2005. I joke that my girlfriend is school (or Lady Academia), but I'm leaving her for a few weeks. I'm going out with Lady Life. She's far more attractive .

I get the sense that this term has been especially challenging, and it's not just me, it's like that for everyone it seems. For me, it has been a double whammy this term. At work we weren't able to hire a replacement, so we've been undermanned for this term. On top of that, school work has been fairly insane. It was supposed to be an easy term because I was taking two graduate courses, and I would be working on my technical project.

One of my courses, compilers (CSC 435), grew into an out of control beast that consumed all my time. Every week, some crazy assignment was due. A lot of times, we had to start working on the assignments before the material was even taught in class. To make matters worse, the software tools we were given to complete the assignments were ALWAYS broken and we couldn't proceed. We had to e-mail the prof every single time to tell him that he gave us the wrong version of the source code or something.

My other problem with this course was that we never really knew what the prof was expecting. No practice questions or practice midterms. We had no idea what would be on any midterm/final. On top of that, our assignments were never marked in a timely fashion, so we didn't know if we were doing things correctly. Having no marks is like walking around blind in a course.

For the last few weeks of the semester, my days at UVic usually started at 9:30am and ended at 10:30 or 11:00pm. Sleep, and then repeat. This was mainly due to that crazy compiler class. For anyone thinking of taking the course, beware. The course load is heavy and unrelenting. I rarely hand in an assignment that's incomplete, but I had to do it a few times in this course.

Some say the course is supposed to be very enlightening, but I have to disagree. It was just jumping through hoops.

There were a few bright spots this term though. My social life recovered somewhat (formally pronounced dead because of Lady Academia). I've been hanging out with Adam, Bethany, and Sarah lately which has kept me sane through all of this. It's hard to juggle school, work, and life, but I did make an honest effort to sabbath on Sundays (do no work on Sundays). This seems very counterintuitive if you're extremely busy, but it's really important to take a day to rest and to recover, lick the wounds, and get back into the fight on Monday. It'll help prevent you from burning out, because honestly, if you go AWOL or crazy, you're of no use to anyone. The other bright spot of the term is that I got two people hooked on watching Battlestar Galactica . Muahahah.

In either case, time to relax. We live to fight another day. I'm sitting here with a nice big bowl of ice cream, and I'm going to game a bit. I'll be updating my blog on a more regular basis now.

Special thanks to Pam who was my partner for compilers. I would have died in that course if I didn't have a competent coding partner. Thanks for making us start the assignments REALLY early, it saved out collective butts (everyone in the class should thank you too since you always reported the problems in the assignments first).