At last, sweet peace.

[winterkoninkje]

This term has been quite hectic for me, though to be fair it is surely my own fault. But for now at least I have a brief respite. I finished my term paper for software engineering last night and think I did a decent job of it. Once the suitable grading period has passed, I will post it and join in a long tradition of online articles analyzing hacker culture.

I've still the project paper for artificial intelligence, but that shouldn't be too difficult. Twenty pages, but with a partner and we gave the presentation today. There's plenty of room for tweaking the project and running more trial simulations, but we have enough for the paper I think. And I still have finals, though I'm not too concerned about them; I've some back reading I need to do before taking them, but the concepts of the classes are simple. My contract job, though still ongoing, has passed the initial development stage and passed into the long slow calm of maintenance.

Though of course there is still much to do. I've given the day job and Free Geek less attention than I ought and so I must catch up on them. I've been concerned about Free Geek in particular. There was a break in recently which you may have already heard about. The press coverage has been good from that, a silver lining though still a heavy blow. But I've also been concerned about growing distant from that community. It's been a long while since I've made time to just hang out around there and take pulse of the place, and I worry about loosing touch with the daily happenings at the Geek, as well as the degree to which I am contributing to the well-being of the organization. While I doubt I'm doing any harm, I'm uncertain about whether another might do a better job than I.

I must also look to the future. It's time already to start looking into doctoral programs and to make more solid plans for where I will pursue my degree and with whom. I should probably take the GRE again, though I did well enough the first time. I need to hurry up in looking for other masters' programs too. I've grown weary of PSU. A while back I realized that even if I do get my degree from there, it won't offer me what I need from a CS masters. Without published research in computational linguistics or supplementary studies in sociolinguistic change, a CS degree is a tangent besmirching my dedication to linguistics.

I've begun thinking about Eng again, working out some of the details. One of the basic design considerations looks like it may be more technically challenging than I originally hoped, namely the notion of having no primitive types built into the language itself. The difficulty comes in from how primitive types are defined (in assembly naturally, but there are countless varieties of assembly) and how those definitions could be used by the compiler in an optimal manner. Perhaps the most challenging thing to design is how to deal with translations from literal values into the binary representation which the primitive type uses, i.e. what internal representations the compiler uses.

And then there's romance. Ah, sweet sweet romance. We've been spending much time chatting this term, and over thanksgiving she came out to visit. Hands down the best thanksgiving I've ever had. Hands down the best five days I've had in quite a long time. Though it's strange for her to cross over into my life out here, I could not have wished for a better set of memories. If I can drag her out here again before I leave this town there's still so much I'd like to show her. But deep down, it doesn't matter where I take her, for she is what makes the evening; delicious food and pretty sights are but a pale stage to highlight her wonder. And as she said, it doesn't matter where I move to, I shall always find those intimate authentic holes in the wall. It's what I do.

Still not sure where-all things will go or how to resolve those few thousand miles. I'm sure if nothing else that changing schools will throw all that into a tizzy anyway. But for once I'm not too worried. Time will explain it all. He is a talker, and needs no questioning before he speaks.