A crazy month

It's been a very crazy month. In fact, ever since the semester started, it's been crazy. The sheer amount of studying I've had to do has been mind-numbingly immense, and I cam close to a nervous breakdown a few days back -- all thanks to Graphics (as I write this, I'm casting a baleful look at the textbook, 3-D Graphics by Alan Watt, lying next to me). No course has ever caused me as many problems as this one has. And, what frustrates me, we study only math, physics, and other abstruse concepts in the course, and nothing of creativity whatsoever. I've come close to yanking my hair out this past month.
We've had projects, and my word, were they awful! Well, the first one wasn't...but the second one most certainly was, and though I haven't had a look at the code yet, the third one also seems to uphold the tradition. I finally took the monumental decision today of converting the grading of the course to a credit / non-credit. I might have to take four courses next semester, but that sure beats getting a nervous breakdown, and only a C or worse to show for it.
But I didn't want to crib. I'm actually feeling pretty good right now. I've been working part-time at the Fine Arts Department at the University of Texas at Austin, as the assistant webmaster. For some time, I just had to make HTML or basic Coldfusion updates, which weren't bad at all -- I love visuals, and was more than happy to work on it, and arrange elements of the pages as I wished. But now, I'm doing my dream job -- security!
My boss, Jeremy, has asked me to help out with the security concerns of the Fine Arts website -- and has given me full permission to poke around, and try as many exploits as I can to try to hack into the FA system! How cool is that??! Right now I'm trying to implement a CAPTCHA for the Art and Art History website. CAPTCHAs are the strange twisted words that show up when you try to send potentially spamming material. They cannot be deciphered by machines, but can be read easily by humans, so they prove very helpful deterring spambots.
What I'm actually using is the reCAPTCHA -- which is a nifty little concept. It has two words, like the CAPTCHA, with a line running through them, like a strikeout (it prevents bots from using edge-detection mechanisms to deduce the word), and, the cutest concept of it all, the words come from scanned historical texts, so everytime someone uses a reCAPTCHA, they are helping translate a word that wasn't scanned in well and not recognized by the OCR readers at wherever they do the scanning. I had read about the idea sometime back in an issue of Wired magazine, and actually got to implement it! It's wonderful.
Well, that's enough rant for now. I'm dying of sleep (haven't slept more than 10 hours in the past 4 days), and still have a paper review to complete. So I shall get going, and return again some other day. Adios!