Long time, no see

Wow! It's certainly been a long time since I last updated the blog! I don't think I've even seen the Blogger home page since 4th September -- which was the last time I did an update. Life's certainly been hectic! I have, for some reason, decided to pursue one of the heaviest courses at UT CS this semester, and am suffering as a consequence. But that's not what I was going to talk about.
There have been so many things happening, it's difficult to know where to start. Should I start with the swimming lessons I took? Or maybe with the hours of sleep I get each night? Or about the length of each program we students have to write for the Graphics course? Or the career fair that took place some time back? Or the trip to Mozart's I made with my friends a couple of days back? Hmm...how about a bit of everything?
It's been an interesting month since I last wrote, with quite a lot happening. Probably the most drastic things happening were the sleepless nights in Taylor lab, and the fulltime offer from Dell :) But there were other things happening too. I joined a swimming class for one! Now I'm one of those people who hyperventilate the moment the water level rises above their stomach. I did so during the first swimming class, and the instructor had to spend almost 25 minutes getting me to calm down. When I finally did, I gripped her arm so hard, I'm sure I left welts across it. But by the end of six lessons (five actually -- I missed one because I had too much work), I could swim across the pool using a kickboard. Not bad! Of course, I haven't returned to the pool in ages, so I might find myself thrashing about again if I'm lowered in the water.
But probably the starkest memory of the past month was the nights in Taylor lab. I decided to shoot myself not only in the foot, but in the head as well, by taking the hardest course offered by the CS department, Computer Graphics. Now, I have nothing whatsoever against the course or the professor. The professor is awesome, and the course is excellently designed. It's me that can't cope, I suppose. There's just too much math and too much hard-core programming for my liking. The student population is almost exclusively male, except for my roommate, Sandy, and me. All the boys are the studious, geeky types. There are a few Turing Scholars (undergrads) in the class. I'm sure the grad students are ex-Turing Scholars -- they seem the type. They're the ones who eagerly respond to any question posed, and come up with brilliant algorithms to solve the toughest problems, while I just gape at them, and wonder if there was ever the slightest chance of me getting any kind of solution, ever. Even the undergrads know more than I could ever hope to, and as for the grads, well, I have lost all hope of ever catching up with them. They're a fervent bunch -- people who probably go home and open up a visualization algorithm and worship it, or explain the intricacies of the Phong shading model and distributed ray tracing on dates. They scare me. We recently had a class by a guest lecturer, Dr Fussell (another Graphics guy), who looks like Robert DeNiro with a ponytail (and spouting vector algebra). He was talking about distributed ray tracing. I had slept only three hours the previous night, so it was a task of monumental proportions to just keep my eyes open. What heartened me, though, was two of the undergrads making faces at each other. At least I wasn't the only one completely lost! Dr Mark's classes are much better, and at one point, I used to positively look forward to them. Not any more. All we talk about is perturbation of the surface, and texture mapping, and the like. I could just cry.
The assignments for the Graphics class are another story worth telling. The first one entailed modifying a program that would make photographs look like impressionist paintings, to make them look even more impressionistic. I didn't sleep at all the night it was due, spending the entire night coding furiously. And, of course, two of the features didn't even work, earning me a C. Now the next project is due on Thursday, and I still find myself clutching my hair in despair, and wondering what on earth possessed me to take this course. I'm in Taylor lab right now, half-slumped over the computer, scowling at the screen and at the virtually undecipherable code in front of me. My only saviors are my three best friends sitting next to me (also coding miserably) and my trusty iPod.
In fact, I think I should probably return to the code, instead of typing away into a blog. Maybe the extra 5 minutes of coding might earn me a B next time.......