End-of-Semester Recap

Right now, I'm taking a break from packing. About 75% of my room is currently in either the packed or almost-packed stage. There's folded clothes on my bed waiting to go into a suitcase, boxes waiting to go into storage, and trash waiting to be, well, taken to the trash. As I'm going through my stuff, I find all these things I'd forgotten about--"Wow, that was a good book! Hey, I remember taking this (now-returned) test! Oh, look, math notes!" And, well, it's been a busy semester.


Classes I've Taken:

Math 14: Every math class I've taken at Mudd has had a spectacular teacher. Math 14 was no exception. Sadly, Prof Gupta was a visiting professor, and will be gone next semester. We'll miss him, and the lemon squares he baked for his classes.

Chem 22: It's Frosh Chem! For once, some parts of chem--like Quantum--made sense. Others--like Thermochemistry--still didn't.

Physics 24A: This year, for the first time, there was an advanced section of the Mechanics Physics class. I'm really glad I could take it, because it meant we spent less time on things like energy (which I understood) and more on rotational dynamics (which I didn't understand).

Intro to Social Psychology: This class was awesome. Really, really awesome. It almost turned me into a Psychology minor. (At Mudd, we call them concentrations. Really, it's the same thing.) I also read two really good books, The Lucifer Effect and The Power of Persuasion, for this class. It was more work than some of the other Hum classes, but I learned a lot, and it was definitely worth it.

E4: E4 had its ups and its downs. On the one hand, I made some new friends and built a compost sifter. On the other hand, it was a lot of work.

Jazz: I had to drop my jazz class halfway through the semester, because spraining my finger meant I was out of practice for a month. I'll be going back Spring semester of next year, because Jazz is how I destress.

Other Stuff:

Coding: From hanging out with programmers, I've learned a lot about coding. (For example, that Python alarm clock I wrote with Aren a few weeks back. I'm still working on porting it to Linux.)

Writing: After not writing for a while, I'm finally writing short stories again. Most of them aren't good, but it keeps me sane.

Computers: I have a new computer now, and I'll probably be building a desktop next semester. I've figured out enough about hardware that I'd feel confident doing so.

Fun: Despite all the work we have to do here, I've had a lot of fun: watching anime with my friends, having fights with foam rockets on the lawn in front of East, watching bad movies, and playing truth-or-dare.

This summer, I'll be in Memphis, getting a job and spending time with my Memphian friends. If anything Mudderly comes up over the summer, I'll write about it here.

Hard Drive: Dying (& Python alarm clocks!)

The hard drive on my computer is dying--for certain definitions of "dying". Here's what I've gathered from my knowledge of hard drives (which is not a lot compared to most Mudders but a fair amount compared to the average person):

• My hard drive is partitioned. This is basically the hard drive equivalent of rooms in a house. Some houses have one room--you can get to all of your stuff without changing rooms, but you have to share a room with all your siblings, and if that room gets messed up, your entire house is a mess. I partitioned my hard drive to have 1 partition (like a "room") for Linux programs, 1 partition for Windows programs, 1 partition for stuff (like music, videos, and schoolwork), and 1 partition as a swap (which artificially extends your computer's memory, but is slower than real memory). For some reason, Windows gave itself a partition of its very own, separate from the one I made for it. From what I've gathered, it has important OS stuff like "how to make sure Windows actually runs."
  
• The Windows program partition is destroyed.
• The Windows OS partition is beyond destroyed. Metaphorically speaking, it was set on fire. Then the fire was put out and it was demolished. Then it was set on fire again.
• The data partition is sort of working. There's some stability issues leaking through from the Windows program partition, but so far everything seems to be intact.
• The Linux partition is just fine.

What appears to have happened is that the part of the hard drive that reads the rest of the hard drive can't read most of the Windows stuff. According to some Eastie folks, the entire hard drive will be gone within a week. I have another hard drive in the mail from the friendly folks at Lenovo, but putting all my stuff back on the new drive (& reinstalling Linux) is going to be pretty time-consuming. It's a good thing I don't have class next week, or I'd probably be without a computer until the summer.

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In other news, another Mudd frosh and I have written an alarm clock for Linux in the programming language Python. It takes the time you want to wake up and a file path to a song (or video) as input. Then, it figures out how many seconds it is until you want to wake up, and waits for that many seconds. Then it turns the volume on your computer down to 0, opens a media player, and tells the media player to play the song (or video) you gave it. After that, it increases the volume every few seconds until it gets to maximum volume. Sure, it would be simpler to use a real alarm clock, but this is a lot more fun. Over the week that we don't have class, I'll probably be tinkering with this program to make it work in both Windows and the Mac OS.