I'm in the library right now, planning on spending the next four hours here studying for my Multivar exam at 3:00. I figured five minutes spent on a blog entry wouldn't hurt.

I'm still really enjoying my computer science class. I've been working on our first project for the past week and a half and I'm really close to being done. We have to write a program compares two files. One file is a list of words and the second is this really gay poem. The program has to search for the words in the poem and display the number of times each was found. It must also be able to search for substrings when the words are incomplete (it finds "th" in "hawthorn") and it must be able to process wild card symbols in the substrings (it finds "*ittle" in "Little" and "*h*" in "goodnight"). Right now all that is wrong with my program is that it is accepting punctuation in place of asterisks when it shouldn't. I will be so excited when I finish.

The bad news it Lauren no longer wants to get an apartment with us. She want to live on campus so that she doesn't have to walk very far to class. Cihan, Sarah, and I still want one but it seems like there is not much availability of 3 bdrm apartments in Troy that have not already been leased. Tomorrow we have an appointment to see a 2bdrm (Sarah and Cihan would share) at Horizon Terrace. It houses only students and is similar to dorm life except it's nicer. Rent would be about $550/month with utilities included. The one thing that worries me is if we can't find anyone to sublet it for the summer because the last thing we'd want is to pay for an apartment we're not using. Not that I'm not optimistic about it working out, realistically I think I might end up on campus. Maybe we'd get a triple together or maybe I'd try to get a single in the same building as them.

I'm not looking forward to my multivar test this afternoon. I've studied well and I understand the material, but I really hate my professor and the way he teaches the course. The real conflict is that we think differently. He teaches everything theoretically and visually, as in "Let's picture how this solid is situated on the plane and use that to determine the boundaries of the integral". I can't think that way. I can't learn the way he teaches things. I'm not a visual thinker, I use formulas and paper math. I need him to say "Let's manipulate the numbers we're given to determine the boundaries of the integral". His lectures really don't help me at all. I often go to them and ignore him while I read the book and try to figure the assignment out myself and then go to my TA's office hours to have him explain it to me. I have the same problem with his tests. Many of the questions are unclear about what he's asking for and he thinks that some information is intuitive when it isn't. I really shouldn't have taken this class. There is a consensus among the students that it's taught horribly. I won't even get into the fact that all of his notes are illegible and written sloppily in the margins of his print-outs.

Ok, sorry. I'm done ranting. Back to studying...