Free at last...almost

It's finally over. The sixth and final viva ended this morning. It isn't really worth an entire blog, since it was the kind of fuzzy subject where you can talk around anything they can throw at you if you understand a few fundamentals. So that's about it on that subject.

Effective immediately, I have sworn to study nothing at all for the next three days at least. The last two weeks of vivas and submissions have been the most gruelling days I have ever had the misfortune of living through...thankfully it's over now, and I can heave a sigh of relief, and stay away from college for the next month or so until the exams start...

To be maddeningly precise, I have to go over to college to take care of some minor business. Complete waste of time - almost two hours of commuting time for about ten minutes of actual work. The bureaucrats strike again...In any case, since no frantic cramming is necessary, this should be a walk in the park...

In other news, I seem to have sprained my shoulder - looks like a pulled muscle. Rather annoying - turning my head to look left actually pains my right shoulder...

Fellow techies in need of comic relief, the adventures of BOFH are exactly what you need - several years worth of stories about a bored, annoyed, and frequently homicidal system administrator unleashing his wrath upon unfortunate muggles(nontechies) who try his patience...
The humour is unbelievable, and the writing style is excellent(though as my friend Thite says, it could have been a little more British) . Kinda reminds me of my cousin's stories of dumb users calling up his call centre and asking the most inane questions humanly possible. Definitely worth the read.

Songs I'm currently listening to:
Walking in Memphis
Hungry Eyes(the one from Dirty Dancing)
Yanni(about 10 of these, two or three are supposed to be in collaboration with Enya, but I haven't had a chance to hear them yet)

Stuff to do:
TopCoder match at 0630 Thursday morning...This is a little interesting - my next match will undoubtedly end with me placed squarely in division 1, which leaves me with a slight problem - I'm not that good yet! So the most likely possibility is that I'll be oscillating between division 1 and 2 for a couple of months, before I finally get good enough to hold my own in div 1...

It's really pretty sad - algorithmic programming is something that MU doesn't seem to really focus on - we get a little bit of it in Analysis of Algorithms and Data Structures - but not enough. Hell, I have classmates who don't know what memoization and dynamic programming are...of course, it could be argued that until a few months ago, I didn't know either - but it turned out that I've used both techniques before without knowing their names(or even that they were general approaches to certain classes of problems), simply by doing a little old fashioned intuitive hacking(if you're a nontech person - this just means programming, nothing else) with some mathematical analysis behind it. But there are people who can't even do that...something which I can never understand. How in blazes can you be a computer scientist/engineer without knowing how to program?(And no, they don't understand maths the right way either...)

Looks like that's the end of it...I should really be getting to sleep now. Big day to waste tomorrow!