Thursday/Friday – Day 112/113
November 21, 2012
Today was thankfully the last of the days of torture…
I arose today from my slumber hardly rested at all. I mas as well have not been in physics and, I missed my Operating Systems class to try and help out Deepthi and Jonothan, who, had unfortunately not completed their part of their assignment, the filesystem. Deepthi had been sick for a while and this had impacted their ability to contribute but it was still disappointing when it came time to demo our project and we didn’t have anything to show for a good 50% of it.
More than that I had made a tiny error in the code which prolonged the length of time it took for our demo to get started, another minor disappointment.
Friday we were given an extra chance to try and pass the filesystem requirement. Unfortunately we still didn’t manage to pull through and I received my first ever University fail. Not fun. Luckily though, it didn’t contribute to my final grade.
Today I also started recovering from the whole ‘balagan’ (mess) of the last three weeks and was ready to take some well deserved sleep.
The afternoon was spent with music, both in my singing lesson which, went splendidly and, with Melody Cooke, learning a little piano and teaching a little singing myself.
Shabbat dinner tonight was most enjoyable. Ariella Levine of the OCP (Orthodox Community at Penn) hosted all the Jews doing computer science related majors and minors and I got to spend time with a good number of very interesting people and meet a whole lot more.
Finally, after all that, I sunk into a stupor, not to wake for a long time.
Tuesday/Wednesday – Day 110/111
November 19, 2012
But first a note I missed from Monday! Following the interview I had a rehearsal that slipped my mind, for the University Choral society. Following the end of rehearsal I ran to catch up with a friendly face I remembered from the very first week of semester, a Ms. Stephanie Jane Li of Alberta, Canada! We walked back from choir together and made plans to go out for coffee in the near future as one too many of our interests aligned.
Things just keep ramping up and up and up! Today I found little time to breathe and eat amongst the piles of equations and lines of code littering my life. I was so hard at work today that I didn’t even leave my room for classes, catching up on them through textbooks and friends. Rehearsal from nine to twelve didn’t help much either. However, I did take a little break to eat dinner with a somewhat distraught Molly who’d been having a bit of a rough time. On my return from dinner I was met with a lovely surprise in the Rodin Lobby as, gathered there were a few members of the Philly Orchestra, performing for students and a few staff members. I admit, I did lose a little homework time by sitting down to catch a performance of a Dvorak piece for string quartet. Then it was back to the room to work until my eyes drooped and I fell asleep at my desk.
Wednesday was a little bit of a nightmare, I spent pretty much the entire day working on the kernel. After Glee Club Rehearsal, at 10PM, it was clear we weren’t going to finish in time for the milestone tomorrow. Thus, Charu and I headed down to the engineering quadrangle to work into the wee hours of the morning. After ten hours of straight coding, it finally compiled and ran properly, and I was so surprised I almost didn’t believe it. By this point it was 5AM and I almost collapsed where I was, however, I somehow managed to stumble back to my room and fell asleep almost immediately.
Sunday/Monday – Day 108/109
I honestly am trying to get back up to date so that my posts aren’t so anachronistic but with all the excitement at Penn, combined with the intense workload, I’m not sure how soon I’ll get there!
I wish I could’ve slept in today, but it just wasn’t possible, with a giant four person group project due. I had to build my own Operating System for Operating Systems (CIS380) and boy was it time-consuming. However, it was incredibly enjoyable, up to the point where some group members didn’t manage to pull their weight entirely (though this came later). I was up at 9AM meeting in my neighbors room to hack away at the project and managed to make a good amount of progress. This continued for a good number of hours. In fact, I managed to lose most of the day to it! The rest of the afternoon was uninteresting as I assembled various parts of other assignments into submittable work. Including plenty of hard work on physics.
Monday was slightly more successful as by now I’d had a little extra sleep. Finally a little recovery. Algorithms today was a breeze, given by a guest lecturer who didn’t exactly speak passable English. After that it was off to work again, this week I spent much of my spare time coding up the ‘scheduler’ for the ‘kernel’ of the operating system. I was pleased in the evening to finally get back to regular Glee rehearsals but to my disappointment, much of the rest of semester would be focused on holiday music, specifically carols. And, whilst I don’t mind the odd carol, learning twenty of them and singing them over and over doesn’t really fit what I really want to be doing. Also being Jewish, a few of them have lyrics that are a little awkward to sing, along the lines of “the king over Jews is born!”.
After rehearsal, it was the usual back to my room punctuated with a Glee interview (and for the life of me I can’t remember who I interviewed then, though I feel very guilty about it). Then it was to work for the usual, and the usual late night before sleep. Some of my life needs to be a little less exciting. Good for contrast.