cheerfulWell, today I had my first day of college. Well, sorta, since I've actually taken classes there before, during high school. I picked up my challenge forms (both were approved) and went to the bookstore. We bought...three very heavy, used textbooks. I don't want to think about what it must've costed.
Unfortunately, Mom had to be there to pay for it. *sighs* First thing I do when I'm eighteen is get my own credit card, if only so I can avoid stuff like that. I managed to lose her before I went to class, which is undoubtedly a Good Thing.
I had two of my three classes today:
Math 3A: Analytical Geometry and Calculus (Monday and Wednesday, 11:00-12:30; Friday, 11:00-1:00)
This class is filled to the brim--90+ students. The teacher, a guy named Zucker, is okay; he didn't really leave much of an impression on me.
The class started with a diagnostic test, one where you probably shouldn't miss more than ten. I don't know how well I did...but I don't think it was very good. I may have been over ten. *glanceglance* Oh well...most of them were trick questions anyway.
(Note: I found out ~thirty minutes later that I got six wrong, one of which was a question where he was deliberately trying to confuse us. I also found out that the teacher has a sig quote from Harry Potter. How...interesting.)
Taking and going over that test took the first half of class; going over the syllabus took the second half. I have three sections and fourteen problems to do before Wednesday.
Between classes, I found and charged my Visor. w00t. It wouldn't accept the charge at first; the fix was to reset it while it was in the cradle. With its PowerOne Graph module, I have the graphing calculator I need for calculus.
Wasted some time online, playing games, and watching TV, then went to my second class.
CIS 40A: Computer Organization and Assembly Programming (Monday, 7:00 pm-10:00)
Fairly empty class, actually, probably because it's a night class and it's not something that people outside of CS majors would study. (Prerequisite is experience in two programming languages.) The teacher is an Asian woman called Soon Ko--I'm not a good judge of age, but I wouldn't consider her young. (She's not old, either, so...yeah.) Pleasant change from the usual middle-aged white guys that seem to populate the CS department. She has a fairly significant accent, and she's very quiet, but I figure I can compensate for that with some work. Another student who's had her before said she's not a very good teacher, but I'm hoping he's just had an unusually bad time with her, because my first impression of her is pretty good. She seems to be somewhat knowledgable--she was able to rattle off the broad differences between the instruction sets of various x86 processors without too much apparent effort.
I'm not very good with Asian names, either--can anyone tell me where she's likely to be from?
I only have this class once a week, on Monday nights, so it's three hours. We spent the first hour of today's class going over the usual syllabus-and-stuff, the second hour doing basic terminology and concepts, and the final hour working with different bases. I'm quite good at converting between binary, octal, and hex, but my anything-to-decimal and decimal-to-anything skills...well, they need a bit of work.
Actually, it's more that I'm too lazy to do those problems in class.
That class marks the first time I've ever seen somebody else wearing Thinkgeek stuff--the Shakespeare shirt, to be exact. I'll have to ask him if he's a Perl hacker.
The other classmate I found interesting is actually in both calculus and assembly--if she's in my C++ class too, I'll probably freak. She's apparently deaf, judging by the laptop sitting in front of her, hooked up to a stenograph (dunno if that's the right word--it's the thing they use in courts to record what everyone's saying) that someone else types at. Young, Asian, definately smart considering the subject matter. I may have to ask if she can read lips so I can talk to her. ;^) And no, I don't necessarily have "impure" intentions--she just seems like she might be an interesting person to talk to.
I have one more class tomorrow--C++. I don't really know what to expect, except that I doubt the class will be too difficult. After all, there's a reason I listed my C++ skill as 4 out of 5 on the survey in the assembly class...
My Languages (as reported to the Assembly teacher)
- Perl: 5
- C: 4
- C++: 4
- Visual Basic 6: 3
- Visual Basic .Net: 2
- C#: 2
- Parrot VM Assembly: 4 (or maybe 3)
