Checksum Arcanius

Course	Course Title	Credits	Grade	Grade Points
CHEM E 260	THERMODYNAMICS	4.0	4.0	16.00
CSE 143	COMPUTER PRGRMNG II	5.0	4.0	20.00
MATH 324	ADV MULTIVAR CALC 1	3.0	3.3	9.90
T C 333	ADV TEC WRIT & ORAL	4.0	4.0	16.00

Yee-hah!

It is either my new Borg name or my class ranking in CSE 143. So then the question becomes, is 10 of 228 enough to garner the proverbial A? (4.0 at UW)?

According to Ananth, grades only appear after the 100th time you check them — and its looking like it’s going to be a long wait!

It is finished. I have reached the end of the beginning of my tenure at the University of Washington. At 4:20pm, I left room 015 of the Chemistry Library a free man… almost. I am still beholden to the grades that my efforts will recieve. I left each final feeling just okay — not terrible and but not great. And thats just about how I expect the grades to turn out.

As i discussed with Theo earlier, my standards are as follows:

A — Expected
B — Disappointed
C — Failed

Unfortunately, I think I’m in for some disappointment and I’m probably failing Math. (If I really am failing math… *cry*.) On the other hand, I should get at least one expected grade this quarter, from Tech Comm 333. I have a chance in CSE 143, if I aced the final (and I think I might have). I also have a chance in Thermodynamics (Chem E 260) if I didn’t screw up the final too badly (I really don’t know)… it didn’t go smoothly, but it may have been the same for many others as well. I know I made at least a few mistakes on the midterm, but I ended up setting the curve. However, I can’t help but feel that the Final went worse than that.

On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised with my performance in my Math final. I cruised thorugh the first three problems, and only got stuck on the two hardest… and I think I did enough work on those for strong partial credits. On the other hand, I might have scrwed it up very badly. Thats how shaky I was in that class. It felt good at the time, but I have no idea if I was doing any of it right…

If all goes well this month, the UW Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) will grant me my petition to take CSE 370, Introduction to Digital Design. That class is required for the major, so it will feel like real progress towards something useful, as opposed to all the other crap I’m taking that I’m interested in, but whose primary purpose is to whittle away the time until I’m into a major.

However, if I do get into CSE 370, I will have to rearrange my schedule, which has shown itseslf to be no easy task, considering every section of every course I’m in is full (more or less), or conflicts with something else in my schedule. After about an hour of considering the possibilities, I was able to derive a least-conflicting derivative schedule that would require only one difficult change to the schedule, and onyl two changes overall:

1. Dropping Chem 241, Organic Chemistry Lab — EASY!
2. Moving My Biology 220 lab from WEdnesday Morning to Thursday Morning (preferred) OR to Tuesday Evening (Which could really suck!) — HARD! (but doable!)

Below is the schedule that would result. All of the schdule combinations work well together except (1a) and (2b) — that would be pretty bad (10 hours of class non-stop!). I guess I would be happiest with (2a) and (1b).

I dodged a bullet today in my Advanced Multivariable Calculus class. We got a chance to look at our second midterms today, and I was disappointed, but not surprised, to see that I scored only 25 out of 40 possible points on the test. I made one very stupid mistake that cost me four points, probably, but the rest of the missing points were because I didn’t know material. Fortunately for me, I was able to beat the curve anyway — the class average was another point lower than mine. I guess I am lucky in that my poorest performances are generally well within the mix of the average smart person, because there ain’t no dimwits among this group. Except, perhaps, for whoever the poor soul is who got the class low at 2 points. Hopefully this will provide me with sufficient motivation to study for the final, so that I actually learn all of the concepts I am supposed to get out of this class.

On Tuesday, Maria and Maura suddenly had four tickets to the Sonics game, so they invited me along. Jon was stuck at work, so I called around and got Courtney to tag along as well. Yup, I went to a game with three hot girls; I’m that much of a stud.

At any rate, the company was much better than the game. The first three-and-a-half quarters were disgusting to watch. The Sonics were flat on their feet, lacked hustle, and lacked direction. I’m really starting to dislike the new coach, Bob Weiss, who seems to lack any competetive fire and doesn’t seem to do a very good coaching job either. For example, his substitutions seem (to me at least) just motions. Its like he’s substituing because, thats what a coach supposed to do, not because it actaully makes sense. For example, when he brought in Potapenko to replace Petro (who was doing fine), Vitaly went on to brick two easy shots (one should have been a dunk!). Furthermore, I think he needs to use the bench as role players, and give them specific direction when they come in.

For example, when Weiss brought in Radmanovic, Vladimir didn’t really know what to do with himself. First, he needed to establish his inside game — to go hard to the basket the first three or four times he got the ball. He’s fast and he needs to get respect for his drive before he establishes his mid and long-range game. Instead, he wandered around the court, threw the ball away, and hesitated at every opporunity. And speaking of hesitation, Nick Collison missed a couple of shots early and then stopped taking them, effectively removing him as a threat.

As a coach, Weiss should have seen this and pulled him aside and told him, I want you to take the shot the next two tims you touch the ball. Collison is a good player with a strong mid-range game — there’s no reason for him to stop shooting after missing a couple. But instead of seeing him make any good decisions, I saw Weiss take a poorly-timed timeout, argue a call which the ref had clearly called properly (perhaps this was his atttempt to fire up the team?), and generally look unhappy and fat in the process. I want Nate back.

After the game, I ended up getting a ride bak to my truck with Courtney. Before, Maria and Maura had picked me up from the U-Disctrict in her very nice Impreza RS 2.5 — complete with leather! However, I left my backpack in Maria’s car. The girls dropped it off with Jon, and when I went to pick it up, we ended up talking for a long time about stuff that I mostly didn’t really care about. I finally just had to say, “talk later” and take off, since on Wednesday, I had a wonderful Math Midterm (#2!) to take. Well, long story short… I have no idea how I did, other than the fact that I’m pretty sure I missed at least a quarter of the points. ><

This is what you get when you take a UW senior with no major and four courses with labs and shake vigorously at 6:00am. At least I’m now in my first Bioengineering class.