the final: i was able to write “something” down for basically the entire exam, which is more than i can say for other exams i’ve taken in my life. but afterwards, three of us stood around in the middle of campus for more than an hour and went over the entire final and there was a better way to do every problem… and i probably ended up writing things that were patently untrue in my desperate flailings. i felt pretty bad about leaving possibly the easiest question on the entire exam blank: show the kernel of a ring homomorphism is an ideal. for some reason i approached the question wrong and freaked out and forgot to come back to it later, but all you have to do is look at two things in the kernel and check the axioms. so easy. i don’t know what happened. i felt really bad about it after the test. i know how to do that problem, i just didn’t think clearly for the 45 seconds i spent reading the question, so there you go. and there were a few other things like that, so i’m pretty unhappy, but the wait is short and we’ll know by tomorrow. i feel like i wasn’t engaged in the class at all until very recently–eight weeks fly by fast.
i made a friend in this class. he’s more behind in getting an undergraduate degree than i am, but he works really hard and went to every scheduled office hour and i hope he got an a in the class. it was interesting to talk to him and get another perspective on “zomg i’m 23 and my life is over.”
my poor gsi got surgery on his thumb while we were taking the final and had to have someone else proctor it for us. this reminds me of that horrifying picture in the nevada city newspaper of that guy who’d shot a nail into his head with a nailgun in the way that every xray of an object embedded inside of a human body will remind me of that picture.
i swear to god i have http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Auditory_Processing_Disorder ; every time he said something in class that he didn’t write down i’d want to beg him to repeat it because i totally missed it. i can only take notes by literally writing down everything that comes out of an instructor’s mouth as fast as i can, because i can’t pay attention and figure out what’s important and what’s not important on the fly. this was good in some cases (prof hollinger comes to mind) but if i take a break to think about something for just a second half a board flies by and i’m left copying down vacuous symbols.
i played warcraft yesterday for the first time in what seems like months but was actually about two weeks (though two weeks ago i only played one day, and hadn’t touched it for two weeks before that). i was hoping to raid FINALLY, since i’ve never set foot in naxx, but not enough people were online. a lot of people are upset about this and we may open up recruiting… although another higher-ranked guild than us just broke up, so there really shouldn’t be any problem getting high-quality players. our recruiting officers just haven’t talked to the applicants at all for some reason. guild morale is fragile: if enough people go on vacation or are busy, then we won’t be able to make raids for a week, and then if we don’t raid for a week more people don’t show up the next week… and then after two weeks of not raiding you’re not in the habit of it anymore, you’re not thinking about it all the time, you’re no longer “in the zone,” so instead you think about the dumb boring aspects of the game–waiting for battlegrounds, farming for gold, grinding rep, grinding rank, bickering with each other over loot or letting the tanks die… and that’s when you get burnout. a bunch of people are talking about burnout now. they say they’ve been running a pvp group 24/7 for the last two weeks to make up for the lack of activity, but that’ll only engage 10-15 of the most hardcore players, and cause them to burn out faster, as well. grinding for rank sucks.
WoWing yesterday wasn’t actually that fun–log in, wait in pvp queues, chat idly with these people–but i use it fend off loneliness. and all the AV games were turtled because alliance was stupid and started off not letting horde get SH. you can only say “stop fighting pointlessly in the road between SP and SH and come offense! if both sides play heavy D this is going to be a 12-hour game!! PLEASE LISTEN TO ME!!! FW GY NEEDS HELP!!!!” so many times in general chat before you /afk out and go to sleep. but it is AB weekend and i’ve only four bubbles to go until AB exalted…!!!
i miss my ryanling.
has anyone heard the new muse CD?