originally posted may 08, 2002

mission critical

After a few weeks in which I felt guilty about getting enough sleep, I have suddenly found myself unable to get any sleep whatsoever.

As I write this, it is early in the morning of Wednesday, May 8. Finals week is well underway, and I have been preparing for my two exams and two projects which culminate roughly 173 hours from now, at 9:00 AM on Wednesday, May 15. This is crunch time.

OS: One Giant Time Bomb

Operating Systems, a class which officially comprises 40% of my courseload for this semester, is known for being extremely time-intensive. On the annual Faculty Course Evaluations, I indicated that I spend an average of 25 hours per week outside of class on homeworks and projects. That's an average, mind you: during the final days of a project, nothing else matters but OS. During the final few hours before submission, I have gone into a mode I call "OS Overdrive," where anxiety crests to highly dangerous levels.

Although I have performed very well on the homeworks, which I do myself, and on the projects with my highly-skilled partner, my poor grade on the midterm overshadows all of that. The course policy officially states that students must have a passing average on both the projects and the exams in order to pass the class. Average less than 60% on the projects or the midterm and final, and you fail bar-none.

If I don't get a 70.2% on the final exam, I could very well fail OS in a way that no other student has ever done in the history of the course: pass the projects but fail the tests. It's hard not to think about the ramifications of an 18-unit failure.

The OS final is on Thursday, May 9.

Computability: On the Precipice

In Computability and Incompleteness, I am in the unlikely position of being within one percentage point of an A. While the course is curved fairly heavily, this is a feat that I have never even remotely come close to achieving. It all comes down to the final exam on Friday, May 10. If I can learn the material that completely eluded me through the last few homework assignments, I stand a chance at breaking new ground with the final theory-based computer science course of my undergraduate career.

Japanese: Action!

Advanced Japanese II marks the last language course that I will take as an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University, although I plan to study language immersively at International Christian University for six weeks this summer. It also means that my project presentation, a 25- to 30-minute deal on Monday, May 13 at 1:30 PM, and the report due two days later at 9:00 AM, are instrumental to my success. I've barely started on both, and my partner is just as swamped with finals leading up to the weekend. As was the case a year ago, I expect to devote unprecedented amounts of time to make this project work.

I'm really pulling for a B in this course, but our final report will have to be spectacular to counteract the fact that due to OS, I missed seven of the last eight regular homework assignments in this class. My grades otherwise in Japanese have been unimpressive.

Technical Japanese: On the Homestretch

As I worry about getting my main Japanese coursework in order, a far more ominous deadline looms: roughly four and a half hours before I am to present my Japanese final project, my Technical Japanese paper is due. Needless to say, this seven-page Japanese-language paper has barely been started, and will require considerable effort, review, and time to finish in the next 125 hours. This is the last course, along with Advanced Japanese II, that I will take to fulfill my minor requirements for Japanese.

Conclusion

It's four in the morning, I can't sleep, and I'm going to go nuts by the time I leave here.

Let's rock.

Back to May 2002, or to the year 2002.

Where am I?

This is Weill Aspects, the official news archive of Jason Weill Web Productions. All articles posted to the front page end up here. This page was generated automatically by a series of Perl scripts.

Articles in Weill Aspects are organized solely by date. You may find the Google search in the left column to be useful if you are looking for an article but do not know the date on which it was posted.

Weill Aspects is composed of static web pages generated as appropriate when a new article is posted. It was developed in May 2001 as a way of managing the content on this site. I also used it extensively while in Japan, during which time I did not have continuous access to the Internet. I was able to write daily updates during July and August 2002, pack the files onto a CD-R or memory device, and upload them from the Internet-connected computers at school.

These scripts are all hacked together in less than elegant fashion, and I don't plan to release them. Some of the design that went into Aspects also was used to develop Livestat, a suite of Perl scripts to process statistics for academic competition tournaments. Livestat is available freely.