Friday, April 18, 2008

The Indiana earthquake

I've been incredibly busy lately (and still am in the middle of a homework due in less than 12 hours after having worked on it all night), but I guess this is some sort of historical moment, even though it's not CS-related at all. Around 4:30, Phil and I were doing our Parallel Computing homework when I noticed my leg was shaking. It came to be no surprise to me that my leg was jerking since it happens on occasion, but I couldn't get it to stop. Then, as cliche as it sounds, I looked over at my water and it was rippling. It started seriously vibrating the room after awhile, which was really freaky, since I live on the 10th floor. About half of our floor noticed it and came out of their rooms, wondering what happened. Of course, it had to be an earthquake or a bomb. Bomb didn't seem likely, and sure enough, it was reported a few minutes later. A 5.4 earthquake in the middle of the United States seems absolutely incredible.

In other news, school has been wreaking havoc on my health. Phil told me yesterday that Parallel Computing was allegedly the second hardest graduate CS class offered at Purdue, which is insane, yet I wouldn't doubt it at all. Our professor is a good teacher, but tends to consider things to be much easier than they actually are. This homework was supposed to be "easy", but I've worked on it over 12 hours so far and am still not finished. Of course, I still have plenty of work in other things coming up and will be until finals are over. Sometimes I wonder why I chose to stay in school. Actually, I guess I never actually posted about that. I accepted Purdue's offer, so I'll be staying here for my Ph.D. There's only one other person I know at the moment that's doing it, and I'm surprised that I even know one.

Back to work, anyhow.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, I plan to take up computer science at Purdue this Fall ( finished high school last month ). I happen to contribute to a few Free Software projects ( as a dev ) and plan to study a bit of AI before coming to campus. Can you tell me what the prospects are like for a Computer Scientist from Purdue after graduating ( lets say at top programs at places like MIT, Stanford etc. ) as I want to end up teaching + carrying out research in fields like natural language processing. And how hard is it to make it to the "honors" course that Purdue seems to have ?

P.S.: I was "smashed" a bit by a rejection from MIT but I guess Purdue's a cool place to study CS at. Care to elaborate more on how best to squeeze out research opportunities and the like as an undergrad at Purdue ?

saiyr said...

Sure, I will post something in the coming days. I'm preparing for finals and working on a final project, so I don't have time right now.

Anonymous said...

Thanks, I'm eager to figure out what the future's going to be like :)

Anonymous said...

start booking your tickets to nyc please, i'm there from june 1 to aug 29.

zzz.

phd? a little presumptuous, don't you think?

zzz.

zomgz. :D