Don't get me wrong, I'd rather be in school, at least attempting to learn something, rather than working for the man, getting a steady diet of dead-end projects that never make sense, managed by either a know-nothing suit or a know-it-all lead with nothing but the most vile disgust for life.

Sometimes, though, graduate school seems like the most bizarre place on earth. Why bother taking a class when the professor would rather hang out at conferences and send his assistants to teach (more like recite) the material? Maybe it's just the teacher in me critiquing the teacher I see, but when you get through 3 sets of slides in 6 weeks, that is just plain rediculous. Nobody seems too worked up about it, though. The worst part is that I know we'll be doing 4 paper reviews, a presentation, and a final crammed into a couple of weeks near the end. It takes me too damn long to read and understand papers to pull that shit. Two columns? No, you seriously can't fit more text in writing in two columns. (Edit: Supposedly it does fit more *if* the text is code segments or proofs that consist of several short lines. I still think it's pretentious crap. And my next point is still valid.) And then you put in figures that stretch across the entire page. Does that go with the stuff on the left or the right? Nobody knows or cares.

Figure 1: This makes the paper MUCH easier to read.

Then, you have the professor who you know needs to retire, who repeats whole lectures (yes), forgets his own schedule, reads directly from the slides, and still can't say anything of value. He repeatedly references people and standards of the 'old days', you know, when people coded on paper, or if they were really lucky, punched cards. Of course, nobody cares, because they actually know how to code on modern projects that actually have the ability to accomplish something, not dividing integers using successive subtraction.

All in all, though, there is something good about having the flexibility to work on something that you want to do. And playing Sodoku during lecture. I don't do that, but the guy sitting next to me does.

What I supposed to do?

I noticed that a lot of people that I knew seemed to be into blogs. I hesitate to put myself into that category. On the other hand, I had an inclination to host my own blog, even write it myself in PHP and MySql, so I figure, let's do it.

30 minutes later I am writing this blog entry using Simple PHP Blog.

OK, so I took the easy way out. Anyways, lets get to actual interesting stuff (about me, of course). (Soon to come..)