Coding with Coffee
Sorry I missed the post last night. It was my hope that I could spend some time writing blogs while Melinda puts Drake to sleep. We have somehow fallen into the habit of Daddy/Scout Mommy/Drake pairings when it is time for the kids to go to bed. Every now and again we attempt a switch but Drake and Scout are quick to let us know that we’ve screwed up. That’s what happened last night.
Today I have almost three full hours to work on some research. I have two projects that I would like to work on. One of them is essentially done, I just need to run a program for a couple of months (it’s already written), collect the data, and write up a small report. The other involves writing code for a project that was started as a research experience for undergraduates at UGA. It’s potentially very neat. I’ll need to write a gradient descent algorithm with a bit of a twist. The twist involves performing a computation that is numerically unstable in its simplest form. There is code already developed, which I can port directly, that does what I need in a numerically stable and hopefully fast way. Interestingly, the libraries are written in FORTRAN 77. They have been ported to C, but I am toying with the idea of trying to write code in FORTRAN, just to refresh my mad programming skills. I am somewhat reluctant to do that though because there is a piece of the algorithm that is fairly nasty to code, and has already been done in C (by someone who is not me). We shall see.
Classes went well(ish) yesterday. I got to teach my upper division class (Abstract Algebra), and I think that the class went well. I was a little dissapointed that none of them seemed to remember anything from linear algebra (the course I taught them last spring). It makes me a little nervous that nobody objected to the statement that every nxn matrix has an inverse. When I reminded them that this was not the case and asked how you check, no one remembered what a determinant was or how you use it. *sigh* Oh well.
I plan on grading a little harder this year. I’m afraid I was too soft on my students last year. That was not to their advantage. I wish that several of my professors at West Georgia had been a little more demanding of me. Perhaps then I would not have had so much of a hard first year at Georgia Tech.
I finally have my office looking roughly how I want it to. I had to take many (most) of my books home, but I still have enough here so I can get some work done (right). Here it is in all of its glory.
The office looks nice. I like all the stuff on the walls. The late 60s early 70s furniture is a nice touch. We have modular 80s in here. If I could find a way to reach all the various doors over my desk, I could start up a great percussion section. They make a terrific bang when you close them. Since they are all different shapes and sizes, you could get a real range.
I’m going to have to get some bookshelves for in here. I don’t have any (believe it or not), just a ton of filing cabinets. Since we are working on the basement, I really need to get that stuff out of there. I don’t even remember what books are in some of those boxes.
We had the same deal with the kids at our house. I would put Austin to bed and Will would give Grant a last bottle and rock him to sleep. Now that we are putting Grant in his own bed, the schedule has gotten a bit screwey. He’s also in his Ma-Ma-Ma phase, which means that now I often get to be the one to do the dirty deed of putting him in his bed. Poor little guy, he just really hates to see us walk out of the room, but he gets a MUCH better night’s sleep on his own.
Do you remember the great Rod Stewart poster Mom got in one of her cds? She framed it for me as a joke last year and gave it to me. For some strange reason, Pam, our grad student, loves Rod Stewart. Now normally she has good taste, so I’m not sure what happened here. Perhaps it was too many hours standing in the hot Kansas sun watering cows. This morning I brought it in and used a dry erase marker to write “Pam, Thanks for everything! love, Rod” on it. She’s still laughing—although she’s threating to hang it up in her bedroom.
Good luck on the research. I have a few projects I would like to work on, but they are all on hold at the moment. Perhaps now that the semester is underway I could pick them up again. I’m just trying to keep my hand in the publishing thing to keep my options open.
By the way, what is a zombie outbreak? I know you talk about zombies in class, but I’m totally out of the loop on this one.
What’s a zombie outbreak? Jesus Lisa. Zombies like to eat brains. If someone has their brains eaten by a zombie (or in most cases are just bitten by a zombie) they die and come back as a hungry zombie. This is a classic example of an exponential growth epedemic. When you have a few zombies nibbling on folks, shortly thereafter you have a zombie outbreak. Kinda like a cholera outbreak, but without all the runny poo.