So what’s going on? I had four pieces of coursework to hand in on Monday of this week, but being the highly organised, enlightened, best grad-student version of myself that I am, I had them all done by last Friday. Extremely irritating right? I’m trying to be a lot better than I was during my undergrad, which means no all nighters, proper planning and always overestimating how long things will take. It’s going pretty well so far.

It’s now under a month until I’m off to Canada for Christmas, which means I need to be on top of getting all of my remaining pieces of coursework out the way. Seems to be going well so far. The only struggle at the moment is getting momentum going for a large group coursework. My control freak tendencies keep showing up, but I’m managing to keep a lid on them. I think it’s helpful to have that in part, good to put some fire into the engine, but you want to get the best out of everyone, so that means letting things go and figuring out how the work will emerge from the group as a team. It’s a really great exercise, practicing Agile dev techniques for the first time, in a pretty (grand scheme of things) low risk environment.

Doing things, calling it a life

Spending a lot of time also working on computational languages. The Foundations of Computation has unexpectedly turned out to be my favourite course this semester. The next challenge there is to write a parser that will take a context-free grammar in Chomsky normal form, a word $w$, and return a parse tree for the word if it is in the grammar. All of the problems in computation are really fascinatingly low level, and have a nice mix of the creative and the technical. It’s an excuse to mess around with MathJax to represent all of my notes, compiled languages are great.

I’ve been working on my bike a little this week. Some parts came so I got the tachometer working again. My dad was on hand for the soldering, when you have an electrical engineer at hand you’d be foolish not to take advantage of it. It has honestly been very nice working on the bike with my dad, a nice way to spend time mulling over mechanical things and learning from him. Another thing I’m learning about mechanical projects is the to-do list never seems to get shorter when you’re working on a bike or a car. You find new things to do just as you scratch old ones off. I still need to adjust the tick over speed, replace the backlight bulbs in the instrument panel, fit the heated grips I got, and then potentially strip off the tank and most of the cylinder head cover to check the valve clearances as “they don’t sound quite right” (again according to my dad, but I do trust his judgement more than mine). It’s definitely rideable but got to love a project.

Something I’ve found myself missing the most recently is dinner parties. I miss eating with my friends, breaking bread. I miss yelling about stupid things, and drinking a lot of wine. The closest I’ve had to this recently has been a few rounds of Among Us with folk from my course. Incredibly silly fun game to play with people. I have been pinging back and forth with various people recently, which has been very nice. It feels good to find ways to be in conversation with each other, sharing and learning things. That’s part of what I’m enjoying about writing this blog recently, just the act of writing helps focus what I’ve been thinking about, and what I feel’s worth sharing.

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