It's amazing. I've actually lived past 21 years of my life without any serious (life-threatening) mishaps. It's been a rough year, considering all that has happened. I fallen in and out of love, fallen in and out of favour, fallen in and out of the elite.
Whatever the cause, the fact remains that I am still alive.
I guess all that moody and depressive nonsense that I've been putting up should be left well behind. Time to be the Mun Thye that I was meant to be.
Anyway, the first week of classes have more or less ended. Interesting week, I'd say. The course load for this semester is going to be really high, as I've overloaded an additional 9 more units compared to the de facto average. Among the courses that I'm taking, the three that stands out the most is 15-251 Great Theoretical Ideas of Computer Science, 21-301 Combinatorics and 21-229 Set Theory.
21-229 is an interesting course, in the sense that it is a purely theoretical construct. It's almost like learning a new programming language, with the introduction of ZFC and all the axioms and schemes that defines what a Set is. The level of abstraction was shocking initially (eg integers are just various sets defined according to the Existence of a Unique Empty Set and the Union Axiom), but after listening to the Professor's exposition, things became more and more clear. The hard part of this course seems to lie in the fact that everything in the course is about proving. Looks like I can retire my calculator from this course for this semester.
21-301 is interesting for a bunch of reasons. It's one of the first high-level courses that I'm taking, and it supposedly kills two birds with one stone by satisfying one requirement of my Computer Science major and one requirement of my Discrete Math/Logic minor (though I'd rather take a harder course 15-451 Algorithm Analysis to cover the CS requirement). The topic is particularly hard, but still fairly understandable, considering the fact that I've been playing with combinatorial objects for quite a while. The professor is not too bad, a little monotonic at times, but still fairly okay. From the list of topics that he gave us, it appears that it's going to be a really fun course of sorts.
15-251 can be considered one of the most random courses around. Its coverage is so big that it has no textbook assigned to it! Prof von Ahn is one of the "new age" professors, full of energy and wit, and very very demanding. Not that I don't like that, but if the first week is of any indication of what is to come, this course is probably going to be one of the most intensive courses that I've taken so far. A class effort assignment was assigned about 3 days before the semester started, and for the first assignment, we were to go on a "treasure hunt" of sorts, CS-style (meaning lots of Math, logic and google bashing). Up for grabs are 4 iPod shuffles for the winning team, and my team seems to have a decent chance at it. I'm hoping for the best in this. :-)
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Kangyi dropped by from Wednesday to Friday to stay over while waiting for his dorm back at Brown to be open. I feel a little bad in the way I've hosted him; due to the timing, I couldn't take him around Pittsburgh to see the stuff (I had classes), moreover, due to my laziness, I didn't venture out of CMU to visit many places, so I guess I would have been a really lousy guide if I had taken him out. Anyway, he bunked over at my dorm because Mo and I had a spare bed, thanks to Aditya moving out to the frat house to stay. Kangyi was positively in awe when he saw my dorm, heheheh... I had to tell him time and again that my dorm was not one of the "normal" ones, in the sense that it is more of an apartment suite than a dorm outright. Lots of catching up were done, and I got Phil to take him (together with Linda, Eliot, Mo and I) on the Grand Tour of CMU.
Kangyi enjoyed himself thoroughly on the midnight "tour" of CMU. We travelled across the campus to all the eerie places and showed him around, and he was amazed at the extent of our knowledge of the place. He had a field day taking pictures of all the places. :-) He left early in the morning on Saturday, which I regret not waking up to send him off. :-(
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In other news, I've gotten a new flapdoozy and a nice stainless steel mug, all from Megagear, the Megatokyo store. I've also almost busted my print limit by printing out drawing manuals to figure out how to draw properly. And I've found the palette for the COPiC Markers for use in my drawing programs. Hopefully I can draw something decent and put it up soon. Japanese learning speed has gone down by a lot, partially due to the large amount of events (and the overall instability of it all), and partially due to the arrival of my 笛子 and 箫.
So, yeah, lots of stuff happened for the last week, and there's more stuff to come by. Oh, I went ahead and stocked up my kitchen with edible stuff again. And it's almost 5am now, guess I should finish up the proof for 15-251's assignment and then crash out.
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