Apologies and Frustrations

I apologize for the lack of blogging that has been going on. A few of us have been leading somewhat busy lives, or have been outright lazy, or have just forgotten. I, personally, feel I fall in the first category; that, and I have nothing particularly interesting to write about.

Until now, of course.

It's 1 AM, and I should be heading to bed. Midterm in the morning. Sorry if this starts to sound like a worldly rant about my life. Don't worry - it will get to a point.

I have been very busy, juggling planning events for Boken, schoolwork, internship searching, and personal advancement in graphic design, etc. The last has been somewhat lacking, but Spring Break is coming up, so I hope to be productive on my personal side of life.

Now, I just took a midterm. It was for Algorithms II.

Please, I just want to learn to code with minimal algorithm analysis.

To be honest, I do not see the point in the thorough mathematical analysis of algorithms. Yes, of course, to decide the efficiency and some other things, but I feel that no one truly does it as in-depth as we have done in this class. We also have barely been learning C, which is what I WANT to do. It's quite unfortunate, and although I should have studied more, the topic is dry as well as the lecture itself. I can barely pay attention, and when I do, stuff gets over my head. I'll have to look into studying this analysis part more over the break as well, but I have barely learned any coding in C - anything that I know right now - which is very basic, putting aside the basic syntax one can easily adapt to - I taught myself attempting to do homework for the class.

And then Scheme is deciding to be silly with SLLGEN, a scanner/parser system made with the Essentials of Programming Languages 3rd Edition of Scheme that goes with the book. I've been trying to make sense of it in the book, but nothing is actually explaining it clear enough that I can understand what exactly is wrong with my syntax in order to use it correctly. I have the class tomorrow, so I can perhaps ask the professor. It's been so frustrating, and sometimes Dr. Scheme doesn't want to return error messages that are actually useful to me so I can fix the damn program.

Now, to my somewhat-point. I hate not having specific instructions, vagueness, and lack of precision. It's a very big wish, but if professors could teach what exactly is needed instead of explaining things of the wayside, learning might be more enjoyable. Alas, I have to do a lot of self-teaching, even if I do pay attention in some of the classes.

Sorry for the rant. I would have posted on Tumblr, but I want to bring this nonsense back to life. Maybe when I get SLLGEN working I'll post a short thing about that. Until then, I'm off to bed.

~ Caroline