not falling down

Fourteen hours ago I was on top of an Alp. Three hours ago I was getting lengthily hassled by Immigration about my months-long residence in the United Kingdom with no visible means of support. Eventually they decided they couldn’t really deport me and grumpily let me back in, but not without permanently detaining–get ready for it–my London library card. That is the pettiest thing I can imagine! I am going to write a book about petty people just so I can use that as an epitome!

But the hassling and bag search and back rooms and subsequent two-hour night bus ride don’t really take away from the experience of looking down on Innsbruck from four miles up (a good quarter of which we hiked) with a really good song on my headphones, learning the secret of Hafelekar summit. The secret is this: it’s fucking covered in poop and bugs. I guess the mountain goats and snow rabbits just love to use the lookout point as their special private time space, but man. They grow the flies big on Hafelekar summit.

Have I mentioned yet that I’m done with school? I’m done with school, as of the day after my birthday. I ended up with two Bs and a C, balancing the two Bs and an A from last semester, and finish my first year of postgraduate education with a pristinely average 3.00. I did some complete crap work, in places, this spring; I got thoroughly and undeservingly rogered in others. It all balances out, in 3.00 Land.

One more year of this and I’m done with school forever. Whoof. I am ready for that.

I’ve been panicking on and off for a little while here, trying to make myself remember to register for fall term. If they let me come back to school. But anyway, I registered really late last fall and didn’t get all the classes I wanted, so I keep beating myself about the head and shoulders, trying to make myself do it.

I finally remembered while at a university computer today, and clicked frantically through the (horrible) catalog system… to find that nobody else has registered either. I guess it’s okay to wait until summer, or at least until I meet with my advisor.

I did do one thing already, though. As of this fall, I am FINALLY IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING.

Allilea rants at length about usage of “fuck.” “Fuck the registrar’s office,” she says, is an appropriate usage. She is correct.

I think there’s a Muse of Incompetency, and the University of Louisville computer system is her masterwork. It is so fiercely and proudly retarded that I eventually gave up on even trying to check my U of L email, and thus missed the opening of spring registration by a week, which means I have to put off taking Software Engineering (basically the course for which I came to grad school) and Compilers again, for a term and a year respectively. Because they’re full.

Since I don’t really know anything about the way scheduling works here (what professors to take, what course numbers mean, et cetera), I ended up feeling like Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer when I tried to put together a schedule without the two classes I’d really counted on taking. Maria, lucky roommate, got to see me in full HATE SMASH TECHNOLOGY mode while making that attempt the other night. She also talked me down from it and told me to go see my advisor, who was actually really helpful considering he didn’t know my name.

So in the spring I’ll have Networks, Evaluations, Internet Application Design (Java whee!) and, after a frighteningly long time, Prob ‘n’ Stat. I really should have taken that last one, like, decades ago, but it wasn’t a requirement and I never had room as a double major.

For a while, Blizzard was looking for somebody to write statistics code for Battle.net–a job I bet I would have loved if I’d ever, well, learned anything about statistics. I mentioned how this made me want to take PnS at Centre to Jon, who laughed in my face and told me that one undergraduate course wouldn’t qualify me anyway.

I’ll show you, Jon. You hear me? Your world frightens and confuses me, but this caveman will show you all.

P.S. Fuck the registrar!

Ten minutes until my very first graduate class, and I only managed to find the classroom by coming into this second-floor computer lab and searching the U of L site. My very first class (Artificial Intelligence) is, as it turns out, in the basement.

Omens. Mmm.

Remember my credo about fucking the Registrar? No, I’m not at Centre anymore and no longer really feel the need to do such fucking, but I’ve been thinking lately about the history and progress of this journal. How will future generations of NFD readers know just who this fuck-target was?

Thus, to give you a frame of reference, I have procured a casual photograph of said fuckee (visible below). It’s like a party for my gall bladder! Yes, he’s in the front. Please try not to shriek.

Yesterday was my very last class at Centre, which isn’t nearly as impressive spelled out. It was also the first of two Short Story reunion concerts planned for the end of the year, and we sounded damn fine, and it was the first and last time I cheated the system here at school.

Centre students are required to attend twelve cultural events per year, as designated arbitrarily by the administration, in order to better ram the humanities down our throats. Even more than that idea, which I mildly dislike because I don’t like ramming, I can’t stand the way in which credits are assigned–there are one or two people collecting these colored cards outside the door when you leave, and if they happen to cut out early, you’re screwed out of your credit. Granted, there are around forty a year, but when the count starts getting close at the end of spring, it can be a dangerous thing. Not getting twelve credits means a pointless one-hour F credit on your transcript.

Tuesday was the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra concert, the last convo of the year, which I had to attend because the aforementioned stupid system kept me from getting credit for two other ones to which I’d already gone. The only problem was that they suddenly moved up the start time of the concert to right in the middle of the Jon and Brendan / Jon / Short Story show.

Cheating at convos is a time-honored practice among Centre students. Most convos are boring and sucky and packed with old Danville townies, and people have other things to do most nights. You’d think that such widespread corruption would invite a reassessment of the system, and possibly a correction (like, say, a freaking ID scanner), but instead it just means that it’s impossible to get credit for a convo without a card, even with multiple witnesses.

Like I said above, I’d never done it until yesterday, when things just went beyond my control. So at 7 I left the show, went and got a card, and left through a side door. We played the rest of the show, and I returned to Newlin and idly surfed the interweb from the design studio until I heard the applause go off. Then I went downstairs, handed in my card and went on my merry way.

I’m a cheater. Except not really, because I earned the credit already. What law does that fall under? Conservation of convocations?

Rhymes aside, I finished Blind Loop. I can’t play it all consecutively right now, because I can’t play piano, but if I can get it put into a MIDI program I’ll try and post a playback here. Thanks to everybody who said you liked it!

I got into UCLA and U of L; word about money is pending. Maybe Carnegie Mellon wasn’t a fluke. After my conversation with UK the other day, I got word from U of L that they didn’t have my scores either, and was I sure I had them sent? Sitting at my desk with a receipt showing scores and their names and codes, yes, I was quite sure indeed.

Hey, what a funny coincidence, I thought. That was the same receipt with IU and UW on it. The two schools I didn’t get into.

Hang on a bit.

You know, I never liked standardized tests, even though my ACT score essentially got me my scholarship here. I did fine, but I didn’t like taking them, I don’t like the assumed universality of the results, and I don’t like the way they screw with people’s heads. Now I’ve got another reason: they apparently don’t like to perform the services they promise.

On the advice of that same guy at UK, I complained to ETS, and got a response a couple of days later saying the scores had been sent again to UK and U of L. We’ll see, I guess. I mentioned UW and IU in my complaint, but I think they ignored that–I also mentioned that I’d already been declined there. I really do wonder if they ever got my scores, and whether they just got tired of waiting and turned me down instead of requesting that I send them again. I even thought about litigation, but at this point, what would it accomplish?

So basically what it comes down to, now, is UK, U of L, UCLA and CMU (Dartmouth hasn’t responded, but they don’t even have a financial aid program, and at this point it wouldn’t be worth the cost). Thoughts:

• UK: Nothing against anyone there, but I won’t go to UK if I have any other options, and I do, so I won’t. This might be my only chance to escape from central Kentucky, even if it’s only as far as Louisville, and I think I have to take it. Even more than I did in high school, I want out.

• UCLA: Obviously the program is first-rate, but I worry whether I’d be able to keep up. I’m a good student, but I’m not a great student, and I’m not a mathematician. If I do get some kind of aid–especially merit-based–would I be able to keep it? Also, the cost of living in Los Angeles would be a huge step up from here.
• CMU: Same worries as UCLA, but amplified; Carnegie is consistently ranked among the top three CS schools in the country. I really like everything I know about the school, but I have no wish to be ground under and stumble out after three years without a degree or a penny to my name. There’s also no aid whatsoever, and I’d have to wait to even apply for an assistantship, but Maria keeps telling me it’s possible to go without aid if you combine private and Stafford loans.
• U of L: I want to go to Louisville, plain and simple; if I can get money there it will be my solid first choice. I wonder, though, about whether I want to go there for the right reasons. I’ll have friends and a roommate there, and a Centre / U of L CS alum I wrote this weekend says it’s less academically challenging than Centre.

  Is it a safety program? Could that affect my career adversely? The fact is that I’d probably do fine in a slightly cushier environment; I’m a better programmer than most people in the department here, but my grades are around average. But how much will grades matter in the job market, compared to school name? If I’m going to invest this much time and (future) money, I don’t want to my Master’s to lose that job at Blizzard to the the whippersnapper Bachelor’s from NYU.

I’m putting off choosing for now on the excuse that I need to know more about money. I already turned down UC, my only sure scholarship, because the deadline was the 18th. That felt risky, but really it wasn’t. Going to U of L with even mild aid, for example, wouldn’t cost much more than what the UC scholarship wouldn’t have covered; the other schools would be financial burdens, but more than make up for them in name value.

I read a long excerpt at the University of Chicago Press site (found via Sumana) about choosing a grad school, and it gave me a lot to think about. They all support choosing the best school you can get into, but then say that being with a supportive faculty is better than working under chilly top researchers. They also cite the large number of postgrad students who don’t complete as evidence of the difficulty, and as a deterrent to people considering it casually. So is it better to choose a program in which you know you’ll do well over one with a great name that could kick you in the teeth? I don’t like the (arrogant, maybe) idea of being a big fish in a little pond, but then I don’t really know that I would be.

Questions, only questions. I’m one of those people who wants all the answers before I do anything big, and I don’t think I’ll get them this time.

Tired. Legs hurt. Bouncing.

Yesterday we got caught with the backlash of the campus-wide virus warning–I did more scrambling between computers, but all five of the calls I answered (from frosh girls: predictable but disappointing) were false alarms. I think they just wanted to be part of something exciting. I think that’s nice. I suggest rock diving.

Whenever I wasn’t doing that, I was standing over grad schools with a bat. First, I tried to get this… woman at U of L to walk ten feet and pick up the last piece of my application. She says it only takes about a day to decide once the application is complete, and the transcript is definitely the last piece, and I have yet to hear anything either way. Why? Because “the fax machine is acting funny.”

Second, I finally called UK to inform them that yes, my GRE scores were forwarded in January, as I told them in February, and would they mind taking a look? Oh, says Mister Admissions, the “electronic version didn’t upload right,” but now that I’ve informed them the scores are there, they should be fine. Meanwhile, since it’s April, there are no assistantships left. I’m pondering litigation, or (more satisfying, less expensive) actual use of the hypothetical bat. (You know. Like hitting them with it.)

One of my drafted-but-unused journal entries was about my bemusement at the sheer rarity of competency on this campus, and the apparently unusual fact that all of my friends are competent, useful human beings–in fact, that most of them are experts in some way. I was going to wonder if such a disparity existed outside the Centre bubble. If the people I’ve dealt with this week are any indication, I feel no need to wonder anymore.