(no subject)

I had my midterm exam in bio-informatics yesterday. It did not go well. I could not remember the wild card character for use in regular expressions. I remembered the definition of homology wrong. I spent something like 25 minutes trying to figure out a five-point question and I'm not sure I explained my search algorithm right. At least I knew how to do bit-shift searches and how one went about finding prefixes using bit-shift, as opposed to finding the entire search string...

Well, it's over, and I think about half the class had similar troubles. I am going to have to do an excellent job on my remaining homeworks and on the term paper to make up for this, but this is an elective rather than a core course, so I'm not too worried.

Tonight I have Mandarin class and I'm much, much happier with the idea of that than I was with my class last night. Not just because it's not a class with a midterm, so far as I know, but because it's Twain-defined play. I'm obliged to do the bio-informatics 'cos it's an elective I signed up for as part of getting my master's. Mandarin? I just wanna. Not to mention that the teacher and a few of the students joked that since class was so close to Halloween, we ought to dress up appropriately for class. (Mind, the teacher thought at first that it was Thanksgiving, but someone cleared that up to her.) I think I'm going to get my Mandarin jacket out of the closet and wear it over a T-shirt along with the pants Chinasprout no longer sells, just to see. I can take it off after the first five minutes and all will be well.

Meanwhile very happy with the power adapter I found for my MP3 player, and with the 'randomize' function I found on the player - 160 songs to choose from means I'm pretty near guaranteed a no-repeat day. Ah, back to work without threat of looming midterm.

!@*&(

Well, there go half my points on ONE of the exam questions... just found that I'd totally cocked up the definition of 'implicit suffix tree' and thereby created an entirely wrong example of one... not real sure if the fact that my implicit suffix tree is a correct ordinary suffix tree will count for anything considering we were supposed to do a suffix tree and an implicit suffix tree...

I hate this exam, God, I hate this exam.

Well, this makes me feel better...

Strange Daze is one of my favourite 'seriously, you're demented, you know that, right?' web comics. Still feeling dejected about how rapidly it's unfolding (inside my head, nothing official yet) that I must surely have bombed out on the midterm, I wandered over there to see if the artist had managed an update. And he had; he's currently parodying The Ring. The strip for this past Saturday made me laugh, and I'm thankful for that, so go and have a look and make the guy's reader stats spike, please?

"I thought it were some kinda video-transmitted thought virus... figgered I could reverse engineer the thing an' attach one'a my retrovirus' to it. One high-jacked broadcast later and I'd have myself a mutant zombie army! I was planning on taking Canada first. Turn 'em all into some sorta beaver/crawdad creatures."
"Uh-huh. Seriously, you're like the bastard child of Dr. Frankenstein and the narrator from Dukes of Hazzard, right?"