Friday, January 10, 2003

Sorry to hear about L's grandmother passing. :(

I didn't realize you were back in school! Is this your first semester? And CS is the subject? I started and second MA program last fall, and am taking 2 classes this spring *crossing my fingers*. Just slightly less applicable than yours, it's in Critical and Creative Thinking (more on my blog soon). Was thinking of doing a CS program but there are just too many pre-req's, since I don't have any formal comp training...hoping to slip a programming course or two in soon...

Later :)
So L's grandmother just died last night.

She was fairly old (90+), and had very poor eyesight, so for the first few times we met, her epithet for me was the guy in the striped shirt.

For me it is not so bad, I didn't know her long or well, but in fact I saw her more often than my own grandmother who died the summer before our wedding. I also cannot relate as much to L's grief for the same reason; my family simply isn't as close as hers. Most of my grief was regret that I knew my own grandmother so little, and failed so often to call, write, or think about her. I never visited her, even when I was old enough to do so on my own. Probably it never occurred to me since this is just not how my family operates, and I was already doing a good amount of travelling even to see my parents and brother, never mind anyone else.

The wake is Sunday, the funereal on Monday. We'll probably go see her parents this weekend then accompany them for the rest.

Perhaps I will miss my first night of class on Monday. I am sure the prof won't care.

My job was immediately sympathetic and accommodating - for some reason this still surprises me a bit when people do the right thing about such life changes.

Thursday, January 09, 2003

So class begins shortly.

The next 6 months at work are looking to be exceptionally busy/challenging, so I decided to return to academia with only one class.

I need to do a pre-req before my philosophy degree and a few CS class background can get into a CS MS program at the BU Metropolitan college. BU MET is the adult/continuing ed. college, and offers an actual MS in CS, unlike say Harvard's extension school which does not.

So it's "CS 248 - Introduction to Discrete Mathematics" every Monday from 6-9 pm for me for a while.
Joy.

Luckily it seems as though my rather, uhh, diverse academic interests have not left me completely ignorant of the subject (cs, statistics, and logic classes seem to cover alot of the syllabus). A perusal of the text makes me feel relatively confidant this will not require herculean effort.

So I snagged the text from the BU bookstore - I had to call the CS dept. to find out which text I needed since the BU bookstore has kept a monopoly on that information.

Also, since I wanted to buy the book a whole 2 weeks before classes start, the text book section of the B&N pretending to be a university bookstore was not yet open to the public - but they had a single copy of the text book in their general mathematics section, so luck day for me. Oddly, the price to buy it there was $5 cheaper than amazon or B&N, and no shipping time or cost.
Happy day.