end of fall 2015

Back home for winter break. I shall refrain from looking back on this semester, at least in its entirety, until I have sorted out some... mixed feelings, I suppose you could call them. Throughout this semester I made no secret of the fact that I had mixed feelings about Atlanta and GT. For the longest time Life seemed to be throwing banana peels my way with the speed and exuberance of a baseball pitching machine. At times it seemed as if Life had defeated me. But after a while I realized that things weren't really so bad. In the end I managed to do okay in all three of my courses. I got a B in distributed, though, but only because the debacle that was the midterm was not something a mere mortal like me could have overcome, even had a miracle found its way into his life. On the other hand my A's in algorithms and software engineering were so close that I shiver from time to time, imagining what life would be now if they had been borderline B's instead of A's. My A in algorithms was, to be sure, the Hitsugaya of A's: slight and underwhelming. One wonders how it came about.

Nicky's company was excellent, of course. I don't know that I would have survived this semester without her. The all-nighters toward the end were particularly fun, notwithstanding the overdoses of high-calorie food and snacks that the health-conscious side of me would have balked at on any other occasion. The aplomb with which we proved Abbu's predictions about our project wrong was immensely gratifying. It also revealed the extent to which the appearance of having done something can substitute for actually having done something in the world of academics. Not that we hadn't done much, as our project on GitHub amply demonstrates. It's just that my impression had been that a lot more had been expected of us than we delivered. And who can blame me? The presentations that the other teams gave on their projects toward the end of the semester ranged from things like consolidating data generated by data centers around the world to gathering information from satellites. In hindsight, their endeavors might just fall into the class of things that, just because you can do them, it doesn't mean that you should.

And Casper... man, oh man. We discovered his wife's blog near the end of the semester, and were astonished to discover that Casper wasn't just some gray-haired academic who preached things that he seldom practiced. Casper, it transpires, is quite tech savvy. It sort of dampened the high we had ascended into after the project to discover that Casper used Arduinos every day to do much more complex things that we had done in our project, but there comes a time in everyone's life when he must stiffen his upper lip and accept things for what they are.

I've run out of things to say.