Friday, December 14, 2007

Much Afraid

I've been working on my PhD class called "Machine Vision" for 14 months. Its a 650 page book of calculus, linear algebra, probability and statistics, differential geometry and other crap I don't know anymore. So its taken me awhile. I've read through the book twice, then was about 3/4 of the way through it a third time, trying to do the exercises at the end of each chapter because the one and only grade (the final exam) is simply working professor-selected problems from the book. So trying to do them can help you with the final exam. Well I've been pounding my head on this for months, and all week long I've been emailing the school to tell them that I can't access the final exam b/c some coding is wacko in their system. I emailed them on Tuesday, and still haven't heard anything. I emailed yesterday to a different email support area and got back an email that it had been fixed. It hadn't. I emailed again today, waited about 6 hours, heard nothing and was getting ready to call them when I logged in to get the phone number and found that the exam link had been fixed. So I got the exam sent to my proctor, printed it out, and sat down directly to take the exam. Three hours later that didnt feel like more than about an hour and 15 minutes, time was up. After dinner I came to check my email and found a note saying that they were working on adding the exam to the online environment b/c after today no one would be working there to process paper exams. Ummm....WAIT...WHAT??! I've already taken the exam. I'm done. Its ready to mail in. So I hope that he simply didnt know what he was talking about. But I'm nervous...if my program gets even more screwed than it already has, I'm going to be very upset.

Meanwhile, on to the next class.. more crappy math...this time "numerical analysis".

In other disappointing news, the astronomy articles having been making a big deal about how this year's Geminid meteor shower should be particularly stunning since there would be no moon, etc. I've gotten my family up for several years to try to see these meteors... most of the time its too cloudy. Well this year took the CAKE because it was completely fogged over...couldn't see the trees at the end of the road much less any so-call shower of alleged meteors. I'm starting to think they don't actually exist.

I'm really really tired, in case you couldn't guess. So I think I'll go to bed.

1 comment:

beth said...

Get some sleep - hopefully it'll be better in the morning. But I sure hope they're not going to make you take it again....bleh.