"Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they are out to get you."
Is that what they say? Or is it "Just because they're not out to get you, doesn't mean…"
How does that go?
"Just because they are out to get you, doesn't mean you're not…"
Never mind. The professors are out to get me, even if they don't hate me, and a mushroom cloud of homework is rising high into the air above my house. The ever-expanding shadow spreads across Church Hill. Small children shriek and run indoors, dogs howl. Perturbed at how I while away the hours by peering deep into a cathode ray tube, the cats yowl and body slam each other on my bed. I go upstairs and find tufts of hair all over the coverlet.
"Well, that's one less petrified hairball behind the couch," I say to myself as I dress for school, where I'm going to—you guessed it—get more homework.
Back in my halcyon, liberal arts student days, I never did homework. I left those days behind for good when I decided to go back to school and, I pause here to retch, work to my full potential. So now my entire life revolves around homework, because when you study engineering you either do all your homework or you change your major.
I have three tests, one of which is generously called a "quiz", next week. And problem sets galore. At this point, all I can do is prioritize them by due date and slog on through. I got up early this morning and worked on the digital signal processing (DSP) stuff till it was time to go to school. I hit the wall with one problem. I hit the wall with every problem, really, but this last one had the highest wall and broken jaggedy bottles on top. The example in the book simply listed the Matlab code you needed to solve the problem, because even the authors didn't want to do a partial fraction expansion with a ratio of two fifth order polynomials. Yeah.
But it was time to go to school, so off I went, where I got a math worksheet to finish up by Wednesday (in case the mammoth problem set for that class wasn't quite big enough, don't you know). I also did the Matlab thing in the computer lab, where they have the full version. I only have the student version of Matlab at home and it doesn't have all the "toolboxes" (sets of advanced functions) installed. Earlier that morning, thinking that I might have some other toolboxes on the student version CD, I checked my documentation to see how to install additional toolboxes. The instructions were "buy toolbox, download and install toolbox".
At least I didn't have to type in the code from the textbook. As I began typing, it occurred to me that the authors might have a website from which I could download it. Lo and behold! They did, and with a wonderful zip file of all the Matlab functions from the book. I pulled out the functions I needed, plugged in my vectors, and got—an error message. One of their functions had a syntax error, but I fixed it in maybe one second and then everything was dandy. Happy for the first time all day, I printed out my results and, tucking the sheet into my binder, I glanced over the other parts of the problem to find that I had done them backwards. The x coefficients were on the y side of the filter and vice versa. Do over.
Homework breeds.
599 words | February 13, 2004 10:31 PM | Ivory tower