Road works are a form of communism
I'm now convinced that road works = blatant communism. Actually I have no basis for that conclusion beyond the fact that they pissed me off, but nonetheless I'm going to stand by my wonderful, baseless viewpoint and try my best to convince everyone I know that it's true.
Ultimately, my question is... what the hell could they be doing to Rural that's more important than my education? I was stuck in traffic for 40 minutes on Rural today, which put me in my parking space at 10:00... a cool 20 minutes after my math class starts. So, I definitely said screw it and went to the Brickyard and mooched off their internet (as usual) and used the extra 20 minutes or so that I had to waste more time pointlessly surfing the internet. I'm just glad it was maths I missed, and not english or human event, as that would have been a nightmare... math I can at least teach myself from the book without too much trouble.
Programming was fun today too-our professor basically told us not to come on Wednesday if we were comfortable with recursion, as that's all we're doing Wednesday. For me, having mastered recursion under the skillful eye of Dynamic Dave (Johnson) my sophomore year of high school, that was telling me I needn't come to class Wednesday. Not that I do anything in that class anyways, except mooch off the free, fast internet and make sarcastic comments to myself about how much Java really does suck. I find it amusing that there's little or no distinction between pointers and concrete variables in Java, just as there's no such thing as a double pointer, and lord only knows how you do something like reference variables (which you do in C with pointers, and C++ with &s). I also find it funny that we were going over recursion today and our prof was like "oh, by the way, you guys actually shouldn't use recursion unless you're doing something that can't easily be done in a linear fashion, like heap sort or binary trees," which is amusing because we're being taught recursion, and then being told not to use it. It's a valuable tool, but one of those things you rarely use in programming, or at least when you're programming anything useful.
That's what really bugs me about CSE210... we're learning all this low-level stuff which, if you're doing cluster-computing and attempting to determine the number of different ways you could get from here to Tucson given only a plastic fork and a small chunk of uranium, is all well and good. However, when you're making applications which people actually USE... take, for example, a web browser, or an AIM client, or anything involving semi-high level programming... you don't need to know how the hell a binary tree works or how to construct stacks from stacks. All of the stuff we're learning is wrapped in neat, nice, high-level classes in high-level languages that do everything for you (Cocoa, for example). Recursion is all well and good, as are linked lists, but neither of them can be used in low-memory or limited handle environments, and neither are practical if you're doing anything high-level either, so their use becomes very limited.
Oh well, I'm sure there are more pointless things we could be learning...
... like how to obstruct the greatest amount of traffic in the shortest distance on freaking Rural Road...
Ultimately, my question is... what the hell could they be doing to Rural that's more important than my education? I was stuck in traffic for 40 minutes on Rural today, which put me in my parking space at 10:00... a cool 20 minutes after my math class starts. So, I definitely said screw it and went to the Brickyard and mooched off their internet (as usual) and used the extra 20 minutes or so that I had to waste more time pointlessly surfing the internet. I'm just glad it was maths I missed, and not english or human event, as that would have been a nightmare... math I can at least teach myself from the book without too much trouble.
Programming was fun today too-our professor basically told us not to come on Wednesday if we were comfortable with recursion, as that's all we're doing Wednesday. For me, having mastered recursion under the skillful eye of Dynamic Dave (Johnson) my sophomore year of high school, that was telling me I needn't come to class Wednesday. Not that I do anything in that class anyways, except mooch off the free, fast internet and make sarcastic comments to myself about how much Java really does suck. I find it amusing that there's little or no distinction between pointers and concrete variables in Java, just as there's no such thing as a double pointer, and lord only knows how you do something like reference variables (which you do in C with pointers, and C++ with &s). I also find it funny that we were going over recursion today and our prof was like "oh, by the way, you guys actually shouldn't use recursion unless you're doing something that can't easily be done in a linear fashion, like heap sort or binary trees," which is amusing because we're being taught recursion, and then being told not to use it. It's a valuable tool, but one of those things you rarely use in programming, or at least when you're programming anything useful.
That's what really bugs me about CSE210... we're learning all this low-level stuff which, if you're doing cluster-computing and attempting to determine the number of different ways you could get from here to Tucson given only a plastic fork and a small chunk of uranium, is all well and good. However, when you're making applications which people actually USE... take, for example, a web browser, or an AIM client, or anything involving semi-high level programming... you don't need to know how the hell a binary tree works or how to construct stacks from stacks. All of the stuff we're learning is wrapped in neat, nice, high-level classes in high-level languages that do everything for you (Cocoa, for example). Recursion is all well and good, as are linked lists, but neither of them can be used in low-memory or limited handle environments, and neither are practical if you're doing anything high-level either, so their use becomes very limited.
Oh well, I'm sure there are more pointless things we could be learning...
... like how to obstruct the greatest amount of traffic in the shortest distance on freaking Rural Road...