Author: paperbackdragon

I’ve had absolutely no time to write. Despite this, I’ve been promising people I will write, in a gaming blog and a university-related computer science blog. I’ll post the links here when those start.

Otherwise, I’ve been swamped with coursework. For each of my 5 classes I have a project, and then I have an additional year-long project that isn’t associated with a class. They include a “smart” pac-man maze solver, an Android game that has elements in the real world, a visual Facebook-related Android app, and a few more that are both code-based and writing-based. In a lot of …

These days, I don’t listen to the radio. I’m not driving, I don’t own a physical radio, and I don’t bother going to websites of radio stations to listen. It’s just too easy to find the exact type of song you want to listen to on the web. But the one thing that I miss out on because of this is spoken radio: news stories, radio shows, the sort of thing my parents would play in the car on long drives.

The best radio station for this in America was (and still is) NPR, National Public Radio. When I …

The new term is now in full swing, and I’m enjoying myself. I finally get to choose (all but one of) my classes this year, and I find them all both engaging and challenging. Here’s as understandable an explanation I can make of all the classes I’m taking:

Artificial Intelligence (AI): Speaks for itself, mostly. I’ll be learning everything from decision-tree algorithms to how we can make robots think, learn and be “intelligent.” I don’t know what our project will be yet, but last year’s was to create the “mind” for a robot like a roomba. Ideally, if attached to …

This past week, my boyfriend and I went to Spain and Gibraltar. It was beautiful, but I never quite got used to the humidity. Evening was the most tolerable, and so we often slept in. I wish we’d woken up earlier some days, since we only got to the beach twice: once in the evening as the sun was setting and once on the day of our flight, after we realized the beach was worth getting up early for.

The beach was incredible. The water, since it was so salty and it’s the Mediterranean after all (despite Gibraltar being near …

Surprisingly close to my flat is this gorgeous building, the Kelvingrove Art Gallery. It’s free to enter and would take the better part of a day to really appreciate everything. I’ve been in Scotland for almost a year now and hadn’t been inside until a few days ago. It’s almost a crime… though my friends tell me quite a few Glasgwegians haven’t been, either.

Almost everything is in the wings of the building. From ancient Egypt to the history of Glasgow to famous works of art by Van Gogh and Salvador Dali, they’ve got it all. I enjoyed their …

Edinburgh was beautiful. If I hadn’t lost my camera’s cable and battery charger, I would have taken pictures. I went with my boyfriend, who doesn’t know a lot of Neil Gaiman’s work. We decided he should come along kind of at the last minute, so he didn’t see the talk. We arrived at the festival barely in time for Neil Gaiman’s presentation. Signing afterward took a long time, then we barely made the train home after eating quickly. This all means I will certainly be going back one of these weekends with the boyfriend to see the sights. I did …