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Overwhelmed Yet?

The weeks are flying by, blurring together. Work is steadily piling on. I’ve worked a lot on one project the past few days, but I have many more waiting to be truly started.

A list of all my projects:

  • An Instant Messenger program (as a group), for which I am mostly designing and implementing the interface (this one lasts all year, the others are done by December)
  • An email notification system (as a group), which is mostly to practice the process of planning projects and writing reports rather than learning to code
  • A program that takes a mailing list, reads through it, and tells you of any possible duplicates
  • A web-based calendar like Google Calendar (as a group), but we’re all focusing on the interface design because it’s for my human-computer interaction class
  • A program that takes a long list of words and creates “word ladders” from them (i.e., given “flour” and “bread”, it comes up with “flour → floor → flood → blood → brood → broad → bread”)
  • Extending a compiler (which I don’t know much about yet)
  • One more that I will get tomorrow in class, and I know nothing about.
The mailing list program is the one I spent all weekend on. I was really stuck for a long time, and today I finally went to see my professor about helping me. He pointed out the problem to me in the half hour I was in his office, then I spent twenty minutes coding, and it was fixed. Sometimes it really isn’t worth trying to learn things without help. Or overestimating your abilities.

There’s a bit more I could do for that program tonight, but I’m stuck again, and this part isn’t a big portion of my grade. So I decided to leave it for tomorrow’s lab, where I can get help from the teacher again or a TA. Instead I hope to go out to the student union with some flatmates to get a break from nonstop lectures-labs-study-sleep.

Oh, and this weekend: more shopping downtown, and then Halloween. Which will be epic.

Photo: A group of street performers just after playing something on a busy street in the city centre. Note: it is a typical occurrence to see groups like this on a downtown street. I love it.