Honored and confused
I was supposed to go on a whale watch this Saturday, but it got cancelled because of the hurricane. And that was gonna be such a good blog entry! :) I might have even posted a picture of a whale! Oh well. I might still be going to Boston for the day, we'll see I guess.
In other news, I was offered membership in Pi Mu Epsilon. PME is a mathematics honor society. I'm above average at math, I guess (it seems sometimes you have to be in order to be a computer science major) but I never thought I was honor society good at math. I think I'm going to do it... I don't have tons of free time this year, but any time that I can devote to it would be good, I think. If nothing else, I could meet some new people, and maybe learn a little more about math :) And one more honor society never looks bad on a resume, either, for what that's worth. PME seems to be pretty active -- contrast that with Golden Key and Sigma Alpha Lambda... two other honor societies I'm "in", but haven't done anything with so far. Active or not, it's an honor to be in an honor society.
As it should be, I guess. :)
I'm liking my artificial intelligence class so far, but at this point we have only really been learning LISP. LISP is a strange language, if you ask me. I'm grasping it fine, but still am not sure if I like it. It's functional, like SML, but not nearly as elegant. It's more elegant than C/C++, but not nearly as powerful (as far as I can tell). It has the potential to be object-oriented, like Java, but feels more like the OO aspects were all tacked on too late in the game -- which, I believe, they were, in fact. Oh well, interesting to learn about and every new language a programmer learns makes them a better programmer, in my opinion. I'm also learning Perl. Which is sort of neat in its own way.
Also, a funny anecdote. I tried e-mailing a virus scanning tool to someone today, who was using Outlook to receive it. Now, Outlook is the *cause* of just about every virus out there, because it chooses to run just about any code that comes through it. But of course, when the virus tool was received, Outlook refused to save it, saying it was "potentially unsafe." Virus scanner = unsafe, Viruses themselves = a-okay. Sometimes I feel using Windows is like Bizarro World in the Superman comics, and this is a fine example of that. Windows is one of the biggest, most bloated operating systems ever, while Notepad is the smallest, most useless text editor I've ever seen. Users get treated like potential criminals every time they try to access "C:\Windows" on their computers, but viruses can delete that whole directory without problem. You have to click "Start" to shutdown. Windows XP ships with a firewall, but disables it by default. I have a headache now... :)
OK, relaxing tonight...
In other news, I was offered membership in Pi Mu Epsilon. PME is a mathematics honor society. I'm above average at math, I guess (it seems sometimes you have to be in order to be a computer science major) but I never thought I was honor society good at math. I think I'm going to do it... I don't have tons of free time this year, but any time that I can devote to it would be good, I think. If nothing else, I could meet some new people, and maybe learn a little more about math :) And one more honor society never looks bad on a resume, either, for what that's worth. PME seems to be pretty active -- contrast that with Golden Key and Sigma Alpha Lambda... two other honor societies I'm "in", but haven't done anything with so far. Active or not, it's an honor to be in an honor society.
As it should be, I guess. :)
I'm liking my artificial intelligence class so far, but at this point we have only really been learning LISP. LISP is a strange language, if you ask me. I'm grasping it fine, but still am not sure if I like it. It's functional, like SML, but not nearly as elegant. It's more elegant than C/C++, but not nearly as powerful (as far as I can tell). It has the potential to be object-oriented, like Java, but feels more like the OO aspects were all tacked on too late in the game -- which, I believe, they were, in fact. Oh well, interesting to learn about and every new language a programmer learns makes them a better programmer, in my opinion. I'm also learning Perl. Which is sort of neat in its own way.
Also, a funny anecdote. I tried e-mailing a virus scanning tool to someone today, who was using Outlook to receive it. Now, Outlook is the *cause* of just about every virus out there, because it chooses to run just about any code that comes through it. But of course, when the virus tool was received, Outlook refused to save it, saying it was "potentially unsafe." Virus scanner = unsafe, Viruses themselves = a-okay. Sometimes I feel using Windows is like Bizarro World in the Superman comics, and this is a fine example of that. Windows is one of the biggest, most bloated operating systems ever, while Notepad is the smallest, most useless text editor I've ever seen. Users get treated like potential criminals every time they try to access "C:\Windows" on their computers, but viruses can delete that whole directory without problem. You have to click "Start" to shutdown. Windows XP ships with a firewall, but disables it by default. I have a headache now... :)
OK, relaxing tonight...
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