Pretty odd, finishing school (at least, formal schooling) but I'm trying not to have the standard crisis about it all and succeeding pretty well - I'm looking forward to starting with IBM, and looking forward to a new place to live.

A New Place. Amy and I have been talking about getting a place together. Dad also suggested that he could spring for downpayment, and we could split a condo. The former's been going through my head for longer, and the latter, well, I don't know if my pay would be enough for mortgage plus expenses. I guess there's also an independence thing there with moving in with Dad, but I feel no particular need to exert my independence, I'm comfortable enough with it, and dad is one of the more sane roommates I could envision. Still, he needs to find a place ASAP, and I'm still meandering on the path to insight, so I think he will find a place of his own, and I will get used to the notion that a 22 yr old shouldn't expect to be able to stomach a $160,000 mortgage plus maintenance fees straight outta senior year.

Last semester is going to do weird things to my brain, hacking wise. Only taking one CS course, and it's really more of an AI course - Natural Language Processing. They're teaching it in perl, which feels strangely right for some reason - and you have to respect a course one of whose textbooks is The Camel. Couple that with the fact that I will be re-acquanting myself with all of Java, in anticipation of IBM work, and you make for an interesting term. Of course, I'm taking other courses too - Intermediate and Advanced Symbolic Logic oughta be fun, Minds and Machines definitely will be, and one cannot go wrong with Philosophy of Science.

I will be TA'ng again. Java, again. What can I say, I like teaching that course. I'm guessing the students will be suitably impressed to hear that Java can get you a good job - seems they come in treating it like a toy language. Show me another toy language with excellent crypto, DB connectivity and multithreading support.

I wonder if other people reading these diaries get irked, and feel that diaries at advogato should really be hacking- related only. I hope not, if so, I apologize, but will probably keep writing here, as the spirit moves me. Maybe as school finishes and work begins, my life will automatically become more hacking-oriented; in the meantime I hear it's good to have a life too. :)