What a week!  Well, due to missing my first week of classes for that INS interview, I got in this week expecting quite a bit of catch-up.  I certainly had it coming.  I got to my first class to discover an assignment was due from the first 2 chapters and we started lecture on the 3rd.  Any makeup on that would be due in 2 days.  My second class was a complete mystery to me.  I sat through the first lecture feeling like I had missed a month.  Getting the syllabus helped some, but only in that I see how much work I’ll have in there this semester.  My third class was a little chaotic.  From my correspondance with the professor I had expected a little different person for the instructor, but it was obvious that lots of people were skipping class or that this was their first (or maybe even second) lecture like me.  He was trying to help get us all on the same page.  My fourth class was a total suprise.  I got there that night and the first thing the professor does is give us a quiz.  I didn’t have a clue.  He didn’t mention it to me when I talked to him earlier in the day, so I felt it was a little mean, but it could have been worse.  So, now I’m kind of caught up and this’ll be my first real week.  Let’s see how it goes.

Finished my last exam today. The professor shows up a tad late (which is actually early for him), and starts handing out the exams. He said he’s made a long one for us and that it’s better, because it means each question is worth less points. That’s great, if we had time to finish them. So after the hour and fifty minutes it’s obvious only one or two people have left (they probably gave up). He gives us another 40 minutes, so we had two and a half hours. I still didn’t finish, but I’m sure I’d have needed quite a bit more time to solve a few of those problems if I ever would have figured them out. At least it wasn’t quite as difficult as the last exam in there. We’ll see how nice he is in the grading. Here’s to hoping for a huge curve.

Three final exams complete now. The two today were a split. One went well (at least I think it did). The other was a mess. The first half to two-thirds was fine, but the last bit killed me and I eventually ran out of time. I’m not particularly positive about tomorrow’s exam either, but we’ll see how it goes.

I finished my first final exam today. It went well. The practice test that the professor put on her website had several of the questions verbatim on it, which made it a breeze. At least that one will help my average. I can’t seem to get motivated to do any more studying.

As an aside, I really like ffmpeg. It’s an outstanding little utility I’ve been testing out, trying to encode videos for my W800i. It works quite well. I’ve got several videos done with it now and it seems to do absolutely everything I need, except cut out sections of video (which I can do with Virtualdub if need be). Command-line tools are the best.

It’s crunch time, aka finals week. I’ve got 4 exams Tuesday through Thursday. I just can’t remember the order. I’ll print that out off out of Kontact at work tomorrow (later today) and get my study schedule worked out. I honestly don’t think these exams are gonna be helping my averages any, but maybe I’ll be wrong. I’ve got to print out all my notes asap to let me study without having to worry about battery power. It’s gonna be interesting.

Well, it’s December first. We’re a month away from 2006. The countdown until the end of finals is quickly coming to an end. I’ve got 15 days until I’m finished. It’s rather frightening and I feel woefully unprepared for a couple of the exams. Let’s just see if I can get self-motivated enough to do something about it. I need to apply for my diploma too. It seems the biggest downside to direct deposit that the University forced on us is that I almost never go to the Student Union anymore. I don’t have too much time left to get my application in.

In other news, KDE 3.5 is out. Yeah, it was a couple of days ago, but this is my first real thought about it. 3.5 excites me as it’s supposed to add webcam support for MSN in Kopete. That might be just just enough for me to convert my desktops over KUbuntu now. If things stay as slow as they have been around the office I’ll probably do the conversion on that desktop tommorrow. Integrated SuperKaramba will be nice too. I bet this desktop runs it nicely (as long as I can get the dual DVI output to work right).

Done with all three exams now. All I have left to do is finish a quiz and do some exam corrections for Monday and I’m home free! I really need this upcoming break.

Well, my second exam this week is done. I’m not going to say it went well, but I had some level of answer for everything. It was a long exam. I don’t think there was a single person that left early. We’ll see how it turns out. I’m not real confident about the one tommorrow yet either.

Well, one exam is out of the way. I think I did much better than I would have thought before. We’ll see after they come back from grading, but I’m pretty confident I didn’t fail or do too badly. Two more exams left on the roster. These will be tough ones.

You know, considering how long I’ve been at this, I should never have a surprise like I did this morning. I’m sitting there looking at the syllabus for one of my classes and notice that I have an exam in that class this Friday. Here I thought I was going to just have a busy week with homework and two exams. In fact, I really have homework and three exams. I hate weeks like that. To top it off, I just don’t feel the motivation to get off my ass and really study for them. We’ll see how it goes.