Pfhew! So what’s new in my life? I’m currently rushing to get my Master’s project finished on time so I can graduate this semester. I need to start on my project write-up, which should be 20-30 pages so says my advisor. It’s going to suck when my Dragon Age 2 preorder comes in next week and I have to put off playing it, exercising massive discipline, in order to work on all the schoolwork I have. Besides my Master’s, I’ve got my second midterm next week, for models of computation. I just had my compilers midterm today and I thought it went pretty well. It was about as difficult as I was expecting (draw deterministic and nondeterministic finite state machines for a given regex, draw the parse tree for this string using this grammar, how do you know this isn’t an LL(1) grammar, make this grammar ambiguous, draw the states for a bottom-up LR(0) parse of this grammar, fill in the semantic actions for this grammar, etc.), but the problems were much longer than any of us thought. All his “show the First() and Follow() sets for these nonterminals” and “draw the parse tree for this string” problems had lots of nonterminals/terminals such that the parse tree took up an entire page (he gave us like an inch of space, lol) and the sets were a couple of paragraphs. He told us afterward something like “yeah that parse tree was bigger than I anticipated…” because several of us accosted him with “why u no make shorter problems??”. I just managed to get done on time, and I was the first one done. I know a couple folks who said they didn’t finish the entire test; yikes. I think he may have given us extra time, even; I wasn’t watching the clock. I read seven chapters in maybe ten hours over the previous two days to prepare for that test, so I’m glad it’s over. :P Now the process can begin again for my models of computation midterm!

So I’m terribly excited about Dragon Age 2. I’ve got it coming from Amazon and I hope to goodness it gets delivered on its release day, March 8th, because even though I have lots of work to do, I’ll still make time for Dragon Age. I was surprised at the demo because I love playing as a mage in Dragon Age: Origins, but the mage was almost dull in DA2. I think I’ll do my first play-through as a rogue because it just felt really exciting. The disappear-reappear-backstab move was really cool, and the whole experience felt like more than just the light-warrior feel that Origins gave.

Okay, looks like our professor isn’t going to show today; apparently she’s so sick she only emailed a few in the class to let them know she might get a substitute today. I’m going to grab my homework and head home to work on my Master’s, because damn these people are getting loud. :/