Good to be back

Moving back in

The campus police noticed my sleeping presence on Sunday night, so now I'm back to sleeping with Walmart. It's not a bad stay. I feel safe and comfortable next to a 24hr outhouse, with parking lot companions, under a protective spotlight. Plus, I've got a video gaming library down the street.

'Hacking' (not hacking at all)

The Jargon File contains a bunch of definitions of the term ‘hacker’, most having to do with technical adeptness and a delight in solving problems and overcoming limits. 
 - What is a Hacker? Eric Steven Raymond

The library has four gaming PCs in a separate room. (Teens have their own room with an identical setup, but adults are not allowed to mingle with them.) Each PC has Steam with a few games installed, but I don't own rights those games, so I can't play without extra work. I have permission to install any game I want, but anything installed or downloaded gets deleted from storage when I log out. The hour long overhead to wait, download and install a game each time is insufferable.

Instead, I hook up my laptop to their monitor instead of using their PC. I remove the wired internet from the PC and feed it into my computer. This way I can play my own games and make downloads to my laptop. From a distance, you can't really tell I've made any changes and so far, nobody has objected.

Fast don't lie

The best part is I can get wired high speed internet in the video gaming room. 6mbs fast.

Over WiFi, one 256 mb video download would take 1h 15m !!! I wanted 28 videos from an online course, so WiFi was not a great plan. On wired ethernet connection, same video took six minutes. And that's with ten videos simultaneously downloading!!! In 45 minutes, I had an entire lecture series on my laptop.

What I'm doing in the picture is putting a math textbook inside a comic book, to pretend like I'm using the computer to play a video game instead of studying, a la Martin Prince 7F03. I finished watching the Quantum Physics I video lecture series from MIT OpenCourseware last week. So I had to download my next class. 

Naw, I lied... I was playing, but I did need the gaming room. It was the only place to sneak a high speed connection to access videos for studying! It's an upside down world that I would have to open a video game to hide my studying!

Course Evaluations

How was the Quantum Physics course I watched? The professor loves to say 'in particular' and 'particularly'. He does seem very knowledgeable. Perhaps his strongest suit is encouraging student participation. What impressed me most from the videos were the student questions, because they showed an understanding of the lecture and probed points I would've never thought of. But the answers themselves didn't really give me much help.

By the end, I stopped understanding what he was talking about, and just waited out the videos until he stopped talking. The later lectures were laden with calculations and when it came to explain why things were done, his qualitative justifications didn't help me see what was going on. I listen for any Big Ideas to turn up, but wasn't much going on by the end for me. For what it's worth, I did sit in front of each video.

Class Registration

What course did I pick next? Well, I feel obliged to watch the Quantum Physics II that follows, so that's my next task. It's taught by a professor who guest lectured several times for Quantum I, and his style is eye-bleeding blackboard calculations in a voice that is hard on the ears. I do like that he teaches from a more mathematical approach, but I also find his explanations lack clarifying justification. I might just let him drone on in my ear like I did the end of Quantum I and not get much out of it, just for the sake of seeing which topics are covered.

I also found a Crystallography course with an agreeable and entertaining professor. One of his course texts is a book that he describes as having all the steps proved and worked out for you, with no statements like 'it can be shown' or 'we leave as an exercise to the reader'. But the subject itself is less important to me than learning Quantum, so I relegate its priority. I intend to listen to his lectures as an exemplar of good sense, right attitude, and proper way of doing things... a respite from the cacophony and confusion of Quantum II.