Spring ’06 classes, Brokeback Mountain, cut throat pool, and Tula’s bidness…

I had my first class of the Spring ’06 semester today, and I’m just torn, torn, torn. Fortunately, I’m not Rip Torn.

Mid-afternoon, I checked to see if there was an online syllabus for my class, and to my delight, found one. To my horror, however, in it I found out that there is some programming involved in this course. I was under the impression that this Human-Computer Interaction course was a non-programming course.

After a few e-mail exchanges with the professor of the class, and my adviser in the Tech Comm program, we all agreed that the course was “worth giving a try,” so I went to the first class today.

I really enjoyed the class, and actually participated, but at the very end someone asked about the programming part of the class.

“The projects are structured such that those of you with weak programming skills can rely on other team members for that. There’s enough to do on these projects that everyone can contribute in some way.”

This brings up so many questions and thoughts in my mind:

• Group projects in grad school are difficult enough without having to rely on someone to do your programming for you.
• Is the professor going to assign teams by skills?
• If not, what if 3 of the 4 people on our team can’t program? Unlikely, I know. But what if?
• How many people are on a team anyway?
• In our e-mail exchange earlier, the professor said, “It’s possible to minimize the amount of programming, depending on what project you do.”
• I told him I can’t do object-oriented programming at all. So unless it’s eliminating the amount of programming, I’m still concerned.
• The programs that we create have to run on both Linux and Windows. I’ve done a minuscule amount of work on a Unix machine. Linux, specifically, I have zero experience with.

I am trying to weigh all the pros and cons about taking this course, but must take action quickly if I’m going to drop it.

I met Robert at the Carolina Theater, where we saw Brokeback Mountain together.

I brought him a , just because.

At some point, I may post all of my thoughts about this movie, but will wait mostly because what I have to say will contain spoilers. At this point, I’ll just say that while I really enjoyed the movie, overall I was disappointed in it.

I found this interesting about the audience: There were way more womyn – some couples and some groups of three or four — in the audience than men. I saw one couple who was (presumably) straight.

I met Joe at Flex for Scareyoke, and there we found Tracey from Charlotte, who I’d met before, and the three of us played “cut throat” pool for almost the entire night. We kept the same “range” of balls to make it easier to drink while playing:

John had     through

Joe had      through

Tracey had through

At the very end of the night, I spent some time with Tula Box, where she not only shared the longest palindrome in history with me, but her latest grocery receipt as well.

Tula’s receipt follows. Just look at how much she saved on that Whole Pork Loin! And overall, she had almost a 50% savings with her .

Note: While Tula herself is a true lady some of the “female items” on this list were actually for her roommate, who is a RG.