End of the Summer

The summer semester is finally over. Teaching two courses over the summer is a lot of work! Especially when one is a new prep. I have about three weeks before the next classes start. I have a few projects in mind....

• Course development! No, I'm not a workaholic. I just don't want to stop.... I have three courses next semester. Two of them are well-prepped, but a course (if you care about it) is like a book or a painting---you never really finish it. If you have a passion for anything creative, you know what I mean.

  One thing I want to work on is my Question Database. That came in really handy this semester; the text book had very little in the way of examples (not the authors' fault--it's still in progress), so the ability to post many examples with solutions really helped the students out.

• I'm thinking about making some more web pages for my course, especially data-structures and programming languages. I was inspired by this Biology text. Tons of extra content on the web... I'd like my courses to have stuff like that. Hm... pod-casts about lambda calculus? Maybe not. But there have been some very interesting posts about Java, the antifunctional programming language, and a related post about fold and map, two higher order functions, and how they are used by Google to get real work done. As a specialist in functional programming languages, I have to say I approve.
• Learning Statistics and the R programming language. This language reminds me of APL. I love collecting data, but don't have much reason to do so, except analyzing exam scores. Next semester I am going to start taking attendance and correlate those with exam grades. It would be nice to have some data about how much attendance affects learning outcomes.
• Rewrite my file cabinet software. I put a number on each file in the cabinet, and put a description in a searchable database. Pretty obvious really, except hardly anyone ever does it. You can find something in the cabinet in about 5 seconds or so if you do it right. Oh, bad things happen if you lose that database though....

  I hosed my computer this summer, and ended up installing xubuntu, the XFCE version. I didn't want to reinstall mod_python, so I'll have to redo the pages in ruby.

• Brew some Mead. August 5 is National Mead Brewing day. I also recently got an All Grain brewing kit, so I'll try that out once the temperatures reach something approaching reasonable. And I have two wine kits I need to get started....
• Weddings! I have five of them to go to in the next two months! I got a good deal on a car rental, though, with I-go cars, a car-sharing network in Chicago. For $60/day, you get a car and 200 miles. This includes gas and insurance! (If you sign up, let them know you heard about it from me, okay? I get a referral credit!)
• I'm starting to do research again, too....

Another busy vacation...