Flashes of Panic

Actually, there’s less time than that before the semester starts; our weekly, obligatory colloquia start this Wednesday, and my “first day” will probably be the Friday before Labor Day, for the departmental Grad Assistant Orientation. (This year, I was asked to offer orientation, not be one of the disoriented; I wonder if they missed the memo.)

So here’s what I’m doing to get ready for my job switch:

• Rereading Brooks. I now have two copies of Brooks, since I got a “desk copy” of the nice 20th Anniversary edition. My old copy was a pre-20th-anniversary edition, complete with pencilled notes, which I picked up from a table marked “Free Books” one evening at Westfield State. Somehow I don’t think I’ll be able to get much for it on the used market.

• Playing with Audacity, which we’ll be using as an example in class. Not just as a programming example, though it’s probably that, but an example of a modularized software product—a system, perhaps—as opposed to a single program. It’s also a decent example of an open source project as opposed to commercial development, though the Audacity community probably isn’t as large as, say, the Mozilla community. This is probably for the best. I’m going to have a use case for the software tomorrow; sometime soon I should open up the code and have a look at that, too.

• Thinking about lab scheduling. It’s “traditionally” on Friday mornings at 10:30, I’m told. I’m not sure I’m fond of that idea.

• Thinking about office hours. I didn’t need to do office hours before. I don’t know why I’m thinking about them too much, since many other grad students report that they generally don’t have many visitors during office hours.

• Checking my stock of “TA pens.” I may have mentioned this before: I find red pens unnecessarily garish and perhaps harsh, but it’s necessary to mark papers in something that’s not blue or black. The two remaining (useful) colors are purple and green, so I have a small stock of purple-ink pens. I am still amused by the idea of grading papers in a CS course.

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