Chill, people
Honest to Pete, you’d think a remedial-Java programming assignment was the end of the world, the way some of my classmates treat it.
Do I need to manage my buffer size to avoid the input file overflowing memory, asked somebody. Yeah, like the professor has time to sit there cackling at the carnage while twenty-odd student programs bring the JVM crashing down one after another. Puh-leeze. (And what is a guy who worries about buffer overflows doing in remedial Java, anyway?)
Then later they jawboned her into letting punctuation as well as whitespace be word delimiters. By that time I’d already turned my assignment in. Did I redo it? Did I hell. Sure, I could have. I have better things to do with my time, thanks.
Yesterday’s pop quiz was an exercise in how often we could be tripped up by sneaky little “features” of Java. I got all but one; not too shabby. We discussed Big-O algorithm analysis, which is conceptually rather nifty, but whose details (ugh, sigma notation, shoot me now) lead me to believe that a lot of “rigorous” software analysis boils down to not much more than the traditional Scientific Wild-Ass Guess.
There’s a guy in the class who will not stop staring at me. It’s not that I’m the only one with girl-cooties, either; there’s six other women in the room, not including the professor. Nor is it my stunning animal magnetism. I don’t have any. I’m the oldest and fattest woman in the room, and the homeliest to boot.
He just stares. I don’t get it. Maybe it’s that I don’t keep my mouth shut? Now that I think about it, mine is the only female voice I’ve heard in class (aside, again, from the professor’s). Eh, well, whatever. I just wish he’d cut it out.