I had my Master’s defense this morning, and I’m very glad it’s over. It went well, but one of my committee members was seriously making me nervous with all his very specific questions. I suck at theoretical stuff, and he asked questions like “did your tool produce 2ⁿ or n! pages?” and “can you give a proof why this language is not regular?”. The more I gave him “I dunno” answers, the more grim he looked. I was mentally kind of panicking, with thoughts along the lines of “does he hate my project? he must think I’m so dumb”. After they kicked me out in the hall and my advisor called me back in a few minutes later, though, the committee members were all smiles and congratulations. Pfhew. Now I just wait to receive my diploma in the mail this August (unorganized me didn’t submit the paperwork in time to get the degree this month).

As of this coming Monday, I’ll be done with school. My defense is in the morning, and then I’m through. Provided my committee accepts my Master’s project, but my advisor tells me not to worry. It’s crazy, though: eighteen years of school, and I’m finally done. I don’t think it’s really hit me yet. After my last final the other day, I chatted with a classmate on campus about the final, then just went home. I didn’t even realize that I probably won’t be back to that part of campus or that building for a long time, if ever. Lying in bed this morning, I felt incredibly free, because I realized not only do I have the rest of the weekend free from studying, reading textbooks, and doing homework, I have the foreseeable future free of such activities. I no longer have to balance my time between what I want to do and what my class schedule dictates I do. I can come home from work and immediately go to slacking off on the couch, or exercising at the gym, or whatever, because I don’t have homework due the next day that I’ve been putting off. It’s a lovely feeling.

I’m so tickled to have completed an assignment for my Linux kernel class. The specification was as follows:

For my graduate-level programming languages class, I wrote this class that represents a rational number in Smalltalk. I figured I would share my source code with the interwebs for anyone else trying to learn the language. I release the code under the GNU General Public License v3.

This essay was originally written for my graduate-level programming languages class.