Having spent most of my life with only four TV channels (the Government eventually decided we had been good enough to give us another one a few years back. We mostly wish they hadn't bothered), having 50 all of a sudden comes as a bit of a shock. It also seems that the proability of you finding one channel with something you want to watch rapidly approaches zero, whilst the probability of missing something interesting due to the incessant advert breaks is very close to 1. I'm still laughing at Fox News, by the way...
A problem which has become apparent since my parents left is how am I going to feed myself, without not dying of nutritional deficiency before Christmas? After looking intently into a McDonald's meal today, and not particularly enjoying it that much (no, I haven't read Fast Food Nation. Ignorance allows me to continue to eat there), I have come to the decision that my time in America will not be spent by visiting the fast-food restaurants that you can find all over the world. Tomorrow, I find something local. And I will find a bus that goes past a supermarket before the end of next week.
Incidentally, does anybody else have a packet of patroitic
M&Ms that seem to be lacking in blue? Red and white are adequately represented, but the shortage of blue worries me. Is this so each pack can be used to build a flag? I don't know what's worse, that I thought of the idea, or that I'm considering trying it out...
First day of lectures today. Oh boy. I may have forgotten just about everything I was taught during my undergraduate course. We had to fill out a pre-test for the Graphics course, and it went badly. I managed to get the cube roots of 1 completely wrong (1, -1 and i indeed. So dumb), stumbled my way through a couple of questions, and answered 'I used to know this' on everything else. Not a good start. With my confidence shaken, I head towards the Compilers course. If you don't know anything about Computer Science, then take it from me - Compilers are hard. One of the hardest and most complicated class of computer problems in existence. Not good if you're already feeling vulnerable. No pre-test, just a Java program to finish by Thursday. And I don't understand what it's asking me to do at all, but it's so basic that I dare not ask anybody about it. I've sectioned off tomorrow afternoon/evening/night/Thursday morning to try and get my head around it. On the bright side, there's no exam for that class. That's because we have to turn in a working compiler at the end of the semester. ha ha ha ha ha. ha.
The TA meeting was fairly informative, although it strikes me as weird that a lot of lectures have a laptop ban in place, despite the fact that every freshman has to buy a laptop. The perils of wireless connections, I suppose.
I've been here a week now. The biggest surprise so far (and this may come as a shock to many people who know me) is just how English I feel. I keep on thinking that I should break out the tweed jacket and head off to the library. The Hugh Grant stutter is in full effect, and I have to change my clothes half-way through the day, as they're soaked through with sweat. The culture is different in so many subtle ways. A asked me where I was from this morning, and after I told her, she said That's cool. I was in Madrid during the summer
. My first reaction was to look rather puzzled. It's nice that she went there, but what does it have to do with me? The distance between London and Madrid is 783 miles. To me, that's quite far, further separated by the different languages in France and Spain (travelling in a straight line). In America, that's less than the distance from Washington to Miami (924 miles) . Yet I view Spain as a far-off foreign country, when all the time it was on my doorstop. So, a thank-you to the in the lift for the world-change.
Right, I think that's plenty for today. I will try and get the blog back on a daily schedule again, depending on how nasty/hideous/life-threatening the courses become as the semester rolls on. I've got my Sleater-Kinney ticket all booked, so I'll let you know all about that in October (I haven't got hold of the new album yet, as I've ordered it through KillRockStars, and it hasn't arrived). Presuming I find a way of getting back without walking...