return void;

So my Christmas vacation has been a hit or miss. I have spent the entire time on pins and needles because I am (still) technically on call. That means, even though the company is shut down for the holidays, I may have to go in to work. I am working on a project that is delivering and they refuse to slip the delivery, so I have to go in a fight any fires that come up during the holidays. It could be worse though; I could be one of the people who is working every day but Christmas and New Years.

The thing that’s frustrating for me is I was desperately needing a solid vacation. I get 160 hours of paid-time-off a year and I only used about 16 of them for pleasure. The rest of the time was spent studying for school. Graduate school has basically become a second job since it is so demanding of my time. I had over 60 hours of time off in November before I used about 50 of them to study for my Machine Learning class.

I did end up with some decent swag for Christmas though. Here’s a brief list of things I was gifted:

• Garmin Forerunner 205
• The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass
• Contra 4
• DS Charger Grip
• Misc. DS accessories, including a bendable stylus
• Marathon by Jeff Galloway
• Galloway’s 5K/10K Running by Jeff Galloway
• Nine Inch Nails – Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D
• Nine Inch Nails – Year Zero (returned, will by the Still CD)
• Nike sweat wicking layer shirt
• $100 Visa Gift card (will get a new harddrive)
• $40 CircuitCity gift card
• Hockey wall calendar

All in all, it was a pretty sweet Christmas. I can’t complain about any of the gifts really. I’ve been working on getting this Garmin working with my Linux box and all is going well so far. I’ll make a separate dedicated post about it later because it seems the internet is devoid about information on how to do this.

So activity lately has tapered off. I spent about 70 hours of my PTO (paid time off) at work on campus studying for exams. The class I just finished was Machine Learning by Dr. Vincent Ng. We had a second midterm, the final, and the qualification exam all a week apart in the last 3 weeks.

So I did alright on the midterm and the final. Unfortunately, I didn’t do as well as I think I could have though. There were several questions that were easy and I either made a simple mistake or misunderstood what was being asked. In the end I finished right in the middle of the class, giving me a B. I think I could have had an A if I had performed slightly better on the final though. The class was difficult to say the least. I spent an average of 10 or so hours a week for this single class. We had biweekly homework assignments, all of which had a programming segment (usually entailed implementing the covered algorithms). The professor I took the course with was not

Because I ended up in the middle, most of the people that beat me were the PhD students. Those same students were more likely to be signed up for the qualification exam. After studying for 3 days, I spoke with the professor and he told me I was ranked near the bottom compared with the other students, which meant I was more likely to get a FAIL on the qualifier.

That’s the other thing; in between the second midterm and the final exam, the department head sent out an email informing everyone that they were officially changing the QE policy. Now, a student only needs 3 PASS grades on the QE instead of 5 and the student may take any exam from any track/focus. Before, I had to take all 5 from the Intelligent Systems track. Also, the tests changed to a PASS/FAIL grading scheme, which meant my two previous MARGINALs were wiped from my record, as if I had never taken them.

After speaking with my professor, I decided that taking the second most difficult exam offered by the Computer Science department was not the best strategy. If I failed it, then I would have 1 more shot to get a pass and I couldn’t switch to a different exam. I really would rather take an exam that is somewhat easier. I’m not a fan of the whole end-of-course exam policy to determine who can do research anyways, so it’s really best to just go with the strategy that will most likely result in an overall PASS.

Christmas vacation is coming up, but I am on call for work so I’ll likely have to work several of those days. I will however spend some time trying to update my blog. The author of the NextGen gallery will be releasing a new version with EXIF/IPTC support with automatic tagging, which I will definately install immediately. I also need to update WordPress and switch to the new tag-based system. I’ll post my year-end goals later this weekend.