Crappy Valentine's ...

I'm not much of a Valentine's Day fan. My first one of the sort in America didn't convince me of anything else either.

I had two midterms to pass today (as if only one wasn't enough), Computer Architecture and Bioinformatics II. Been studying like crazy, yet without succeeding in preparing myself properly for either exam, splitting my forces between the two of them plus the three page project status report we had to write this weekend for the bioinformatics class.

As my classes are one after the other on Tuesdays, I had both exams in a row with a ten minutes break between them. And both exams were fiendishly hard. Well, the architecture one maybe not that hard, but really long and time consuming. Nevertheless, I managed to finish in time. My strategy this time: do the longest problem first! So, I hope not to have the same disastrous results I got on my midterm last quarter.

The bioinformatics exam was trickier, and I found myself very under prepared. Fact is, I didn't know how to prepare, because I had no idea what we were going to be tested on and how. I think I've come to hate this class, frankly.

As I got out of the second exam, I rushed to study for my operating systems class. Now, figure what, of course I didn't manage to read through all the articles on our reading assignment for today (we had some 60 pages of scientific articles, and that's heavy reading!), and guess what, of course I got called on the most technical question of the paper. And I didn't know the details of the answer ...

Then, as far Lover's Day goes, well, C's been in a bad mood lately, so, there wasn't much love there. First of all, he doesn't like it when I work long hours, or take my readings from school home with me, he prefers it when I stick to a 9-5 schedule (something that's not always possible, I think, in grad school unfortunately). Secondly, I think he's getting quite tired of being a post doc without any significant advancement. He got three papers out in the last year, one of which was in PNAS ("and that counts as two!", Bernhard says ...) , but he hasn't recolted the fruits of it yet, really.

After my long, shitty day at school we finally went to the gym, and C didn't even speak a word through our whole workout. And it's not exactly as I enjoy lifting weights per se ...

Fun day, ha!