Haha.

Anyway, spring semester! I only signed up for 4 classes instead of 7 based on the theory that both my mental health and my performance will improve if I only hate 3/4 classes as opposed to 6/7.

The course I don't hate: Control Systems.

The courses I hate already:

Software Engineering, because this is what I do for a living; furthermore the content of the class is highly centric to corporate-drone software "engineering". The teacher seems to kind of realize this though and at least we're not doing more useless C++ so as time goes on this course is most likely to upgrade to a mere dislike, possibly a like if I get to do Clojure dev instead of straight Java (which I do frequently at work too among other languages).

Probability and Statistics. This is because the professor has taken a Frequentist approach to "probability" for the rest of the course and so she is therefore an enemy to the Bayesians and is therefore Evil. She's gotten to know me from last semester's Calc 3 course though so even if I can't influence her teaching this semester I may yet be victorious to save the generations after me. I hope we do actual calculus, otherwise it will be no different to the AP Statistics course I took in 12th grade and whose material I've since been trying to forget because it's Bad. On the upside, my recent Naive Bayes post and feature-implementation on my blog that I did purely for fun seems to qualify for this class's final project, woo-hoo.

Engineering Economics. Currently we're doing 6th and 7th grade level stuff. "Make sure you can tell the difference between a table and a chart!" "If you want to maximize profit, you want to maximize "benefits" - "costs" such that it's at least >= 0." "Set these two things equal to each other and solve for the common variable X!" I'm told we'll eventually get to 11th grade calculus! For the purpose of calculating a maximum/minimum point on a graph. (Take a single-variable non-partial derivative two times.) Don't get me wrong Economics itself is an interesting subject. Engineering Economics, however... I'll be surprised if I gain anything from the class; I had to buy the 11th edition of the book for $80 because the 10th edition has slightly different homework problems and the 9th edition that's available online has slightly different homework problems and examples. (e.g. in the 9th edition one problem assumes gas is $1/gallon. In the 11th edition the same example is the same except they assume gas is $3/gallon.) The teacher seems to think "we don't have time for spreadsheets"; well shit, this just makes it that much more useless doesn't it because what sane accountant who actually needs to know this stuff doesn't use spreadsheets to both maintain the data and ease calculations (indeed having instant calculation available on changes to the data) for all sorts of things (even letting us avoid those so-difficult 10th grade topics like function derivatives!), as well as to generate good-enough graphs to reason analytically about? Yeah, no one uses Excel, it's too time-consuming to learn it and I guess we'll never use it or similar software in the future huh? (Well, I won't, because (don't tell anyone) I'm working on software that exceeds Excel's benefits while letting people keep their data and other stuff in the spreadsheet if they want anyway to just give it back to our software later, perhaps with modifications.)

One nice thing about being in the burnout-recovery stage (which can last a year or two) is that I'm a lot more bitter, seething, and snappy and my horribly low tolerance for BS before has only dropped further. Hopefully I can use my increased agitation as some weird form of an advantage. The Lisp Character, that is, the Bipolar Lisp Programmer (not in the sense of medical bipolar disorder though there are similarities..), seems to fit me somewhat accurately. [link]

By the way, still looking for a Clojure developer. I forgot what the idea was for but if two of us know Clojure well-enough the idea doesn't matter! Bwahaha.