---
So, I've been poring over my college textbooks for the last few days. The Networking book is a great read, if way dense--I'll definitely be keeping it for reference. Same goes for my other two books, a "liberal arts" math book (more on this later) with all kinds of practical stuff in it, and what amounts to a book on the art of proper debate, also a nice reference piece.
I was a total geek last night. Got everything lined up on the kitchen table, sharpened a whole bunch of pencils, tested out the calculator, all that jazz. Schedule's on top of the pile, the next day's books already in the backpack.
Now, my class (the only one I have today) starts at 11AM. Me, being a good student, I leave home at 10:30, and since it takes me about twenty minutes to get to the campus, that's ten minutes to park and walk in.
I should have known better, really. My tour of the campus two weeks ago showed me that there's lots of parking spread across the place, but at the time, I figured it was for football/baseball games. The multiple roundabouts instead of 4-way stops should have clued me in to the large amount of traffic the campus is built to handle. THe newspaper article I read Saturday about how enrollment was up should have sent up a warning flag.
*whoosh* Right over my head.
I get to the campus, and am not really surprised to see that the front lot is filled up. What does surprise me is that there's campus security out directing traffic. Huh, maybe college students just suck at driving.
Well, not only are the front lots full, but when I take the security man's advice and move around to the back... those lots are full, too. We're talking, oh, 1500 spaces, all full. Yowza. The guy at the back lots suggests I use the overflow parking areas. I take his advice and his directions.
Problem is, he's given me bad directions. Doh. Knew I shoulda brought the map today. I end up off-campus, make a U-turn (legal in Minnesota), get back on campus, and go back to the one overflow lot I know exists. Park, get my stuff, lock the car.
By this time, it's about a quarter after eleven. Crap, late to class on my first day. It takes me fifteen minutes to walk to the class--it's easily three-quarters of a mile from the overflow lot to the building. Thank goodness the classroom is near the front.
I slip into the classroom. "Why are you late?" "Everything was full, ma'am." This happy answer results in a sharp comment about getting here early.
I bite back an urge to tell her to go look at the lots for herself, not to mention that 'early' makes no difference when the place is being stampeded by a herd of four-wheeled wildebeest, find a seat, and get out my materials.
Now, you may recall I mentioned that this math book is a "liberal arts" math book. What this means is that it's not a book that goes into too much depth on any one topic, but has a wide array of information. A little geometry, some statistics, loan and interest calculations... y'know, stuff Everyman can use. That's what the introduction says, anyway. The first chapter, however, is counting systems. Whole numbers, base-10, how base-X systems work, that kind of thing. It even had a nice little section on the Babylonians (smart bunch of people, btw) and their base-60 system. What I didn't expect to find was information (and a set of problems to solve) on the Incan, Mayan, Phoenecian, and other oddball number systems. This is complete with said problems written in those languages, to boot.
I was, as you might expect, a little fearful of the first day of class. Luckily for me, she skipped right over all that and landed us into Euclidian and non-Euclidian geometry. OK, fine. THen it gets wierd; she passes playing cards and then has us split into groups based on the value of the card. This wouldn't be so bad save for that we didn't really get a chance to choose locations. So I'm in the back row. This worried me a bit until I learned that this woman can actually project her voice, and even with my good ear plugged up a bit, I could hear her. Yay.
Now she's having us work in these groups of four, first problem being a spatial visualization exercise. Take a cube and randomly unfold its sides so that each face is attached by one of its sides to one or more faces, then laid out flat. Example: your standard unfold for a cube ends up looking like a (Christian) cross. These weren't standard, though. Also, the goal is to write the word 'MATH', one letter to a face, so that when the cube is folded back up, two faces will be blank and four will have those letters, in a readable order.
Mind you, all of this is a diagram on a flat sheet of paper. Had I known this was going to be today's exercise, I would have brought scissors. As a side note, I became an instant hero at this point in class--most people brought pens. I had half a box of ready-sharpened pencils I was only too happy to lend out.
Back to our cubes. Thankfully, I've always been good at this type of thing. One of the girls (Sarah, as I recall) in our group (Julio, Jennifer, Sarah, and myself) also has a good head for this--she might have a career in the Air Force if she ever decides to fly planes for a living. Both of us are laying out solutions lickety-split, which gets the paper filled in, but doesn't help our other two members. Sarah's not having any luck explaining the mental process, so I give it a whirl. After a little Ender-style humour ("The enemy's gate is down!".... which nobody got, sad to say), I show the other two how to pick a nice central face, designate that the 'top' of the cube, then mentally 'lift' the whole diagram off the paper and start folding sides down and around. With a few hand gestures for illustration, our group is up to speed, and we decide that not only will we solve the problem, we'll solve it creatively by putting the letters as far apart on the diagrams as possible. Hey, presto, we're done in a flash after that. Luckily, the teacher didn't require that the letters have the proper orientation to be read, only that they're in the right spots and in the right order.
We also got an extra credit problem, a fiendish 'Pentomino' style puzzle, except with triangles, restrictions on piece placement, size, and number of faces, and requirements for number of rows of triangles encompassed. Nasty. Not due for a couple of weeks, but I think I can knock it out tonight after dinner. Same goes for the reading material.
Class is done, now for a nice 3/4-mile walk back to the car. Thinking ahead this time, I scout out the parking lots available for tomorrow's class.
I found a nice back-lot that's easy to get to for this one. And I'm going to leave the house 45 minutes before class-time, just to be safe.Tomorrow will be fun--it's Networking, so we'll probably end up covering the OSI model for starters.
