"I don't think it's happening..." from "Twenty-one" by the Cranberries

Huh? Study? What's that? I admit I don't have the best of study habits, because I usually find that I don't need to study, or if I do, I don't know how or what. But I needed a heading for this page, and Study seemed like a good one. I don't even have a reason to study now, since I've finished my B.Sc in mathematics at Massey University.

I'm really glad I've finished, because once I'd finished all of the mathematics papers on offer, I had to do computer science and statistics. In the computer science papers we were taught C, which I'd already taught myself the year before, and in the statistics paper we were very slowly learning statistics, which I have been avoiding since sixth form. Since all first-year papers are taught ridiculously slowly and the students are treated like total idiots, and I already knew everything we were taught in first-year computer science, It felt like I was slowly going insane - but I seem to have survived, thanks to acronymising and games on my Newton MessagePad keeping me entertained during lectures. As this page said during those last semesters: Most days I do not learn anything at university, and it seems like a total waste of time going... but I have to go so that I know where the other students are up to, since we get penalised for using anything we're not meant to know yet in programming fundamentals. I suppose I should have got all these boring first-year papers out of the way in my first year, but that probably would have put me off university altogether. I've created so many acronyms about slow teaching during those lectures, I've made a subcategory for them.

I enjoyed geometry though - I've even made some frieze-making software using what I've learnt. The only problem is, on the contact course we had on Massey's Palmerston North campus I discovered that down there they have dozens of PowerMac G3s and G4s, whereas up here at Albany we have mere 75MHz 601 PowerMacs - and it costs less to study down there. What's the point of a nice modern-looking campus if their desktop computers are slower than some obsolete handhelds? The Newton 2100 has a 166MHz RISC processor so I guess it's at least twice as fast. Anyway, enough about that.

In 2001 I did my last five papers in one semester - three of the second-year computer science papers (because they fit well into my timetable) one third-year computer science paper on A.I, which was actually really cool, and another extramural maths paper.

I like languages and I would have liked to take up Japanese again at university but I ran out of electives, I used them up on linguistics and human development. I am, however, working on some software which helps people to learn Japanese... I believe it does some things that no other shareware (or even purchaseware) program does. It is currently being beta tested by some friends of mine, although I really need to get a class to test it. If you happen to know of a Japanese class (high school would be best) which has access to Macintoshes and would like to use my software for a while, let me know.