With less than two weeks until I depart from Clarkson for winter break, it’s crunch time for my friends and I. Below is a list of the things I need to finish before I can pack my things and head home for some much deserved rest before my co-op:

• Final paper for ANTH330 due Monday
• CS350 final group project & presentation due Thursday
• Two CS456 assignments to polish up and turn in
• Final paper for CS456 due next Friday

After that is all taken care of, I have three finals next week to study for and take.

Peace and chow,

Ranok

After an early morning interview on Tuesday, I accepted an offer to go on a co-op to Assured Information Security! Even though it will be tough to leave my friends (especially the seniors) as I move 2.5 hours away, and disrupt my class schedule (pushing things back a semester), I think the hands-on work experience of applying the things I’ve learned, and learning more will be worth it. I now have the frantic task of trying to find a place to live, and thinking about what I need to take with me over winter break. I will be sure to visit Clarkson pretty regularly over the weekends so I won’t become a distant memory to those at Clarkson.

Peace and Chow,

Ranok

As many of you may or may not know, recently Clarkson’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) implemented a firewall that blocks all incoming traffic to most machines. Being a Linux junkie, I have a number of machines in my dorm that act as servers of many types, from web servers for my projects and web development server, SVN/DARCS repositories for my code, a number of OSP servlets that I’ve been testing and having to connect to distant OSP instanced to test latency. However, OIT seems to want to stop me from being able to experiment and play around with networking and servers. Perhaps there is a psychological flaw for all IT administrators that makes them all be control freaks. I emailed OIT to have my servers removed from the firewall 2 weeks ago, and heard no reply. I re-emailed on Monday, and finally I heard back, that I need to fill out this form (for each machine), and get it signed by a professor before they will unblock me.

I find this absurd, do we now need professor’s permission to use our computers? Is OIT going to implement a list of acceptable websites we can visit? Do we need an academic reason to think certain thoughts? I find this completely off par with Clarkson’s condoning of partying, however, we need a professor’s consent to open a port on our computer to the outside world?

I hope that OIT will rethink their firewall policies, and see how it affects students. Also, when they make network wide changes, they should notify the students, and also update their website which still shows that only a few ports are being filtered.

Peace and no packets,

Ranok

Assuming I’m not going on a co-op next semester, I will be taking the following classes next semester:

• CS 653 - Automated Reasoning
• HIST 350 - History of Nazi Germany
• LW 270 - Law and Society I
• MA 314 - Number Theory and Applications
• MP 551 - Open Source Software
• PY 310 - Human Sexuality
• STAT 383 - Applied Statistics I
• HLTH 108 - Basic EMT

Looks like I have a busy semester ahead of me

Peace and chow,

Ranok

One of the reasons I fell in love with Clarkson when I first came to the Clarkson School was because it offered a challenge that I couldn’t find at my high school. When I came into high school (after skipping 8th grade), it was great, I was surrounded by older classmates and there were 4 years of classes ahead of me that I hadn’t taken. However, even though starting out in the junior and senior classes as a freshman made my first two years a blast, once I reached my junior year, I had exhausted all the challenging classes, and could no longer talk with upperclassmen in a learning role. This is when I began looking for alternatives, and the Clarkson School seemed to be perfect, my first year was fantastic, even though there were some easy classes (CS142 and UNIV190), I knew they’d get more exciting after I finished the pre-reqs.

Last year was probably my best year ever, taking some of my favorite classes to date: automata theory, compilers, and formal methods. They were my favorites because for once in my life, I was in a position where I actually had to work for a good grade, and I was inspired to do so both because the professors were excellent, but also I could see the value in excelling in these classes.

Now fast forward to now, while I’m taking a few interesting classes: CS547, CS456 and CS659, I’m worried that I’ve reached that ceiling and I won’t be able to find a challenging class that inspires me to put in the effort to succeed. I’ve been taking some classes (ANTH330 & COMM310) this semester that remind me of my high school days which I find very worrisome, they require next to no effort to skate by and get an A, yet I am required to go through the formality of taking them.

So, now that everyone is getting sick on my whining, I’m going to list some options to resolve my problem, if people could comment giving their input or feedback, it’d make this decision quite a bit easier.

• Transfer to another school, which should provide more challenging classes and more peers to learn from.
• Stick it out at Clarkson, doing directed studies for the next 2 years or trying to find classes outside the realm of computer science
• Go on co-op to hopefully see how my knowledge is useful in the real world, and interact with some of the brightest minds in the industry

Just for people’s information, I have started working on my masters and should be done with it in May ‘10, which is when I was going to graduate with my B.S. To fufill this goal, I’ve been taking graduate classes along side of my undergraduate requirements. My tentitive thesis topic is: “Quorum Sensing and Cellular Automaton in Game Playing Systems”, which is going to look at game theory from a systems biology/alife standpoint to see if a more biological system can play better than a more algorithmical one.

Peace and chow,

Ranok