Copy/Pasta

Dear Aunt Elaine

Actually, sharing meals was mostly Clinton's idea. I'm still getting settled in to living here, so this week I'm trying harder to cook regular meals. Once that happens I'll worry seriously about meal costs, but yes the plan was to allocate dues based on the cost of each meal (based off the Man/Meal tally sheet from the Impoverished Student's Handbook).

As for school, it's going well, I just need to get caught up on homework (or at least not fall so far behind that I'm missing due dates). I'm taking Japanese 101, which is exciting because I was unsatisfied with my Japanese class in high school (excellent teacher but it was getting phased out so I got passed on to the second year without really being competent). I'm also taking Calc II, which will be interesting because Calc I was mostly review for me, so this year I'll be learning more advanced integration techniques. Linear algebra is really easy so far, but it's a bit weird. I can't really predict where it's going, so I don't know how it's going to get more complex from here, but we'll see. Chem I've got my reservations about. Chem is generally confusing at best, but according to Cole (a friend of mine from AHS) we got a remarkably good chem education, so again I'll wait and see. I'm also taking a CAD class (required for an ME degree) and learning to use Solidworks. I learned to use Autodesk Inventor through Skunkworks, and already I much prefer Inventor over Solidworks. Mostly I just prefer the layout, it's much more intuitive. Solidworks tries to do too much for the user without giving them the option to do it themselves, and relies too much on adaptive windows and toolbars (ie. toolbars that change based on what's selected or what you are doing), while Inventor doesn't change it's toolbars much, and doesn't seem to worry so much about organization. According to Clinton, Inventor uses better physics engines when it's making analyses, but honestly I never learned how to use those tools.

As far as coming home, I'm thinking about trying to get home this next weekend. There's some things I'd like to get from there (like a proper soup-pot), but I suspect that I'll opt not too. Sometime soon I'll have to track down the dates of all the school breaks, but navigating the school website is a pain unique to recruitment and bureaucracy.

- Jay

P.S. You're officially getting more info about school from me than Mum does, so I'm going to copy/paste some of this to the blog she has me writing for that purpose. Hope that's not a problem.