Big Day Today

First we took Meir to the doctor to get weighed and measured. Since he was sick last week, he lost almost a pound, and then recouped it with the aid of some chocolate cake, so not much of an overall gain. Meanwhile, the scale-table in the doctor's office freaks him out, since you have to lie prone on it and on more than one occasion he was given a shot while on that scale. They really should not combine equipment like that for children, given how it is so easy to make such negative associations. It is a struggle, and a terrible ordeal for everyone, everytime we need to get him weighed or measured.

Then I went to YU. Got myself a leave-of-absence for the current semester. I owe so many papers. Hopefully will get rid of a few of them this summer. Also asked for a transcript to send to Touro for job purposes. Also picked up my Klaf. Hooray!

Back to Queens, worked a bit with a coworker on adding delegates to handle events in C#. Still some problems on that end. Then off to teach the Programming Languages course at Lander College. I covered a bit more concurrency today, and finished concurrency in Ada.

I assigned an interesting problem to implement in Ada: the game of Spit. This involves both competitive and coordination synchronization, as they must lock the stack of cards to which they place a card, and both can see and write to this stack. They also must communicate to determine a winner of the round. And the best part is, Spit is not a turn-based card game, so it is perfect for a concurrency problem.

Next time I think I am going to introduce the programming language Inform. Inform 6 shows how to apply OOP principles to a vert specific domain, that of text adventure games/interactive fiction, and exactly how the language matches the requirements. Further, Inform 7 was recently released for Mac and PC. It compiles to Inform 6, but actually lets you program in English. This was a very dumb idea for COBOL, but it is an absolutely brilliant idea for the domain of interactive fiction.

Finally, I sat down to work on my linguistics final. I finished it, except I did the first problem a bit wrong, and have to redraw the trees and modify my answer somewhat. If I can finish it tomorrow, it will be a week ahead of the deadline, and I will be relieved and happy.

Good night!