The summer after Junior Year Cliff and I looked for an apartment. I don't remember how long it took, maybe a month, to find our new home. A one bedroom apartment with a large living room, maybe 600 square feet, on Dwight Way, about a block east of Shattuck Avenue. There was a garage on the first floor and we had a parking space though neither of us had a car at the time. Laundry room on the first floor, less than a dozen apartments on each of the second and third floors (was there a fourth floor?). We had a patio with a sliding glass door and the bedroom had one window, but other than that there were no windows to the outside.

I took the bedroom and Cliff took the living room. After one semester Cliff had to move out because his father wanted him to live at home so he could study more. I lived there by myself for about 8 months before I got desperate and had Donald move in. Then we lived together for a year when he moved out to live with Eric in a bigger place. But by then I had my job at West Coast so I could afford the rent until I moved out a year or two later.

It was Senior Year and I enrolled in Classics 180 (Ancient Athletics), Computer Science 162 (Operating Systems and System Programming), Computer Science 174 (Combinatronics and Graph Theory) and Computer Science 184 (Computer Graphics). I received my only F in this semester, though in reality I think I did ok overall.

I took Classics 180 because my interest in sports. Not that I play sports, but I like watching organized sports. This class covered Greek and Roman sports, the Olympics, as well as writings and we had a couple of films. Lots of people took this class, at least a couple of hundred in the lecture hall which is surprising for an upper division class.

Not all that interesting a class actually. Rather dry lectures and not much discussion. We had quizzes every few weeks, but it's a sign of my disinterest in this class that I came to a couple of lectures and only realized then that we had a quiz that day. And unlike the sciences, where I can take a test without studying and only relying on what I've learned, I couldn't remember anything unless I studied the night before.

The other big fall I had in this class the midterm test. We watched a movie about ancient Greek sports and then we had to write an essay about the inaccuracies in the movie. I wrote a standard five paragraph essay (intro, three subjects each with three examples, and conclusion). Pretty much half the class did the same thing -- standard essays. Turns out that they were only grading on the number of mistakes we pointed out, and there were dozens.

We could have just written a list of inaccuracies and gotten an A. Instead we tried to write properly and all got F's. And yet we must have missed the intended meaning of the midterm since the other half of the class did normally. The GSIs were sympathetic, but the professor was not. So in the end I ended up with a C+ in the class.

CS 162. Operating systems, scheduling algorithms, IO algorithms, memory allocation and paging and segfaults, libraries and resource allocation. All very interesting, though mostly book work. I don't know if we did any programming in this class. CS 174 was much the same. Lots of book work and reading, no programming. Lots of formulas to calculate permutations and combinations and various graph properties. Also interesting and things that a CS major needs to know. I got an A- in CS 162 and an A in CS 174.

By the process of elimination, that means that I got an F in CS 184, one of the coolest CS classes. In CS 184 we studied different rendering techniques using scan lines and polygons and voxels. Throughout the year we split up into teams of two and coded our own renderers. Graphics rendering and 3d rendering is not that imposing. The principles are easy to grasp and code. Coding it so that it runs fast and efficient, ah that takes cleverness and an intimate knowledge of the hardware you're running on.

Shannon took CS 184 at the same time that I did. This is the only upper division class that I took with any of my friends, maybe the only class period, though with there being 600 people in some lower division classes who knows? He didn't show up much to lecture and I think he dropped the class. Unfortunately I kind of wanted to partner with him, since it's so hard to find a partner, so by the time I realized that he was gone it was very late in the semester. I couldn't keep up with all the work so I gave up and didn't complete the required class project, hence the F.

So not a great Fall Semester of 1992, and it's the last semester I have a transcript for. Contrary to what I've said before, I was actually doing my work this semester. It's next semester when I shirked me responsibilities. One thing I should note. I took my GRE tests sometime this semester, I think. Dad and I drove to San Jose the night before and I studied and the day of the test I saw Dave Sweet (we weren't that close back then) also there, a bit of a coincidence.

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