The last few weeks have had ups and downs, like any.

Life here is going really well. 

Evan is working hard learning Chinese.  He taught me:
"ni sher wo tai-tai" - "you are my wife"
"ni hao ma" - "how are you"
"wei jing" - "MSG (best flavoring)"
"bei jing" - "northern capital"

Summer has long, sun-filled mornings and evenings.  I'm enjoying the extra free time.  Since Evan has been busy with class, I've been filling it up with climbing, cooking experiments, and trying to catch up in school.

The cooking experiments have been very fun, though results have been hit and miss.  I learned that some foods bake poorly in tin foil (bell peppers) and some cook well in tin foil (apples).  (I guessed wrong in both instances, but now I know how to do it next time).

Next semester I take Numerical Computation.  The syllabus states that the course covers floating point representation, error propagation, non-linear equations of one variable, systems of linear equations, interpolation and approximation, differentiation, and integration.  In other words, exactly what undergrad Num Comp covered!  It lists the undergrad class as a prereq though, so I'm guessing it goes into more depth.  Otherwise, this may be a very easy semester (famous last words).  Either way, I'm happy.

Spring Semester I'm thinking of taking the Advanced Machine Learning course, which would be extremely useful and fun, but hard (since I have not yet taken Basic Machine Learning).  Looks like the professor still has his website online from the basic class, fortunately.  I started going through the homework, in hopes that I can catch up before the Spring.  It is really fun stuff!  Homework #1 was about using a Naive Bayes classifier and K-nearest neighbor classifier to try to determine how likely someone was to survive the sinking of Titanic, based on their age, gender, and social class.