Spring Break and Crossword Fill

 Yeah... I haven't posted at all over Spring Break. Why? Well, I just didn't feel like it. But now that it's Monday and we're back to the grind, here I am. I'm going to try to post more on a regular schedule now.

So... as for Spring Break, I was actually quite a bit more productive than I had originally expected. Despite asking YiChen for some of the 6.006 labs, I did not think that I would get started on any of them. And guess what? I was right. I didn't. But I did do some other things to occupy my time. I essentially caught up on the 6.009 labs (though Lab 6 looks like the saddest lab yet to come). I've also gotten started on another crossword, though it's quite a rough one this time, with the bigger lack of three-letter words. I'll share the empty grid here, as well as a picture of a tree so that it can be my thumbnail:

As for how much I enjoyed my Spring Break... well, I think you all know the answer to that. I'm definitely happier to be back. Though now that I've been through 6.009 and 18.03 lectures, I will say that I definitely feel a bit "sloggier" now. I couldn't be bothered taking paper out in 6.009 so I simply used my iPad, and taking my binder out in 18.03 was a pain. It's not like the beginning of the semester where I have the rush of new classes. I'm essentially familiar with the classes I already have, so I feel less the will to take notes. And this is dangerous, since classes tend to get harder as the semester progresses... which is why I did eventually force myself to take notes for both of the classes above.

Now, sitting in 6.0002, I've lost the will to take notes for this particular class. I'm still half-paying attention to the class because there's stuff in this class that I don't already know (Dijkstra's Algorithm, for example). The stuff I've seen thus far with the knapsack problem is ultra-intuitive, considering I've already done Greedy-Based algorithms when I did searching algorithms the first time. But I don't know the point where I might get lost if I don't actually pay attention, and how embarrasing would that be to not get an A in this class?

Even now that I'm typing this up later at 11:23 PM, I find it hard to get back into the groove of things of getting Psets done. I got used to having all week just to do two measley labs, and suddenly don't feel like starting my Linguistics paper anytime soon.

As such, I think there is still value to this class even if there wasn't for 6.0001, so I'm going to at least attend the lectures even if I don't take notes in any of them.

As for the crossword... god damn... filling the grid with useable material is such a nightmare of a task. I never really realized how important it was that not much stuff ended in the letter "i" until I started crossword construction. In the past, I would try to justify stuff like "nehi" (apparently a famous soda?) and "cie" (Co. in French?) by saying that they've been used recently-ish in an NYTimes crossword. Now, "nehi" just feels so... effingly... bad..........

I'm probably just ultra picky about all of this because my "Dash of Salt" got rejected (though I have a feeling it was the cluing for the themed clues that fizzled instead of the stuff like "efe" or "erne"). But a themeless is ultra-hard to get through, so I'm doing whatever I can to make sure it has the highest chance of actually getting through.

That will be enough rambling for this one. I meant to post this pretty quickly, but it eventually just got longer.