About 20 hours ago, I changed from Active Duty Army to Individual Ready Reserve status. I am not on active duty for the first time in six years.

Which made it, upon reflection, pretty funny that I got a call from a former Army supervisor of mine at 06:08 local time this morning about an Army matter. I was awake, but still. :)

It was actually good news, which is rare for a 6am call from a former boss. Anyway, combine the good news, the practically-civilian status with the previous post’s point and you’ll perceive that I’m a pretty powerfully pleased pupil.

Today’s letter is apparently the letter P. Especially after I noticed the trend and whipped out the thesaurus.com.

I got my first Physics exam score back today.

Before I relate the actual raw score, let me say that there are some mitigating factors here. I am taking Physics II with Calculus. I haven’t had any contact with Calculus in two years. I haven’t had a Physics course before. Ever. I started my Physics career with Physics II with Calculus. I nearly dropped the course the first week and went with an easier one. I decided that I could do it and I toughed it out.

So, now that I’ve softened it up a bit, my raw score was 44.

This may seem low. Consider, though, that the class average was 31. And both my score and the class average were out of a possible 44 points.

I shall now launch into smug, arrogant bragging, so you’ll probably want to just move on to XKCD or something.

(more…)

I’ve been without a programming language at home for too long. I have, in the past, used bash scripting, perl, php and (only at work!) VBA. I’m sure that at some point soon I’ll be needing a language again. By the time I really, really need it, it will be too late to quickly pick it up again, so this time I’m going to be ready.

Python, I choose you.

This paragraph originally started with “two reasons for Python,” which became three. Then, as I was about to amend it to four before I’d even typed the first reason, I realized that I was quickly getting into Spanish Inquisition territory. Therefore, amongst the reasons for my choice of Python are such diverse elements as:

• open-source
• extremely portable
• CNN recommends it (not the news network)
• XKCD (of course)
• fun

So, there we go. While I’ve been typing this, Python has been downloading and installing. It’s now downloaded and installed. Off I go.

Oh. One last thing before I go. I hadn’t seen today’s XKCD when I chose today for my programmer’s renaissance, but it just tells me that I’m making the right choice.