Maple.

Thursday in class I was listening to music on my MP3 player through one earphone. The song in particular was Everything's Magic by Angels and Airwaves which has a guitar riff that is split into a delayed balance between the ears; the better sounding bit coming from the left earphone. I started listening to the song while taking notes with the right earbud in when I realized I should change ears before the chorus started. I paused taking notes and switched ears, only to find that I could no longer pay attention well enough to take notes. Somewhat confused, I switched earphones again and was again able to take notes.

Bizarre.

Thursday was also the day my first 'coursework' (read homework) was due in my numerical methods class. Now, here in jolly old england, the computer algebra standard is a canadian product by the name of Maple.

Maple sucks. A lot.

My previous attempts to work with the program resulted in program freezes and a computer crash, a rarity in my macbook's life. Maple also refuses to accept the mac standard of dvorak keyboard layout with qwerty shortcuts, driving me mad on a regular basis. The biggest problem with the software is how it attempts to be intuitive. Well, as intuitive as a program that fails to grasp the concept of implied multiplication... 2(4) gives 2 as a result. Since the number is adjacent to the parenthesis, you CLEARLY weren't intending the program to multiply it, were you? ...of course not, that would be a standard mathematical convention. My mistake. The worst problem I encountered was attempting to convince it to plot 2 series of points on the same graph. The online help said feeding in multiple inputs separated by commas generates multiple graphs. It's a good joke. Feeding in my two strings of points, rather than plotting the points in the strings given, Maple decided that I really wanted the first element in the first string to be connected to the first element in the second string. What I gave it be dammed, and off it went. Extremely frustrated after about an hour figuring out what it was doing, I generated a 3rd data point for my second string and fed in the data the way it wanted it. The first graph was the first elements in 3 strings, the 2nd graph was the second element in the same 3 strings. Oh silly me, now my data points are out of range. They're not out of range if i graph the lines separately with the same bounds, only if i try to plot them together. I click the error link trying to figure out what the problem is and the MapleSoft website greets me with "There is no help available for your error." immediately followed by "was this information helpful?" I may have screamed.,

A long time coming.

I've been meaning to get one of these things rolling since about the time I arrived in jolly old England.

Dealing with 6 math classes after a distracting week in London and a rather nasty cold combined with my natural penchant of procrastination has delayed this until now. BUT NO LONGER.

I'll probably be retro-actively posting things until I feel caught up. Why? Because I feel like it.