My Slacker Image
Last night was the honors banquet for the JMU Computer Science department. I received two awards: the first was a “Distinguished Graduate” award, which I think had something to do with my GPA, and the second was a “Special Award,” which as far as I could tell is bestowed arbitrarily by a secret cabal of professors. There were twelve Special Awards distributed last night, and they were all named for a famous computer scientist. I got Brian Kernighan, which is certainly an honor, but I wish the award had been a collector’s card instead of a plaque, because then I could be like “Hey, I got a Kernighan, I’ll trade you for a Stallman. OK, how about a Ritchie?”
But I digress.
In addition to being named for noted computer scientists, the special awards were presented by various members of faculty. Dr. Bernstein presented mine, and turned the presentation into something of a roast.
“AJ is subtle,” he began (this was later translated by Amanda to “AJ is a wiseass”). “When they write programs, most of my students name their variables something like BernsteinSucks. AJ, instead, created a Caribbean Stud Poker program so that, whenever I played it, I lost.” Big laugh. “Now AJ has a website called Maximum Aardvark, where he writes things like ‘I spent three hours writing this paper and got a B+ on it so I might as well not put any effort into work anymore.’ I knew that when he started writing things like that about me that it was time for me to work a little harder.”
It was an absolute honor to receive such an award from Dr. Bernstein, who of all the professors I’ve had in the past four years is one that I respect the most. His comments, though, were a little ironic coming last night, because I’ve spent the past two days writing 12 pages for the SMAD paper that is due on Wednesday. I’m pleased to announce that it is finally finished, and I’m actually quite proud of how it came out. It needs to be edited, but I will probably link it here when all is said and done.
Now I need to start my research for my other SMAD paper, due in nine days, on Eldred v. Ashcroft, the Sonny Bono CTEA, and the Eldred Act.
April 19, 2004 - 11:11 AM