Early and Late… what a first day

I’ll spare you the vivid details. Yesterday I knew with a good bit of certainty that today I had classes at 10:00am and 1:00pm. Despite that, I still attempted to attend class at 9:00am and 2:00pm. This was a mistake, as you might imagine, because my classes did not meet at those times. I was shocked, upon my arrival at room 240 at around 9:00am, that there was nobody waiting for class to start. It just didn’t register. I was sitting in the [Circle K] office at ten after 1:00 with Rachel and JG when I checked to see what room my 2:00pm class was in. I was alerted by the TideGuide server that I did not have a 2:00 class. I walked in 15 minutes late. I’m sure something will go right today… hopefully I won’t be late for it when it does.

Two classes today, Stats (GES 255) and Computer Security (CS 491). I’ve had the stats prof before, he includes an absurd little statement on his syllabus that reads: “Copyright 2004 Matthew E. Elam as to this syllabus and all lectures. Students are prohibited from selling (or being paid for taking) notes during this course to or by any person or commercial firm without the express written permission of the professor teaching this course.” Now, I’m not a lawyer yet… but I can’t imagine this being even a bit legitimate, as the University (which I would assume owns the copyright over all work done on the University pay clock) doesn’t care what we do with our notes. I’d love to take notes and sell them and then just let him know with a little note ending in “Yeah… I sold ‘em… whatcha gonna do?” While he explained how to use the internet (are you kidding?) I wrote three-quarters of a page detailing the variety of ways that this was completely illegitimate.

The success story of the day was CompSec. This is going to be SUCH an interesting class. The professor seems cool, and we’re going to cover a plethora of ultra-nerdy topics like ciphers, hash/one-way functions, DES, Public Key Cryptography, and a host of applications of these topics. Unfortunately, it seems that we won’t get much into network intrusion detection, but that’s ok. You all can just count on reading a bunch of really nerdy things until about Mid May. Not that you haven’t already become accustomed to it.

Today for homework we talked about graphical passwords. Our homework assignment was to consider a graphical password system using a scatter-gram with 1000 objects, 10 of which successfully met the secret criteria, and a 5 screen authentication. He wanted us to discuss the pros and cons… that might not have meant anything to you, but I’ll tell you this… this is the first time (that I can remember) that I actually think a piece of homework is interesting, challenging, and worth doing. Could be a good semester in this class. I also expressed some interest in undergraduate research in security, so we’ll see how that goes.

I’m hungry… but it seems like I’m late for lunch or early for dinner. Story of my day.