New School Year, New Strategies?

I'm back at the MIT and junior year started off with a sizzle today. Having barely survived the past two years, I figured I should revise my various strategies in hopes for a more successful remaining two years. In no particular order:

• Digital handwritten notes: has a more similar tactile feel to writing on paper than typing on a keyboard, yet makes my notes more accessible for studying and saves organizational issues. Combined with taking iPad instead of my laptop wherever I go, this saves a considerable amount of weight.
• Make local git repositories for coding classes: just in case I accidentally my code in between. 
• Run/Jumprope/DDR: sufficiently tires me out so I maintain my (sleep) schedule. Plus aerobic exercises burn way more calories than resistances ones.

Classes have been fine so far; it's only the fourth day, after all! 

6.02 Intro to EECS II: This class is about compression and digital signals, with which I don't have much experience. It should be relatively straightforward since it's an intro class.

6.837 Graphics: This class is about all things computer graphics, from physics engines to modeling to ray tracing! It's also in C++, which is convenient, but could potentially be frustrating. Bummer that Fredo is not teaching it this term.

18.100C Intro to Analysis: This is a Death Class at the Institvte, which should definitely give me a run for my money. I haven't done math in quite some time, so it should be (refreshingly masochistic and) fun.

18.337/6.338 Parallel Scientific Computing: I'm pretty sure this class has already won my heart, if not for the material taught, but for our class [super]computer. We will be using a state of art 8-processor Sandy Bridge-E beast, with 80 cores and 1TiB of RAM! This baby will absolutely crush my SR-2 in (embarrassingly) parallel tasks, but I'm sure will lose miserably in single threaded tasks (that don't demand too much memory, of course). Hah.

21F.107 Chinese I Streamlined: This class is for people who have conversational skills but do not have much reading or writing proficiency. Hopefully all the memorization won't kill me.

Speaking of the SR-2, it is sadly out of commission until about next week because:

• I left the OS X boot flash drive at home (NJ), which is pretty unfortunate. I did put the aml file onto the disk, but that did not work.
• The AMD 6870 that I was using is now sold to a friend. Well that's a non-issue now because my new GPU came in yesterday!!
• Both plastic motherboard standoffs were broken during transport. I purchased some epoxy from Home Depot this past summer, but never got around to re-securing the mounts. I also need to cut the hole in the back for the IO ports, which I may get to this weekend.

Obligatory room pics. 

My desk has turned into a parking lot. Name all the vehicles!

New GPU! It's an Nvidia GTX 460 2Win I bought on eBay. (oops camera rotate fail)

Steve Jobs is finally hung! (hanged?) Also the iMac makes an excellent timepiece.