I am ralizing the (additional) mistake of mine - starting graduate program in the second quarter. I had to take courses out of sequence, and invariably the second or third part of a two- or three-part course!
It is also a mistake to sign up for an senior undergraduate course. I signed up for "Theory, Value and Distribution", essentially an advanced Micro-Economics course. There are nearly 50 students in the class, two of us being graduate students. The other person is Mike Couture, a "straight-A" local (all American) student. Both of us ended with a "C" in the course!
Travel forecasting was all FORTRAN programming for the newly developed "Behavioral Choice Model" from MIT professors.
I thought I knew FORTRAN II. I had gone through the 6 page handout given to me by my cousin-brother-in-law, Shri. Rajagopalan. He got it as part of a short course at Burmah Shell. I read through the handout on my trip to A.C. Tech on bus route 5-B in Chennai, and started using it to develop one-page or 2-page FORTRAN codes. My friend and Guindy classmate Dr. Arockiasamy helped me debug errors. I punched the code using one of the two card-punchers newly acquired at A. C. Tech.
But on coming here, I find card punchers and remote terminals are strewn all over the place!
I punch my code and give my card deck to the operator. I get a printout later in the day or next morning, invariable with a bunch of errors. The errors are given in cryptic codes and I need the operator to interpret them for me. I fix them and resubmit. Woops! I get more errors - one of them is I missed the second card which is the password! I know I had the password card!! (The computer eats the password card on each submission, and I need to add it everytime I submit the deck for processing!)
Dat card for the survey data of Dr. Peterson's study is another story! I needed to use a "programmed card" to speed up my data punching.
With four courses and demanding work for the research project (I tell my colleagues that I am paid for doing 20-hours a week of research work EVERY DAY!)
I am getting letters regularly from my wife and my father; but some days, I do not even have the time to sit and read the letters!
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I find all the clocks are ahead by an hour! I comment to my friend Gokman how all the clocks are running fast by one hour. "No! We have switched to daylight saving time" he says.
"What is that?" "We switch the time twice a year. So far we were observing the "standard" time. Now, for about the next six months, we will be observing daylight saving time, which pushes the clocks one hour ahead."
Glad I asked him. I would have missed my class, had I gone with my watch time!
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Mr. Kahn is a nice person. Some nights he cooks for me. He obliges by buying me milk and bananas when he goes for groceries. But, undersatndably as a High School Teacher in downtown Chicago, he comes home stressed out and is irritable.
He tries hiring stay-home help - but the ladies do not seem to last long. I saw two during my stay there.
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The younger son is not well. I ask him if he took any medicine. "We are Christian Scientists. We do not take any!"
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"How is your financial situation?" - Mr. Kahn asks.
"I am doing alright. I am getting my assitantship paid regularly. Only the work is demanding and I am asked to do odd jobs"
Later I learnt he had lost $20 which he thought he left on the table - the reason for his asking me that question!
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2 comments:
The punch card machines bring back memories. In IIT Madras ca 1984 I had just discovered computers and spent almost my entire time submitting card decks. Typical of India, the print on the cards was invisible and I became an expert at looking at the holes and telling what the statement was! Since you could only run the program once a day, people got very good at writing error free programs -- not like today !
Situation in Chicago in 1977 was probably way better than Madras in 1984! There was only one "terminal" on campus then.
Those punch cards and writng FORTRAN code were fascinating. There were days when I would have just come home after the gruelling 30 min travel by bus and walk a mile from the bus terminus. Within half of an hour went back all the way to AC Tech to resubmit a program because some idea struck me on my way home!
At NU we already had WatFor and Miinesota Fortran with very good error diagnostics to help fix the errors. We still had to wait a few hours to get the results of our submission.
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