Weekly update #10: work, work, work

The current weekly update has been delayed until now because of the excessive work I had during the last week. I think I put in around 80 or so hours last week, and at the current salary I'm paid, if I continue this way, I will be paid around $10 an hour. I can't understand how this happens; I teach only 6 hours a week, and prepare my lessons for them, after I decided that I want better presentations/lessons to use in class. Let's assume that I'm spending 5 hours in excess of each hour I teach, so that's 36 hours a week. The problem is that I still prepare the answers for the homework I give, check the homework, check the exams, and so on. This almost doubles the time I'm spending.
Next week is Thanksgiving, which means we have a long weekend. I guess I'll use that time to rest a little. However, I have so many tasks ahead of me that I don't think I'll get too much rest. We also have plans as we are invited to dinner at someone from D's class and at Kelly's (us! plans! to see other people! confused? so are we!). It's crazy. This 10 weeks quarter term, instead of the 14 weeks semester we had in the Technion, is so condensed. In each class I teach this quarter they have 3 midterms, and 6-7 home assignments and I have to grade them all because I don't have a Teaching Assistant (TA). I've become the corrupt academic type that complains when his research is effected by the lack of TAs and the necessity to lecture in classes. How sad...

Anyway, not much to tell after the views of the snow I posted earlier this week. The weather has improved and became warmer - it's now around zero. I told my dad that yesterday and he laughed and said that I sounded differently than before I had left. There are 22 days left until we fly to Israel, 23 days until we land. I started counting the days now. I don't know if or when we will be able to fly home again after that visit. Firstly, we don't have enough money. Secondly, we don't have time, because spring break is only a week or so. Thirdly, D is supposed to start her internship in the summer, so summer will be busy as well. She has started interviewing for the internship, and as expected, she is doing very well. She is way over the level of the other students looking for internship both in experience and academic background, that the only thing that might prevent her from landing the internship she wants is her being OVER-qualified. She also had an interesting interview with the Forces-of-Darkness from the NW (that's Microsoft, and I'm only joking). The funny thing is that they interviewed her over the phone; if she does well (which she has) and proceed to the next step (no doubt), she will be interviewed there for an entire day. They will probably fly her over for that. Too bad they don't fly the domestic partner :-). I would love to see the Microsoft campus, especially after reading Microserfs a few weeks ago. And Seattle is probably warmer than here at this time of the year.

The maze thing is coming very well. I have improved the communications between the agents to include only necessary communications, which means that the problem now scales to ANY size of the maze and each the only limit is the number of agents in the group. That's vast improvement.
I presented it to another researcher here and he was impressed, I think. He asked me to show this work in a meeting we have next week - so more work. Yay!

Well, see you in three and a half weeks!