I switched into Honors Intermediate Spanish, because my current fanciful schedule falls short of the requirements for the honors college. Unfortunately, I haven't had Spanish class since fall semester of my junior year. Part of my preparation has been to listen to BBC Mundo Podcasts while I'm cruisin' the internet for less academic purposes. The first podcast had me totally lost except to hear the days of the week and "Pakistan" or "Mexico." To save face, I wasn't paying attention. However, today, I spent a short segment focusing on the content and managed a very brief understanding. Unfortunately, I have no idea what the male announcer is saying. The female is much more comprehensible, and I can't identify the change in speech that makes him so muddled, though I suspect it's speed of delivery. In additional preparation, I intend to start rereading Pablo Neruda. The book that I have is "Su Mejor Poesia." It's entirely in Spanish, not an English collection of poems en Espanol. Another thing I could do is to become more familiar with the internet and Word shortcuts to accented letters. That probably won't happen this summer though.

Another of the courses I'll be taking is "Programming in High Level Languages." Prepping for this has been much less comprehensive, and a totally new introduction. When Jeff and I watched "The Last Lecture," Pausch spoke about an educational software developed by Carnegie Melon to teach middle schoolers the most basic structure of object oriented programming. Middle schoolers, legal adults, same level of experience, so I downloaded the program, entitled Alice. I invested a half hour to watch the tutorials, and another 15 to work with the program, but haven't been back. Another well meaning investment that will probably come to naught is the download of a C++ instructional program from Microsoft. The tab is open in my browser, but it'll likely remain there until I close it out.