3rd day of classes

Well it's been a week-and-a-half since I moved to Halifax. I think I'm going to like it here. It's definitely cooler than Ontario. The university is pretty neat. I still get turned around a bit on campus though. I'll have to come in early some day to figure out the shortest routes between my classes.

Today was the first day of Atmospheric Dynamics. It looks like this will mainly be a fluid dynamics course. We spent most of the class doing a review of vector calculus (div, grad, curl in several different coordinate systems) which is good because I needed that refresher.

I was going to go and buy that $185 book today, but it turns out that the Book Store didn't order enough and now it's out of stock until Sept 28th. Sound like any other university book store you know? Anyhow, the prof lent his book out to a few of us so we could copy the first few chapters. I'll probably try and get it via Chapters or Amazon or something....

It turns out that FORTRAN and Matlab are not installed on most campus computers. I talked with the Computer Help Desk and they say that I can access a FORTRAN compiler on the UNIX machine. That sounds like too much trouble to me. On top of learning FORTRAN, I would have to learn UNIX and VI commands. They said that Matlab is installed on only one lab on campus. I'll have to go check that out and try out a basic program to see how it works. Once I figure out how it does stuff like if, then, else, while, for, etc, I should be ok.

Susan sent me an email from home which means that we must have internet now! Not that it's been too boring with all the unpacking we had to do. There is still lots, but a lot of it is done. The apartment is still a mess though.