I must say, things are looking up.

I've revamped the syllabi of my CIS 560 (Database System Concepts) and CIS 730 (Artificial Intelligence) courses. A complete overhaul of 730's been overdue for a couple of years now, though I try to turn over my lecture slides about every three years.

I've also come up with a trio of what I think will be both exciting and manageable term projects for students:

• A single-agent player for a computer RPG


• An agent for the Trading Agent Competition Supply Chain Management (TAC-SCM) scenario


• An ontology and simple CLIPS-based inference system for a bionformatics domain

There's a new crop of students, and this year some of them seem technically sharp. I hope this is the start of an upward trend in mathematical competence. The discrete math and algorithms background of this group, as far as I can see, seems improved on average from recent cohorts. I personally lucked out with students such as zengeneral, weninger, martinsamuel, and tejaswi, but as a certain uncle of mine says, As bring in As. (A corollary I've heard is that "Bs bring in Cs", but I'm not so sure of this. Fortunately, I haven't had occasion to really test this part of the adage.)

Stargate: SG-1 aired its 200^th episode tonight, and I was rolling in the aisles. Clearly, the writers and producers are well aware of fandom subcultures: parody-writers, shippers, slashers, and everyone else who likes to sit back and laugh endlessly at all of the above! I wonder what wiliqueen thought of the ep. To me, the pre-ep special and the ep itself seemed a brilliant retrospective, particularly of Carter.

Stargate: Atlantis? Meh. Another throwaway "asylum" ep, done better by everything from Star Trek: The Next Generation ("Frame of Mind") to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the episode where Warren tries to frame Buffy). And didn't "Home" in Season 1 already cover a lot of this ground? Come on. If you want to allow Weir a "weekend furlough" back into her life, you don't have to stage a One Flew Over The Iratus Nest!

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Banazir