And lo it is now finally official: as of August I will be a Master’s student in the Department of Computing and Software at McMaster University in my birthplace of Hamilton, Ontario.
Needless to say since I orchestrated it, I am happy about this change, largely because it is about damn time I did something new. I'm less concerned with where I'm going and what I'm doing than I should be, but I'm pretty hopeful that I will end up working on something interesting and useful.
Going to Mac, as it's familiarly known, is something that I would be guaranteed to have complex feelings about. Since I left for Waterloo in ’96, Mac has been the university I didn't go to, and my onetime intoxication with the cult of Waterloo left me with a somewhat sour impression of Mac, even after its passing.
As well, I get the vague sense, every now and again, that the Mac administration is capable of even more insanely ill-conceived, baffling decisions than Waterloo is. A very minor example is that, apparently, webmail is the standard way of reading email. Another is the curious idea of an institute for the study of origins. The idea of “beginnings” seems a natural choice for organizing a popular book or a public lecture series, but a formal institute putting biologists studying organic soups beside physicists studying the Big Bang seems like a forced marriage. (Then again, Waterloo is talking about an undergrad degree in nanotechnology, so craziness abounds everywhere.)
Of course, a lot of these issues can be explained in either of two ways: (1) Being forced to deal with Waterloo regularly, I have a good idea of its faults and successes, while my as-yet sporadic experience with Mac means I selectively notice its faults; (2) I've assimilated Waterloo's climate to the point where it is now second nature and doesn't seem strange. Nine years is a damned long time.
One nice thing: three years after being one of the primary authors of a code generation package, it seems I will finally learn something about compilers.