Common Lisp to my thesis

During the last week, little work is been put into neither the self-report tool nor my thesis, because most of the time is put on the assignment of ICS606 Autonomous Agent. This assignment took me a whole week because it is based on Lisp. It requires to enhance a vacuum agent which is written in Lisp. Though I had taken the undergraduate class about Lisp, I were near to novice because firstly I did not experience writing functions, methods and structures in Lisp in that class, and secondly, I had nearly forgotten everything I learn in that class. It took me about two day to pick up Lisp and advance to object-oriented like feature. Meanwhile, I found the book Practical Common Lisp is pretty awesome, and it is available on web! It actually explain Lisp much better than the undergraduate class. After being familiar with Lisp, I did find Lisp is pretty good in program the agent because represent and interpret data is unbelievable facilitated. It gives more freedom than other language ever possible give, though it is sometime same as freedom to make mistake. =P

In this week, the priority is to revise my thesis. Actually the biggest task in this week is the seminar presentation on Thursday. Thus revising my thesis is one of the best way to coordinate ideas in the presentation. After not so many presentation in class, I feel my biggest problem is not practicing the start and detail besides slides. What I did in my previous experience is mostly like to outline the content to slides, and only review the detail over my head. When presenting, because of nervous, I often did not start the talk very good, that cause me even more nervous usually, and forgot what I had prepare in mind, then doing even worse. So I got stuck into a vicious circle and end up being reading the words in the slide. This time, I will trying to rehearsal some times before, in order to get prepared in both content and confidence.