Jack Truong

Going into my last term, I think I can say that I’ve done my fair share of bird courses. I define bird courses as courses that generally: don’t require any work, simple marking breakdown, material is “common knowledge”, professors are easy, etc.

For me, being a CS student, I’m given the option to have 18 of my 40 required courses be electives. 10 of those electives are slightly more restrictive than the other 8 but that simply means they cannot be offered by the Faculty of Math.

PHIL145 (Critical Thinking) It’s mostly learning how to solve problems with logic/reasoning. Very fun course depending on your professor.
ECON101/102 (Introduction to Microeconomics/Macroeconomics) An easy course depending on the professor. The course is usually 2-3 midterms and a final and all multiple choice.
FR151 (Basic French 1) If you remember any French from high school (Ontario students) its easy. The course doesn’t drift too far from Grade 8/9 French and only touches on some of Grade 10.
PSYCH101 (Introduction to Psychology) Interesting course, I did mine online and wrote an essay about procrastinating and got a 92% on it. All multiple choice, possible to pass the course prior to the final.
SCI238 (Introductory Astronomy) (237 is the alternative) Very basic course in astronomy, all multiple choice but the course does require a lot of math.
PSCI291 (The Canadian Legal Process) Very top level view of Canadian Law. All multiple choice, material very easy to understand with very minimal memorization (memorizing details about cases).
SCI205 (Physics of High Fidelity Sound Reproduction) The course has not been updated since the turn of the millennium. All multiple choice, the answers for homework assignments are readily available online and the final hasn’t changed since at least 2005.
SCI206 (The Physics of How Things Work) Extremely fun course, all multiple choice again. The course is basically a mixture of Bill Nye and Mythbusters, it’s a very hands on course because of all the experiments in class.
PHIL216 (Probability and Decision Making) Homework assignments are very easy for a Math/CS major. Course is very passable before the final. No midterm, and highly participatory.
AFM101 (Introduction to Financial Accounting) You might think this is a bird course though it’s probably better to do AFM123. I made that mistake.

Courses I haven’t taken yet:
ACTSC221 (Mathematics of Investment) It looks like an easy course, there’s only 4 formulas needed and a lot of problem solving. It’s the type of Math that I like.
SPAN101 (Spanish 1) Only in the Spring as a Block Course. Any course that’s a block course (in the Spring) should be easy because it ends in July which means an earlier final (or in-class final) — which implies less studying during normal exam time in August. SPAN101 shouldn’t be too hard with some basic French knowledge since these languages are very related.

I have finished cropping out the scans of all my OverPower cards. It took about 36 hours to scan them all in and probably about 60 hours to crop them all. The OverPower cards have rounded corners and I don’t like to have them showing up on my website because it’ll either be transparent or white.

Luckily, with Photoshop CS 5, I can fill in the missing corners with Content-Aware deletion. I created many Actions to help me automate this process but it still took a while as the process was never perfect. Cropping out the images from the scans were also pretty easy with Photoshop’s Crop and Straighten Photos tool. Again, it wasn’t perfect because some of my scans had cards that were too close to each other. In then end, all of the cards (minus about 50 of them) are processed and ready to be created into PNGs for the OverPower website.

Photoshop doesn’t have a nice tool to batch ‘Save for Web’ on directories with sub directories, so it was a manual process to select each folder for exporting.

And here’s where OptiPNG comes into play. After creating any (regularly visited) PNG for the web, I always run it through OptiPNG to shrink it down further. I don’t understand the algorithms behind it but it works. OptiPNG gives you an option to select optimization levels, with the -o [0-7] flag. Zero being nothing, 7 being sufficiently optimized. Basically, these levels sets up parameters for the program to brute-force compress the PNG file and finds the best type of compression.