First, do have a relaxed Thanksgiving. I know that most of you have been working very hard in this course, and I do think you will find that you will benefit from all that work. But, to keep one's sanity, one must also know when to come up for air, and just take some time off. I suggest that Thanksgiving is such a time. Enjoy the holiday. Before I let you go, a few announcements that are relevant. 1. The handout on recursion that we went over in class on Monday. I will not test you on that on the final exam. Recursion is a tough concept for most graduates (!) to grasp, so I thought I would introduce it to you early. You will see it in 312, and in many courses after that. I introduced it to you for two reasons: (1) it provides a great example of subroutine call/return -- a recursive program calls itself!, and (2) it provided a great example of an important application of the stack. Perhaps sometime in the future when you are dealing with recursive subroutines, you can drag out that handout and examine what goes on at the ISA level when you use this construct. But, for now, you can put it aside. It won't be on the final exam. 2. Your 2nd midterm exam (those of you who were not in class on Monday). You can pick up the midterm from my secretary anytime during normal business hours. Just drop by her office ENS 541, and show her your ID. I don't plan to bring these exams to class. I leave it to you to stop by her office at your convenience. 3. The midterm, itself. The median grade was 74. I am delighted with that result. I felt the exam was harder than the first midterm (median: 58) which proves that most of you are getting the hang of it. It may also say something about the quality of your studying lately. I hope you continue this trend on the final. I would like very much to be able to assign a lot of A's and B's. 4. Some of you are worried about the final, and in particular, the time pressure. You should know that we will prepare a final exam intended to take the typical good student about 2 hours to complete. You will have 3 hours to take the exam. The intent is to relieve some of the time pressure. Good luck with it. Again, remember: a good night's sleep before the exam. 5. One big, long office hour before the final exam. I am planning to continue my practice of holding one very long office hour to help you prepare for the final exam. Probably on Wednesday, December 11, starting at 7pm. The exact room and time will be posted on the course web site by Friday, December 6. We will get a big room (WEL 2.224, if it is available), so any student who wants to can come and listen to all the other students' questions and my attempts to answer them. I also expect to answer at that time any remaining confusions about the data path and how it processes instructions. 6. Interrupt-driven I/O and the RTI instruction. I realize that we covered that pretty quickly on Monday. I plan on going over that again in class. I think that does it. Again, have a very relaxing Thanksgiving. I hope you are able to spend it with the people most important to you. Yale Patt