School
Santa Cruz has been really great so far. I took an accelerated introductory computer science course last quarter to test the proverbial waters and get into the frame of mind of university CS classes. This quarter I am taking "Introduction to Computer Organization" which covers computer architectures and involves MIPS and HC11 assembly programming. The class is not too difficult, but the labs take many hours to complete.
Software
thinksynth is going really well. We have it using ALSA MIDI now and one can actually hook up MIDI devices such as keyboards, as well as software MIDI sequenceres, to it and get it to play notes. The synthesizer portion has been split into a library and current efforts are concentrated on fixing current bugs and optimization.
Someone finally offered to take over GtkHx, so I handed off admin access on the Sourceforge site.