75 posts tagged “school”

I swung by the local college that I'm going to be attending in the fall to see if there were any books to buy for my course (there wasn't) and if there was anything else I needed to do in order to make sure I could attend classes without trouble (nope).

The book thing, knowing the book store, is probably a result of somebody not ordering a book. And the second reply is probably somebody who didn't know what they were doing, knowing college administration.

But they say everything's set and I've got all my supplies (aside from a potential software purchase for the Digital Typography course that I'm taking) so I'll just have to see what happens. I'm really excited to be going back to school, which still amazes me because I didn't think that I would ever be excited after I graduated with my Computer Science degree. Hopefully this helps me find the path that I've been searching for.

Unfortunately, it's not all rosy on the design front. I've been trying to work up a design for my mom's craft business website but I'm having a very hard time with it. I have a bunch of ideas, but nothing seems to be working right. It started with fiddling with the color scheme but then that devolved into the entire idea I had for the look and I'm not sure that I can salvage the idea at this point. I'm getting the feeling that I'm just trying to force something that is destined not to work at all. Might have to switch back to a more conventional website design.

As you may or may not have noticed...I've pretty much fallen off the face of the earth for the past couple weeks. This isn't because I wanted to stop blogging or because I died or something. It was because I was spending my time working extremely hard on finishing up my last semester of college.

And I'm proud to say that, as of 12:30pm on May 5th, 2008...

I'm done.

Letting that sink in for a minute here...

I'm...done.

For the past 7 years I've been working through school, sometimes full time, sometimes part time while working full time...fighting against people giving me the wrong information, taking classes I didn't really need...not knowing that I had to take certain classes that I wasn't...

But it's over. I handed in my final project this afternoon, I have my final grades, my overall GPA, my name was in the paper as graduating from the school.

I'm done...

*collapse*

I'll write more when I can stand up again.

My meeting with the professor overseeing my project yesterday went fairly well I thought. I really should have been keeping on top of things before so it didn't come down to the wire like this, but all in all it wasn't bad. He generally liked what I had done and just had a few suggestions for extra functionality to add which I'll try to stuff in over the weekend. It's going to be a fairly busy weekend/next couple days for working on stuff. He also told me I had a little buffer for getting things in if I needed to take it in order to get the project finished up correctly since grades don't absolutely need to be turned in until the end of May. I should be done next week or the week after at the absolute latest.

In other news, it looks like my degree evaluation has been completed finally and I meet all of the requirements for graduation assume I pass all of my courses this semester. So it looks like the end is in sight. Hopefully. Maybe.

Something will get screwed up, I know it...

Just some quick school updates in case anyone was interested. First, statistics. I ended up getting a 90 on that test I took last week, despite finishing about 30 minutes before everyone else. So that's a definite plus!

Also, I was finally able to get my project sponsor to acknowledge my presence (also mentioned in my post last week) which is another definite plus. I'm supposed to swing by his class on Tuesday and show him what I have done. Hopefully he likes it and doesn't make me totally redo it because that would mean one very, very long week for me next week, and I'd rather do more constructive things with my time.

So, as promised, a couple of quick school updates for you. I have some musical stuff that I need to write about too later if I remember. I've just been (again) too busy to post anything recently, so I've got a backlog of things that need discussing.

I had my third test last night in my statistics class. I think I did OK on it, but it was one of those situations where I finished the test approximately 30 minutes before everyone else. Normally, I'm a fast test taker anyway, so I'm probably the first person done. I just don't like being the first person to hand something in, so I usually hang out and recheck my work to make sure everything looks good. This time though, I kept checking and checking and checking and checking...so I'm really hoping everyone else was just slow and I didn't totally miss a question or 6.

One more to go and I'll be done with that class and, hopefully, classroom instruction as a whole. However, this project thing is another matter entirely. I e-mailed my advisor/project sponsor again requesting when his office hours were so that we could meet up and I can show him what I have done. But despite suggesting that we meet up early last week, he's yet to respond to ANY of my e-mails since then. Warning...mini-rant incoming. Take cover.

I think he's intentionally trying to make this as hard as he possibly can for me and it's starting to piss me off royally. I'm getting awfully tired of being jerked around by professors here. Even when I started working on this project and asked him how it generally worked, he didn't tell me anything as far as what was expected of me. I'm just flying blind here and hoping that whatever I get done with will meet his expectations, which it probably won't and then I'll be forced to stay back another semester here so I can do it the right way. If that happens I can assure you I'll be marching straight to the deans office because I'm getting tired of this red tape crap. I want out.

I woke up this morning with a pretty bad headache but considering I had some projects I'm working on right now at work, I decided to try to go in anyway and get some done. By 10am though, I had enough, so I went home sick. The Motrin I have is, as it turns out, expired and has lost some of it's effectiveness. But I got a new bottle and that, plus a nap means my headache is pretty much history at this point. I'm still hoping I don't get the stomach bug that my mom and dad got over the weekend. I'm not going to say I'm out of the woods yet (for fear of being totally wrong) but it's looking promising.

It did give me an opportunity to work on my project a bit for school, which I did. I'm getting a good amount of it done now and I'm starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel. The professor I'm working with, however is being unhelpful as usual. He wants me to come in during his office hours to show him what I've got. However, he has yet to respond to my e-mail last week requesting what his office hours actually were so I can come down and see him during them. I've been fighting with him like this all semester and it's getting old. Fast.

Well, it's Friday, and that's gotta count for something right?

I've been feeling kinda blah lately (not physically blah. Mentally blah). There's a lot of stuff going on at work and school which is weighing on me a bit right now, so I'm not feeling terribly peppy at the moment. Well, actually with work it's the lack of things going on that's the problem. I've been stuck on this one issue for a while now. One of our customers is having a problem I can't reproduce no matter how hard I try, even if I duplicate their setup exactly. I'm not sure what's wrong, how to fix it or how to even work around it because of the restrictions in place with their particular setup. And they're starting to get a little impatient. I also can't really ask anyone else because I'm the only person who deals with this sort of stuff here.

So I'm stuck. Which is really frustrating for me because I should know the answer and I should be able to fix it, but I can't. This doesn't really help my issue that I discussed earlier about feeling like this isn't what I'm really supposed to be doing. I feel like I'm in over my head or something, I guess would be the best way to describe it.

School is being a pain too because I'm still behind a bit on my project but I'm going to spend more time this weekend to get it going again. I find it really hard to get home from work and jump right into working on another thing I really don't want to do. And my frustration with all of this has caused me to deviate a bit from my weight loss plan, which is totally my fault and I'm jumping back on as of today, but I haven't done any exercise this week at all because I haven't felt that I had the energy.

Oh well...onwards to happier news. Syracuse won their game last night in the NIT Tournament which means they get to play one more home game on Tuesday before they head out to Madison Square Garden (if they win anyway). I'm going to this one alone because my dad has a doctors appointment thingy and I had assumed since the only other people I'd consider asking (Wassy and Jay) don't like sports that they wouldn't be interested. As it turns out I was wrong on that last count after I bought my ticket because Wassy said she would have gone with me. Bah! Noted for the next time this comes up.

This weekend isn't looking terribly fun for me though. I need to spend a lot of time working on my project for school to prevent myself from becoming pushed farther behind. I basically have 4 weeks to finish up the whole deal now and I want to get back on top of things before they totally spiral out of control. I'll be very glad when all of this is over.

I've probably mentioned this previously but just to quickly recap...as part getting my degree in Computer Science, the school I attend requires that I complete a semester long, large project of some sort. Considering I hope to graduate soon(ish) I'm doing that project this semester. Or, trying to do that project this semester anyway. I'm basically doing a content management system that could be used for say, a Computer Science Department website.

The problem is I'm a bit behind schedule. Although I guess that's no surprise considering I have nearly 0 motivation to actually code this thing. I have a problem in that when I do programming, unless it's something I really care about, I have a very hard time working up the energy to actually do anything with it. And again, this has bit me in the butt. So now I'm a couple weeks behind where I thought I would be when I was planning out timeframes. But I've determined that if I can get what I need to get done this weekend (pretty much half of the upcoming events calander section, plus some of the user profile stuff like changing passwords and such) I'll be back on track as far as my expected completion date. So I'm planning on spending a signifigant portion of Sunday working on crap that I'd rather not work on. Fun!

This leads me back to something I think I posted up here about not being sure if I really wanted to spend my life developing software. I really enjoy working on stuff...for my own use, or to help out friends. But, if I don't care about a project it just becomes a chore. And more often than not, I end up not really caring. I keep getting this feeling that what I'm doing right now isn't what I should be spending my life on, but this feeling isn't telling me what it is that I should be doing. Just that it feels...wrong somehow. This came out talking to a friend the other night as well. I've really grown annoyed at just sitting in a chair all day in the same spot, day in and day out, doing the exact same things. It just really drags me down imaging that I'm going to be spending the rest of my working life doing pretty much just that. I'm having a very hard time looking into the future and seeing myself still doing this all the way down the road. I dunno. Maybe I'll figure it out sometime. There's gotta be something better out there.

Last night was the first night of hopefully my last semester of college classes. Nothing like a 3 hour statistics course after work to pass the time. Or something. At least the professor is an interesting guy. He's got a quirky sense of humor and knows how to make things interesting.

The first thing he said to the class was that he was annoyed at the school because they don't know how to do anything right and nobody will actually pick up the phone if you're trying to get a problem fixed. He basically went on a 5 minute mini-rant about how annoying working with the school was. It was at this point that I realized that this is my kind of teacher. He also seemed to know how to teach people too, which is kinda a rarity. Although he does also teach at Herkimer County Community College which might explain it. I've found that most of the teachers at community colleges actually know how to teach.

And as far as the big project goes, I'm beginning to wonder if my faculty advisor guy knows what he's doing at all. I'm trying to get some guidance about how the project is generally run and the guy isn't telling me anything. I have a feeling I'm just going to have to stumble through this blindly and hope for the best at the end. Fun.

Let's see here...in other non school related news, I discovered that something ate my Guitar Hero 3 saved game on my memory card, so now I need to replay the game from scratch to unlock everything again. Not that I really mind doing it, exactly, but it's just a pain to have to. I have no idea how my saved game got corrupted either as I don't recall turning the game off while it was saving or something along those lines.

So there's a couple of loose threads that I've left hanging over the past week or so. Specifically the last paragraph in this post. I figured I should post an update because both of those have been resolved.

My car went into the dealer Wednesday night and came back to me on Thursday with working airbags, which is a giant plus in my book. Hopefully it was just an isolated thing and It's not going to keep being a problem...We shall see. They also fixed the squeak from the center console, but I have a feeling it will be back because of reports from various internet sources. On the plus side there, somebody posted that you can do a homemade fix by prying the part off and using some felt on the clips that hold it down to get rid of the noise which seems to take care of it for good.

For school, I was able to get into contact with the secretary which allowed me to register for my final project thingy. So I think we're good there. Something has got to come up though, because with my luck, there's no way I'll be able to graduate this semester. No way at all.