stripethree

The two hour drive to Bisbee-Douglas International airport was well worth it Sunday, as awaiting the 20 drivers that showed up just north of the border was an estimated 1.25 mile course with wide open sections that put me well into 3rd gear in multiple places. It was probably the fastest speeds I have hit at an autox course since third gear came early, often, and with liberal amounts of throttle added. The course also rewarded looking way ahead, the pivots at each end and a few deceptive offsets were crushing if you overshot, which was easy to do given the high speeds of the course.

My times were 79.569 (+2), 78.123, 78.373 (+1), and 77.826. In TOs, I dropped another 8/10s, but not without cones. The 77.8 was the second fastest time of the day, out paced only by an A-Stock Saturn Sky Redline on huge Hoosiers which ran a 76.0. PAX times were a different story as I beat out the Sky by just over a tenth of a second for the top overall spot. Now, there’s nothing left for me between now and San Diego other than some work on the car.

Saturday, Summer and I made a drive about 2 hours in the other direction to the Arizona Renaissance Festival in Apache Junction.

The guy in the last picture, where he is juggling a running chain-saw, a torch, and an apple, later went on to set off firecrackers duct taped to his chest and got the crowd to pelt him with water balloons in order to cool the resulting heat. Oh, and I did I mention this was all while he was balanced on top of a ladder? Yes, I got pictures.

That was entertaining to say the least and although I’m betting there’s some trick or secret, I’m impressed he emerged uninjured and coherent, minus not being able to hear anything. There were also some people in the crowd with killer aim as he got nailed in the face with at least 3 or 4 large water balloons. I couldn’t remember if, or when, I’d been to a renaissance festival but it was fun, the shows were entertaining and the steak on a stake was delicious. I think I was also just as amused by the sheer number of people just there to attend who were dressed appropriately. The irony of it was seeing grown men or woman dressed head to toe in period correct garb but who totally ruined the ‘act’ by, say, talking on their so-not-renaissance-era cell phone. Ha!

I passed the exam for the Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) certification today with some relief. The course last week was invaluable, but I was still not overly confident since the majority of the material was new to me. I guess I studied enough though since I passed by a comfortable margin.

Now, I will move on to some self study in preparation for another certification, the Certified Information Systems Security Profession (CISSP). I have about 6 weeks between now and the exam and plenty of material to go through. I’m more familiar with a good portion of what the CISSP covers, so I’m going to skip taking a class. While the CEH class did help, it is hard to sit through a marathon week of class trying to absorb over a thousand pages of technical material. I do not really want to do that again.

April has been hectic. It did not start well, as I came down with the flu on the 1st of the month and missed three days of work and could barely get out of bed without pain on coughing. Yipiee. I’m mostly over it, but still coughing. All the doc gave me was some codeine laced cough syrup which works, but is kind of hard to take when you actually have to do things. Like drive to work. Last week I took a class for geared towards the Certified Ethical Hacker exam and certification. I couldn’t take the shuttle since the hours of the class differed from the van schedule, so I drove it, which was great because it was a long day and I would much rather have been napping on the drive home. On the upside, I drove the GTI for most of the week and it performed wonderfully. More on that in a moment. The class was okay, it reminded me of many of the things I do NOT miss about the school type setting and by Thursday and Friday I had a hard time maintaining focus and attention. The instructor was good, but there’s only so long I can sit and listen to someone talk in that setting and go through 2300 pages of text books. I pulled a lot from the class, but I don’t know if I am fully prepared for the exam, I need to study more before Tuesday. I am going to try and crack the books open this weekend, but that is going to be tough. This morning Summer and I went and picked up a UHaul and moved all her furniture to the house. We also picked up the matching couch to go with the loveseat a friend of hers gave us since they are getting new furniture. So the house is a little messy, but it will get sorted out soon enough. Luckily the majority of the move did not take that long and she still has her apartment until the end of the month to move odds and ends and clean it up before she has to be out. Tomorrow there’s a Tucson autocross with a course I co-designed with one of the other guys that has been doing most of the courses of late. Sometime this weekend I was hoping to get a few odds and ends done on the GTI since I had about a dozen and a half small parts arrive from various sources this week, but I’m sure if I will get the time. As I previously mentioned, I should probably hold off on that and devote time towards studying for Tuesday’s exam. It’s 150 questions and answering 70% correct denotes success and a Certified Ethical Hacker certification. It’s a computer based test, so as soon as you are done you find out if you passed or if you failed (and if you failed, but how much). I’m nervous about it, but I think I am still close enough to my ‘school days’ that I still have enough of the studying mentality and will be able to pass. Monday night will probably be a late night, but that’s the way it goes. Hopefully I can pass and be done with this certification so I can move on to the next one that I am scheduled to take next month. This time it will be the Certified Information Systems Security Professional, and I’m not taking a class. The exams covers a lot of areas, but only to a certain ‘depth’ so to speak, and since I am familiar with many of the areas, I’m going to take a shot at this one studying on my own. It’s going to take some work, but I’ll have a month to prepare. I think I work better doing a little bit every night rather than cramming everything in a week long barrage of instruction. We’ll see.

As I said before, I drove the GTI roundtrip to Sierra Vista for the majority of the week, and all went well. I’ve found various odds and ends to fix or remove, artifacts if you will from the previous owners, but nothing major. She’s running well and that’s all I need her to do.

Now that I’ve recieved my grade for my last class, not that I had any worries anyway, I can really declare that I am done with grad school. Master of Science in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins, less than three years removed from finishing at Maryland. I am very, very happy to be done with this degree. Goodbye school, don’t let the door smack you on your way out!

I’m been busy, hence, the lack of blog action other than random dog and cat pictures.

- Visit to Maryland was fantastic, can’t say enough about friends and family and how great they are. Margaritas reign supreme, so do slow Mk3s. I could go on for pages and pages.
- Moved to Tucson and so far it’s great. The new place is nice, I met some cool VW (and non VW) people, found a great shop 2 miles away for those car things I can’t do, and there’s plenty of autox. Will probably go broke furnishing this place, but such is life, I’m enjoying living alone thus far. The cats are cool as well, finding ways to get on top of and into the cabinets. And it’s hella warm. =)
- One more homework assignment and one more ‘exam’ (10 question multiple choice finals rock) from being done with my grad degree. It will all be over by the first weekend in May and I am psyched.

That’s all I got right now, too many things to do!

T’was a busy weekend and was happy with things I got done in many aspects.

Started off Friday with some much needed painting on the side mirror caps. After the journey across country these were looking pretty rough.

Got them back on the car so as not to rock the Terminator 2 side mirror look and headed off to Tucson for a gathering of Volkswagens. Yes, I drove an hour to go to a VW gathering and no, there isn’t much going on in Sierra Vista. I definitely noticed that driving on AZ90 and I10 at night is a bit eerie as there is nothing lighting the road other than the cars driving on it, which were few and far between. There were many times where beyond the span of my cars exterior lights, nothing but blackness. Got to Tucson and hung around for a while with some of the local folks chatting about cars and such. Went to Applebees and grabbed a drink and some food and hung out for a while. Good peoples. By the time I got home, that was basically it for the evening. I wish that gathering were closer, because over 100 miles roundtrip isn’t going to happen on but a few Fridays.

Saturday I got off my rear end and finally installed a pair of parts on the car that I’ve had for over a year.

This was quote the undertaking since door panels had to come off, interior panels had to come off, wire had to be threaded above the glove box but below the air bag, etc. This was all motiviated by the desire to replace the speaker cover on the passenger side which someone cracked when loading my car to move. Whoops. At least it’s a cheap part. Anyway, by the time I got to the passenger side stuff and saw how the speaker cover is held in and that it would have needed to be drilled out, I decided I’d deal with the crack for now. VW uses T20s everywhere, why couldn’t they have here, why’d they have to make things difficult? The door lock slides went in and in addition to looking sharp with the brushed aluminum and the blue LEDs and such and such, they don’t rattle!. They fit much better than the OEM parts and I only managed to break two of those silly one time use door clips.

Next up was some computer nerd action. The thought process is that I should work on starting a web business, because seeing kids five years my junior rake in cash for stuff I know I have the skills to learn and do sure starts a motivational fire under me. So, I decided it was time to learn something new (on top of the Enterprise Java class I’m already taking no less). I poked around, and since I’ve been doing all sorts of fun database application stuff of late, stumbled upon demos and setup for Ruby on Rails. Now, I’ve heard of RoR before, but never really had reason to look into it. Once I did, I was happily off in nerd heaven, rubbing my hands together with a sinister grin thinking off all the fun database applications I could write. You can laugh, it is kind of funny. I went and set it all up on the Cube so I can have some fun and learn some cool stuff.

So hopefully I can keep the motivation high and something fun and interesting can come of this little endeavor.

For the evening’s activities, we went down to Bisbee, which is a small town on top of the border, about a half hour away. We went for a chocolate tasting, a charity event taking place at the library in downtown (I use the term loosely) Bisbee. Once we found the place, paid our way in, and got our tickets we were off to spend said tickets on chocolate treats of all varieties.

Everything was quite delicious, even more so since we skipped dinner to attend. We then walked around town for a few and noticed that although it seemed straight out of 1975, the town was a bit livelier than Sierra Vista. We met up with some folks and found a local bar. A few beers, some pool, and some intensely competitive shuffleboard action and we decided to see what else the town had to offer. We found another bar, much more populated and with the added bonus of live music. Drinks, more pool, and we were just about the last to leave for the night.

Sunday was a lazier day and all we really did was go out to dinner after I watched Maryland topple Duke. All I will say about that is #1: Yay; #2 why can’t they play like that every game?

Thanks to EBay however, I did recieve a nice new keyboard for my laptop to replace the aging, worn out unit that was already down a key and prime to loose some more.

Using the new one made it apparent just how beaten down the old one was, and I have a real ‘K’ key again! I guess after over three years of daily use and abuse, the refresher was necessary. I also have a new battery on the way so I can hopefully end the days of being tethered to a power cable. EBay is fantastic, I’d put off both replacing these parts because they cost over $200 from Apple and many parts resellers online. I scoured EBay for some reliable sources and found both things, in their original packaging, for under $100 total. Score.

For dinner, we went to a small, local, Italian place that prides themselves on their pizza. It was good, very good, I just had to remove some of the excessive amount of cheese from it. They deliver too, thus I am now faced with finding excuses as to why I didn’t make lunch, and instead ordered in from Delios. Yum.

That’s all for now, time to go wrestle with WebLogic a few minutes more in an attempt to get something accomplished on this class assignment before Heroes starts.

A recently got a reply from a current professor that only left me more frustrated. I thought about posting a line-by-line analysis of it, but decided not to.

I wouldn’t even be ticked except that this email, and the annoyance it caused me in it’s lack of useful information, personifies my experience with this class, and to some degree, this program. This professor is complacent about answering emails and sparingly posts to the class message board that he constantly encourages people to use. Homeworks have been given with material that (admittedly) wasn’t touched in class and there have been numerous points where the professor has answered questions on assignments by admitting a lack of knowledge of what he has actually assigned. Apparently he’s not only having trouble reading my emails, but is also having trouble reading his own assignments. I never stay the full class because I can read the slides myself and I don’t need him to read them to me, which is essentially what he does. Any question I’ve had could be answered through the Java Doc or Google, because, well, I’m talented like that.

It ticks me off that this what you get for $2350. That’s right. Read it again. $2350. Twenty three hundred and fifty dollars. That’s a lot of Frosties. One third of a turbo kit. Four car payments (sadly, I wish it were more than 4). Point being, why am I spending that $2350? It ticks me off that time and time again professors in this program show a general lack of interest in their students. It’s so painfully obvious that most of them are working or doing research and are teaching ‘on the side’ and really don’t care what you pull away from their course. That’s what I miss about Maryland. Many, I’ll even say most, of the Computer Science professors made sure you got something out of their course. Even if they did so by causing you great anguish and pain through programming assignments that bent the sleep-time continuum or exams that fried your brain so hard you had to bring something to wipe the drool up. It was challenging, it broke people, and when you finished, you felt like you’d accomplished something. You survived. This program, this grad program, with it’s stale course notes, reused assignments, and class sessions that do nothing to keep students interested, it isn’t going to feel that way. It’s going to end, I’ll get my piece of paper, add it to my resume, and probably not speak much of it again.

It feels pretty shitty to question the value of this degree so close to being finished. Beyond the point of no return. To some degree, it’s a $25,000 sham: I know that a Masters from Johns Hopkins looks good, real good, but is it just skin deep? How much new knowledge and ability am I really gaining for that much money, because there certainly are times when it feels like I’m just giving them money for them to check some boxes, pat me on the head, and say, “you did some work, your check cleared, here you go!”.

…and saw that a week from today I’lll register for my last graduate class and apply for graduation.

Homestretch!!!

…three to go.

Exactly three weeks until it starts again.

I am here to proclaim, now that I know for sure I passed and then some, that I am halfway complete with my Masters degree. Five classes down, five classes to go. What am I doing to commemorate this glorious day? Enjoying the month I have of no classes before I start two more in early June. Object-Oriented Analysis and Design starts on June 5th and User Interface Development with the Java Foundation Classes starts on June 7th. I know, they sound thrilling dont they? No matter, this time next year I should be jumping up and down when this degree is complete.

That is all.