stripethree » class

Riding the April roller coaster.

Jeff — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 19:57:49 +0000

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.

A brain dump, of sorts.

Jeff — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 03:03:24 +0000

January, oh January, how busy you have been. Here I am staying up past my bedtime to blog rather than get the sleep I probably need. The first couple of weeks of the year have been fun for the most part, and, as I said, busy. I recently finished putting a ton of work into the Schnell website that everyone seems happy with and should set us up nicely for 2006 and beyond. Go visit it dammit (hey, if the server’s down, it’s not our fault, email Globat and tell them how much they suck). It went from a completely static site to a database driven beast with quite a listing of extra management and cool-ness features. Definitely something I will be adding and discussing in the online portfolio I am finally (as I should be) putting together for future web site work on the side. I picked up some nifty new tricks as well, always good to learn something. I also recently completed a smaller endeavor, a site for a highly modified Corvette and its owner(s).

A small site, and admittedly, not very similar to the car I get around town in, but it was cool to see what someone in another, different part of the automotive scene does with their ride. Hopefully this will be the start of something, as in more web design projects. It can be stressful and a pain sometimes, working on ‘work’ when you get home that isn’t your regular forty hour a wee job, but I still found it to be fun. That is because I am a nerd. Like I mentioned, I am beginning to finally put together a portfolio of work so I have something to show off for potential, new gigs. We’ll see where it goes from there, as there also might be more work from the same source the Corvette site surfaced from.

Next Monday I will be back in class, Cryptology on Monday evenings and Web Application Development on Tuesday evenings. I’ve heard Crypto can kick one’s ass, and I guess I’ll find out. I’m still aiming to finish by July 2007, maybe a little eariler if I can swing it. This also means I have started researching into the wonderful world of student loans, as JHU wants a lot of money (not as much as Uncle Sam took from me, but that’s another story. Look for a taxes rant sometime soon, unless I miraculously don’t owe the entiretly of what I have in savings). The following Monday Kharissa leaves for Kentucky and is gone until almost mid-March. A blower, but not much that can be done about it; just have to make the most of the time now, and it is just a month. This will be like the warm up of sorts, as I know there will be times she’s going to be away longer than that in the future. Things with Kharissa are fantastic though (oh, but you’re just saying that because she can read this!), ah, no. Really, they are, I’m very lucky; I’m glad I can make someone so happy, and vice versa. What is this sappy talk that has found its way into my blog? Gah, beer, football, :burp:, cars. (Love you babe!). Heh, I did get the best fortune ever at PF Chang’s the other night, “You will soon bring great joy to someone”… in bed. Score. Thankfully I didn’t laugh out loud at this at the table, seeing as how I was at dinner with my parents. That would have been fun to explain.

Oh yeah, sort of speaking of things that are completely not sappy at all, ever. Carly pointed me to this podcast a while back when it started, called GuyCast. Hilarious. Pretty much two college-age guys bullshitting about what every (normal) guy bullshits about. Plus they did a show (episode 10) completely plastered and in a shed. That, my friends, that is quality entertainment. There are on MySpace, their site is GuyCast.net, and you can find their podcast in iTunes. Check it. I havent gotten into the whole podcasting thing, just because there isnt a lot of content I feel like listening to in this manner other than stuff like SportsCenter, which I watch all the time anyway, but this one has stuck around. Im running out of excuses for busting out laughing at work while listening to GuyCast through my headphones though (by the way, the site and show are not, how we say, ‘work safe’, hence, the headphones. Think of how often you hear the word fuck in Boondock Saints and youll get the idea of how much these guys curse). Righteous. Oh, and for the record, don’t make the fucking show go clean! Boooooo!

Anyway, thats all out of me. Im tired and its only 12. Im old, I know. Depressing in that I dont think I have had anything to drink this year since New Years Eve. Paging CP Dubs?

Good night bitches!

D O N E.

Jeff — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 21:49:30 +0000

With class that is. Feels sooo nice. I need the break. Will I go back? That remains to be seen. I don’t want to feel like I’m ‘quitting’, but I still wrestle with the fact of how much it will benefit me. We’ll see, I don’t have to think about for a while, registration for next spring is way, way off in the distance. I was letting class stress me out way too much, no more.

So it’s the last day of class…

Jeff — Tue, 11 May 2004 18:41:37 +0000

…but for me, not the last day of class.

Weird.

Going through the normal day and saying bye to people like it’s just another day but you have no idea if and when you will ever see them again. It’s amazing how much it can be taken for granted the people you see on a daily basis.

It’s really hard to concentrate.

Feelin’ kind of mixed

Jeff — Thu, 04 Mar 2004 07:04:58 +0000

And once again, in a weird way, realizing how lucky I am. Luck runs out though.

Starting to feel this class thing a little more, as everything, to this point, outside Photo has been a wash. Digital Imaging is coming along and Graphics, if I can just keep up, would be cool. I’d just like to spread things out a bit, even if it will be a stretch. I’ve been told a bunch of times not to stress myself out too much, and so I think for once I’m actually going to do something (I hope) that’ll help it. A nice side effect is that I should be able to finish what I started on the Art side of things, but I don’t want to speak too soon. I’m definitely feelin’ the burn out in some respects though I feel like I’m a lot more motivated on the creative end of things right now.

Not that anyone ever said it was, but this program (and others here) was not meant for kids to be working part time, being involved in campus orgs, or basically doing anything else that takes up time outside of class work. I’ve had several discussions with different people over the last week about this, and not that the department should at all be catering to people who work outside class, but you would think they would at least acknowledge it. I was shocked when a certain, current CS prof. of mine actually decided to delay our midterm until after Spring break as he thought it was too close to when a heavy programming assignment and another homework would possibly be due. Imagine that, a professor that actually realizes we have [gasp] other things that take up our time, first and foremost being the other classes we are taking. Does this seem as non-trivial as it should?

It’ll all work out in the end [in- and outside the classroom] and soon enough it’ll a hot, class-free day in August.

Until this point…

Jeff — Sun, 22 Feb 2004 10:38:38 +0000

…my opinion of Networks remained neutral. Now we have our usual seething hatred, as one would expect with any, especially 400-level, Computer Science class. [note time of post]

I did get a spiffy drunken phone call that vaulted to the top of my short, but distinguished list of such calls I have ever received. Excellent.

Wandering mind.

Jeff — Mon, 16 Feb 2004 05:55:34 +0000

My mind is so many other places than on computer science classes it’s not even funny. I’m staring at two rolls of T-Max 400 on my desk and subconsciously trying to figure out exactly how much time remains before I can develop them in Tuesday’s photo class. I’m trying to figure out a simple domain name I’d like to snag to use for all sorts of crazy things, like all those projects I wrote down last month but am still thinking about. Oh yeah, and it might come in handy for that Capstone project thing because I think I know what I am going to do. Notice I did not say what I want to do, because I just don’t have the time resources to undertake something extra-intense. So rather than entertaining the thoughts of dropping the citation all together, I’ll settle, I guess. Ha, you thought I was going to actually tell you what I’m planning?

I should definitely be working on my graphics and/or networks projects, but I’m just not feelin’ it. I did get my ideal setup for graphics though, even though it took two reformats of the cube and, because I am stupid and was doing this at 3:00am (ask/find me for the whole story) loss of all my documents previous of this semester. Not a tragedy, but a definite “awwww shit”. Life goes on. Why’d I go though all this? Well, because I’m stubborn and want to program the class projects in Java and on my machine as opposed to the labs. Will this cause me more headaches in the end? Yeah, probably, but I don’t care – call me stubborn, call me crazy, I’ve heard it all before. Both of the CS classes are interesting, well, mostly – networks lectures… words do not describe the degree at which this class does not keep my attention. I know though, once I get off my ass and start working through the projects I will get into it, which for graphics better be tomorrow night, as well, Tuesday is this little thing we call a deadline. Whoops.

Now that I’ve bored you with all that technical crap… I’m going to try and not cough up a lung (what the hell?) and get some sleep.

For some reason today felt like a mid-semester day.

Jeff — Wed, 04 Feb 2004 01:30:00 +0000

I felt like I was behind in classes already. Please tell me how we have two networks projects due Thursday and the prof has yet to mention them in class? How does that work? Oh well, it’ll work out. The weekend was too good for a some class type issues to mess with my mood, and I’m def. looking forward to next weekend now too. Hells yeah.