Category: Uncategorized

Today was fun, I planned to go to Gaston College to pick up my diploma from fall and to go see Mr. Biggers’ new show. I ended up doing a lot more.

First, stopped in to pick up my diploma. After looking at my ID, the kind gentleman in the registrar’s office dashed over to the diploma bucket to flip through to look for mine. He dug for a while and then asked me to spell my last name again (never a good sign). After an exhaustive dig through the diploma bucket, he asked if I had petitioned in a different semester. I’m guessing from the question that people do not often petition in the semester before they are planning to receive their degrees.  After telling the kind associate registrar that the petition was filed in summer, my diploma was located, but that was not where it ended. I had to talk another associate registrar (one who specializes in degree checkout, and whose initials appear on my initial degree form) to get my degree reconfirmed, since someone majorly screwed up and tried to process my degree for the summer term, and a note of a course substitution was not made properly. Since my degree had not been checked out it was not on the transcript correctly either, therefore the previous transcript I sent to Fayetteville was useless. Also, I inquired if my AFA (Associate in Fine Arts) would become automatically active, I was told that I would have to re-declare it because when she graduated me, the declaration was lost.  

Per the college’s procedure, for all students without a declared program (I had literally been undeclared for like 5 minutes), I went directly to counseling to re-add my new major. After a 15 minute wait I was seen by Alice Williams, my favorite of the Gaston College counselors (she doesn’t waste time going over information I already know). After a very short time, maybe 5 minutes, I had my new form in hand, and went to drop the form off at admissions (there is something fundamentally wrong with picking up a diploma and visiting admissions on the same day).

After clearing that issue, I went to the business office to pay for a transcript I was about to request (makes things go faster if you pay first). Went back to the registrar’s office, where there was a short wait (during the wait, I filled out the form).  I turned in my form, picked up my student copy and headed out of the office.

Finally, on to the other part of what I had planned for the day. Went to the Rauch Gallery to see Mr. Biggers’ show. It was much different than most exhibits I have seen. Art of all media, everything from digital prints to woven fabric was exhibited. The most memorable pieces were a giant chess set and an engraved wooden door. I did not see a public announcement of the opening reception, so therefore, I missed it, and I thought I had missed a chance to see Mr. Biggers, but just as I was finishing my tour of the enclosed gallery space (the gallery is the space as well as the connected hallway), Mr. Biggers came around the corner and saw me. We spoke briefly. It is much more enjoyable to see him to discuss a show after the reception than try to speak to him during it.

Overall not a bad day, got my diploma and saw Mr. Biggers’ show (and Mr. Biggers).

 
ex. 1 WebAdvisor Programs list

ex. 2 My diploma

It has been a while since any new screen shots of GITI’s Education module were released, so here is a quick look at some of the newer functionality.

 

A new menu guides the user into a never before seen world of managing their academic life.

The same old class management page has gotten a few new features (upcoming assignments, journal), as well as the ability to control grade calculation based on a weighted or points system, which the user can set up.

 

 
And adding those classes has become more streamlined than ever, as it is now possible to insert all of the classes for a semester at one time.

 
Instead of a clunky list of all courses, sorted by status, pending or planned courses now stay out of the way in their own little hide out for planning a semester. From this system, the user can move courses between semesters and even make a complete four year plan if they know what courses will be available. When the time comes, the courses can updated with instructor information and even take the course registration numbers that can be used when the registration window opens. Beats a post-it.

 
With those numbers, GITI has a handy way to help a user see the numbers and match them up to course information. After this screen (when the user finished registering for courses), the user can input instructors, course description and other pertinent information.

 

After that long weight between semesters, the courses can be activated in a simple utility, presented here. This activates the courses and will soon move forward to collect more information from the user about the courses that they will find on their syllabus.

 

 
Once the courses are registered and the semester has begun, the student can visit this little utility to enter all of the predictable repetitive assignments that occur during a semester (or just enter a list of assignments, but thats boring, so its not shown here).

 

 
When all of the assignments are complete and the semester is over, it is time to close the semester. This can be done as easily as opening the semester, the student simply visits the Close Semester app and inputs the needed information. This can be done as many times as needed until all courses are finished and all grades are entered.

 

Finally, this whopper of a page (which will likely be getting some size controls based on # of schools entered), allows the user to control critical things about their institutions as well as add new institutions when needed. For most users this page should never become this large and unmanageable, but I suppose I personally am the exception.

 

This has been a tour of the new GITI Education module. Perhaps at another time we will take a closer look at some other aspects of GITI, such as anything related to its namesake module, Scheduler.

At times I am a really selfish person. There is an item that was dangled in front of me a few days ago and now that product is only available to a specific group of people. This upset me greatly and I went into a very selfish mood over it, which I suspect bothered some people. I looked at other items of a similar class, but found none to interest me as much as the candy that was dangled in front of my face and then yanked away like yarn from a cat. Life seems like it isn’t fair sometimes. Although, in this case, the group that is so entitled to receive said item technically probably needs the item more than I do, and I could settle for a lesser item, but why would I want to when the superior item is available?

Sigmund Freud, perhaps the most widely known and most criticized psychologist ever, is the subject of my Theories of Personality course next week. To me, Freud has always been a bit like the Einstein of psychology. His theories have yet to be disproven, even if they are a little strange. I am very excited about the topic, but find myself resisting diving in to start reading it immediately, partially because I am afraid that more will be revealed about me than has ever been revealed before.

I have a copy (two actually) of Freud’s Ego and Id, but I have never taken the time to read it because of the depths of the psyche I would need to be able to attempt to understand. This week I will get to find out about all of the theories and information that Freud has given to the field of Psychology.

I suspect this will be an interesting week.

I transmitted my latest transcript from CPCC to Gaston at the end of December, December 14th to be exact, and finally today the transfer of credit has appeared. I feel that the entire process has become over burdened and is not as efficient as it should be. CPCC and Gaston use the same common course library, so therefore, their courses are exactly equal to each other and transfer seamlessly, even if one school doesn’t necessarily teach a course, it is still transferred exact, because the courses apply to the degrees exactly the same anyway. What pisses me off is that it took over a week for admissions to enter my transcript into their records as being “received”, and that’s after they were on vacation for 2 weeks after the transcript arrived (they had time to enter it before the holiday). After admissions entered the transcript, it took 2 more weeks for the registrar to “evaluate” (copy exactly into their records) my transcript and award me transfer credit that applies to the degree that I was supposed to have been awarded in the Fall semester. I guess at least everything is in now, and before the registrar began the process of verifying my degree requirements. The shocking thing for me is how much faster CPCC is, and they have a history of being slow and unreliable. It only took CPCC about 3 days to reciprocate for Gaston.

I am starting to wonder how my C# course (CSC 253) is going to function. First of all, my instructor, who is also the department chair, does not ever respond to my emails unless I send an email to my Computer Programming advisor and ask her to contact him for me, which always gets him to respond, but I feel that intermediate step should not be required.

Additionally, this course is utilizing Visual Studio 2005, whereas in C# Programming (part 1) we used Visual Studio 2008.

Finally, the syllabus description does not match the course description given by the NCCCS Common Course Library. He has listed:

“This course expands the subject of computer programming using the Visual C# and Visual Basic programming languages with object-oriented programming principles. The focus of this course is the foundations of the .NET Framework. Upon completion, students should be able to design, code, test, debug, and implement objects using the appropriate environment at the beginning level. This course will prepare the student for the initial MCTS .NET certification test, 70-536.”

The actual course description in CCL reads:

“This course is a continuation of CSC 153 using the C# programming language with object-oriented programming principles. Emphasis is placed on event-driven programming methods, including creating and manipulating objects, classes, and using object-oriented tools such as the class debugger. Upon completion, students should be able to design, code, test, debug, and implement objects using the appropriate environment.”

 

So far, no actual assignments have been posted and while I do believe the course schedule will occur as it is listed, this course is coming up a little less interactive than I had originally hoped. Things may have been very independent in CSC 153, but at least Eric would respond to emails.

At this point the lack of involvement and the over-combination of this course with his CSC-293 (Topic in CS: .NET Framework) is starting to annoy me, and I am close to sending an email to the Director of the Division of Information Technology (his only direct supervisor, since he is the department chair) regarding my complaints. I never like taking courses with department chairs or anyone who is good friends with department chairs, it makes the whole student complaint resolution thing more complicated. Usually issues are easier to get worked out if there is a department chair separate from the instructor because they generally know the instructors well and can resolve things quickly and easily without anyone becoming overly bothered by the situation.

I have spent a great amount of time today trying to get a remote X-WIndow session on my Windows PCs (using CygWin) to my Ubuntu system. In WIndows I am used to starting a remote desktop connection and going right to my remote system. Things are a little more complicated at the moment in Ubuntu. First, I had to find the place yesterday to enable an SSH server to begin the process. Today I thought I would spend a small amount of time, discover the magic I need to master and then get it all to work well for me. This didn’t quite happen. I still do not have the ability to open an X-WIndow session remotely and I am having difficulty trying to Google the topic because I am not sure what I am looking for.

Staring at Beta 1 of Windows 7 I am also looking over GITI’s Education module and thinking about the comments I have been given recently about it. It would seem that while in general the assignment portion of the module is complete, except for a few process tweaks and a new feature for bulk edits. However, the course management side of things is not as happy. This is where the parallels are drawn between Windows 7 and GITI’s Education module. Things are done the way that they are because they have always been done that way. A few months ago I put in a few changes to the GITI code to allow for adding complete semesters and following the course process (registration through grading) in a rough fashion. This is what I think of as the “Vista” phase of the new generation of the Education module, things have been changed to move in a new direction, but everything isn’t completely baked and there are a lot of problems that must be resolved before it is ready to meet the world. The biggest thing I am running into is the lack of consistency between pages. One page allows for quality points, one doesn’t. One page takes instructor email, another doesn’t. And the biggest oversight in GITI ever, one of my pages will take a course section number, and the new one does not, but then records to the database as though it does, oops! In general, the new parts of Education are strong, but they are also not as tested as their older (6 years in June) counterparts because they make database modifications in bulk, and at present there is no division between the test GITI and the production GITI. Currently, everything just feels like a giant mess that I haven’t figured out how to sort yet. This semester could make or break the GITI Education module.

This photo course (ART 288DH) is going to start off just like my other course, with an assignment involving stop-motion and blur. I remember really hating that assignment, there are so few things that move around me, my life is very static. Perhaps I should go out on some type of adventure and find motion. My only problem with that thought… it has suddenly become like 30° F outside.

I just discovered the term paper topic for my “Theories of Personality” class, and it is a bit of a shocker: “WHO ARE YOU and WHY DO YOU DO WHAT YOU DO?”.

My first reaction to this is to run away from the topic screaming “I don’t want to know myself!” or some other overly dramatic action. I am a highly variable person, so this will likely be hard for me. I have to manage to lock myself into one state of mind for this paper.

The general idea of the paper is to answer the question of who we are and why we do what we do, defining ourselves by personality theories, then we must defend the theory used. This could be an interesting paper, but at the start my first reaction to it is shock and horror.