I am beginning to realize that I spend a lot of time on academics in my life. I have 18 credit hours this semester. 18 hours does not translate to just 18 hours per week, it is around double that for proper preparation and work on various assignments. I spend more time than I probably should just checking up on my courses and watching for signs of activity in my online courses, and not the mention the amount of time I spend working on GITI.
I have many times delayed the writing of the code to make my personal portal idea become a reality. I have all but abandoned work on Site Engine itself, and any hope for GITI side management components for it is lost. I have let this type of thing happen to too many of my personal projects. I give more attention to academics than they need. If I can make A’s in all of my courses and pretty much feel like I could do it in my sleep, then there is a problem when I am spending all of my time on it.
I really want to write my personal portal soon, and am planning to spend time this week working on it, at least to get a moderate level of functionality. I have been using my status page as a test ground for many of the concepts and ideas for the portal. The portal will be a lot more verbose and integrate more of myself into it. Looking back to the original plans for using SiteEngine for the portal (http://curtis.kularski.net/SiteEngine.html) I feel like my goals have changed some, and that my original plans were too wide. I do not want to put EVERYTHING together all at once. I do not know entirely what I really do want to accomplish with it, but I do know that I want to add the authentication functions that I originally planned for. Biographical stuff about myself will come in last for this site. I have given thoughts to doing things like adding the file drop stuff to the site as well.
In my present vision for the portal, DisturbingThoughts takes center stage, as my primary blog. I have considered the possibility of integrating all of the blogs into a single feed for the site (based on group-authentication). Also in that vision, things like my Flickr feed and Del.icio.us bookmarks will be present. Almost all aspects of my online presence will come together in an overall summary of recent content. However, there will not ever be any complete loss of the site’s original identity and completeness as a result of the portal existing (exception is Status).
I have a lot of work to do if I want to reclaim my personal desires.
Bad Sleeping Pattern
I do not know how this happened, but I am somehow back on a nocturnal sleep pattern. I recall something over a week ago, where I had to get up at 7 am, and then somehow that has slipped now to being awake during the night and greeting the sun from the wrong side again. I can not stand this pattern, I feel like I am so far off of where I should be, and emotionally I do not handle being awake on this side of things very well. I am awake now and I know its night and it feels like night, like I should be calming down and preparing for bed, even though I just woke up, but I know that if I go to bed now, I will not sleep at all, I will just end up irritated and more awake than I am right now.
I suppose I could actually try to get all of my tasks for the week completed and try to stay awake until the proper time tomorrow evening, but that will be difficult. I do not easily function for 24 hours at a time, but I suspect that waking up when I did will make that a little easier, since I would theoretically only need about 20 hours of being awake to get started back on the right pattern, which would be a big help.
January 25, 2009 – Academic Outlook for the Week
This week I have a fair number of things going on academically.
- Digital Photography Studio – I have to get my second project done by Tuesday at 3PM. I have to do a motion blur, which should be easy, given that my instructor accused my first assignment of being a motion blur and not a stop motion. The challenge assignment for the week is to make 2 things blur in opposite directions. I think I would like to try doing the regular and challenge assignments seperately and see what I come up with. I will probably go in for the critique on Tuesday if I am awake in time.
- Personality (PSYC 310) – I have to read and be preared to discuss Freud. There is a quiz at the end of the week, but a discussion on Wednesday. This should not be too hard, but my quiz scores have not been what I like lately, so I will put more effort into this week’s reading and preparing.
- C# (CSC 253) – First assignments this week. I have to sit down with the Microsoft IT Academy software and do the equivillent of 6 hours of lecture training. I feel like I’m going to need someone to tie me to my chair for that. After the training there is a quiz on the concepts of the labs as well as the first three chapters of reading.
- Nutrition (BIO 155) – I have to prepare for a test on 5 chapters of material that I have not even glanced at yet. This course has taken a back burner to all of my psychology stuff. The material is mostly a refresher from my Health and Wellness course, so this week shouldn’t be too bad.
- Cognitive Psychology (PSYC 421) – This week is a continuation of sensation and perception from last week in Cog. Schedule suggests there might be a discussion topic this week, but that is never certain until the instructor activates one. I’m getting the hang of things in this course, so probably will just need to worry about the reading mostly. I also need to start working on the “Research Paper Preview” assignment, which is basically listing potential sources and providing an abstract.
- Art History 1 (ART 114) – Now this course I am familiar with.. this is my late starting course for the semester. It is the prequel to the course I had last semester. All I need to do this week is get the first chapter started and then take a quiz on it. No pain here, just the exact same as I got comfortable with last semester.
Overall it isn’t a horrible week, but it will keep me busy. Feels like 18 credit hours now, everything falling on my head at once. 🙂 I love academics.
Freud, Sigmund
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.
Transcript Delays
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.
Toy of the Day: Doom Builder
Having played Doom almost nightly for over a year now, Chris and I are quickly depleting the maps available to play. Based on my own interests as well as that feeling of running out of an exhaustible resource I am looking at the option of building some WADs (a collection of 32 maps/levels) of my own. I have found myself being fascinated by some of the things that people have created. I am presently trying out “Doom Builder”, but I am finding it less than intuitive to use, so I may consider going for something else. Below is that a map looks like when designed in Doom Builder.
I am presently having a lot of trouble getting doors to work, other than that, everything else seems to be going pretty easy, including transporters.
Advanced C# Quirks
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.
Alpine Mail Client
During the Summer 2008 semester I was intruced to an email client at UNC called Pine, a very simple, shell email client. In playing with Ubuntu I have found its modern counterpart, Alpine. It is a really simple email client that runs in the Linux/Unix shell. My only problem with it is that it is not multi-account friendly, since it only ackowledges one root INBOX. I really should not find this text based utility easier to use than something like Thunderbird, but for me it is.
Complicated Functionality for GITI
Most things I do in GITI are not that difficult to code, actually, everything I do is very simple code. There is nothing object oriented or even anything more complex than a few simple arrays, it keeps GITI sane to work on to not write it differently (and I’m not sure to what extent PHP would be flexible to other constructs), but there are areas of complication in GITI.
Usually these complications are in the form of logical process or user interface considerations. Last night I did something I have considered doing for a long time, I copied all of the instructors and their email addresses from the class items to the address book system to prepare for a more efficient way to store more information about instructors, including their pictures, office hours, office location, etc. My problem comes in the form of how I want to handle the way GITI thinks about this storage of information. For some unknown reason I wrote some really complicated code last night to break apart instructor names from the single-field format to work in Address Book’s more complicated multiple field format for a person’s name. The code is pretty reliable, have a look at http://users.pcfire.net/~curtis/class_INSTRUCTOR.php.
Now the issue that I have to deal with, which apparently does not involve that code at all, is when, and how to put the instructor in the address book. GITI now supports a multiple step academic procedure going though: planning, registration, semester activation and semester closing/grading. This process means that I have multiple locations where I could make this insertion, but I have to pick the right one. The largest problem I am facing is that users are not required to go through the process, they can do their course statuses manually still, insert a class, and then change its status as needed. For the process, I have thought about putting instructor information in the address book during semester activation, , but I am almost afraid that would be too invasive of that part of the process and perhaps even an unfriendly burden on the user when given the option to do that for all instructors at the same time. During the registration process might be a little more ideal, as it is more of a calm setting, usually involving a lot of waiting after registration itself; but there I run into the issue of instructors changing between registration and course activation. The third possibility I have considered is adding a new step to the process, this process would be a per-course process to be handled after semester activation, something I have temporarily called the “Syllabus” step. This step would give the user the chance to update course descriptions, add special notes about the instructor’s policies, as well as add grading information to GITI. Optionally, I can also let the user finish the process off by adding a bulk insertion of assignments at the end. For users who would change their course information manually, I can check against the database manually at the time course info is edited and let it catch things and process them as needed, since I may end up doing the same thing with edit anyway (as a simpler way to change instructor info than visiting the address book management tools).
The education module is at this point very robust and every decision I make about the way things function will impact its future development. It is now possible to streamline the entire process of documenting academic information in GITI. We are so far beyond adding individual courses and then adding assignments to them (or better yet, adding assignments and associating them with an array of courses stored in a file on disk somewhere).
Once I get over this decision hurdle and then put all of my functionality in a logical order with itself I will spend a good amount of time with Visio or another tool and rebuild the native GITI menus for the module, as well as its own internal index and the “Edu Bar” on the side of all module pages. There is a lot of stuff burried in the module that it is not revealing in a useful way.
Psychology Course Difficulties
I am beginning to worry about the courses I am taking this semester. I am not doing horribly in Cognitive Psychology or Theories of Personality, but I am not doing as well as I would like. I feel like I am putting more effort into the courses than I usually would. These courses are also occupying a lot more of my time than the other courses I have this semester. I don’t know that I have ever had online courses as demanding as these. I plan to stick with these courses and do what I can to work towards an A in both of them. The biggest things bothering me in both courses at the moment are the discussion boards, which I am having a hard time dealing with as well as the quizes on book material. The problem with the quizes is perhaps the most troubling so far. They are open book, but yet I am not able to locate the information in the text like I feel I should be able to, usually costing me a question or two. I am only 2 weeks into these courses so I am no where near giving up yet, but in my quest for academic perfection, they are starting to get in the way.