My Day – July 24, 2008

Got up at around 5am, and I didn’t do much for the first few hours except read email, watch some stuff on YouTube, bookmark some shit in Del.Icio.us and things like that. After a while I ate breakfast, and went back to email. I also read the feedback in my digital photography class from my instructor. He finally got around to grading the course. I won’t know until tomorrow morning what my grade is (after the registrar processes grades overnight).

After I got un-lazy I went to the wheel again today. I practiced some bowls and plates using the new texture I started working with. Overall I am happy… but it has been too long since I last trimmed bowls and plates. It is quite challenging to do… remember what hardness level is just right for trimming and things like that. I will get back in the hang of it though. I plan to work on ceramics for the next two or three weeks until I get fully back into the swing of things. I will be working on ceramics at home right up until I go back to class and I start working on a project there. I plan to have large functional objects as my project. I will be returning to bowls as well as working on my newly acquired techniques from last fall for coil building on wheel forms to make things like tall bottles… things I could never do from a whole lump of clay. After working on the wheel for a little while I took a short break for lunch and returned to the week again until I had to clean up to make dinner. After dinner was cooking I went outside to take some pictures for a friend. After dinner was finished being eaten, I went back outside to let Chris take some pictures of me.

Once that excitement ended, back inside for some trimming of the remaining pieces. Now I have cleaned up again and I am exhausted. I just remembered I still have to empty my slurry/refuse clay bucket before bed… then I can sleep.

2008FA Schedule Presently

I have been wrestling so much with course selection for Fall this time. I don’t know how many times I have made adjustments to the schedule. Today is the last day to file schedule changes for Gaston until "late registration" which is a day before classes start. The schedule currently looks like this:

Fall 2008
Code
Course
School
HR
GR
CSC234 Advanced C++
Central Piedmont Community College
 3.0
HIS131 American History I
Central Piedmont Community College
 3.0
ART115 Art History II
Gaston College
 3.0
ART281 Sculpture I
Gaston College
 3.0
ENG131 Introduction to Literature
Gaston College
 3.0
ART288C Ceramics Studio
Gaston College
 3.0
Total Hours:
18.0
GPA:
NA

I think I am going to attempt the semester at 18 credit hours, with 2 art studio courses. I might end up regretting this decision, but if I do, there is always the option to drop a course. The only course I feel I might regret is the Art History course, but only because I have had bad experiences with art history in the past. I could potentially be fun.

I am holding off on photography this semester since I just had Digital Photo during the summer. I think I need to calm back down from it and take things easy in that department, maybe taking some time to refocus myself and figure out what I want to do with photography in the long run. The goal of taking photography during the summer was to become more familiar with the aesthetics of photography as well as learn the technical details. I have accomplished both this semester, and I am very excited about that. Before taking another photography course I want to explore getting more interesting subjects and expanding beyond this "nature photography" thing that I seem to be doing a lot lately.

My Day: July 22, 2008

My day started at 1am today. I didn’t do much then, just browsed some porn and looked at modifications I could make to GITI and things like that. I ate breakfast around 5 or so.. had a waffle with natural peanut butter (yummy Open-mouthed).

At around 6am I brought out my pottery wheel. It was the first time I had really touched ceramics in a while. I worked for about 2 hours before taking a break, during which I went outside with my camera and took some photos, mostly of trees and mostly macro. Then I worked a little while longer at the wheel before going to drop off a package at Office Depot, took care of some other tasks and spend 15 minutes starting at/fondling a Nikon D60 (and its friends the D80, D40 and D300). Know what it feels like to hold a $2500 camera? HEAVY! It wasn’t a good heavy either, just bulky and hard to use. I like the D60, its lightweight, but its got awesome features and I believe I could live with it for a long time. Got back home at 12PM…ate lunch and then went back to the wheel for a final throw and then some trimming. In all I made 2 plates, 2 cups, a few bowls and one really odd container. About 10 pieces total. I had about 4 misthrows today. It was pure pleasure throwing today, so I didn’t go for speed or anything like that… I just threw to be throwing.

After cleaning up the kitchen from where I was throwing I made dinner. I made a pan-fried chicken wrapped in bacon, some pinto beans (boring I guess, but I like them, its a southern thing I suppose) and a batch of cornbread muffins (and some Mexican cornbread muffins for those who find the others lacking something). After making dinner I received the day’s mail, which included my ShutterFly orders (except for one piece, which for some dumbass reason is being handled by UPS Mail Innovations… it goes to UPS to deliver to USPS, who delivers it to me). Overall I am happy with ShutterFly’s service. My only complaint is that the 8x10s should be on thicker paper, but well… I say that about everyone.

Now I think my tired ass is ready for bed… it has been  a long day and its a miracle that I am still awake now. Sleepy

Rant: Stupidity of Web Users

I can understand the general Internet population not rotating their sideways pictures because it is a fairly hard thing to do… but what about the people who have 3000+ images on Flickr? There is a built-in rotation feature that is very fast and very easy to use on Flickr, but yet many people ignore it. Are the people stupid, or simply lazy?

Solution Planned

I think I have the solution to the GITI crisis.

1. GITI will register the special cases in its "fields" table

user

module

field

info

data

value
$user education institutional_grade $institution $grade $points

 

2. Education will follow the new v2 protocol for managing its own fields entries, allowing it to take over inserting records about institutions and maintaining information about them, including their grading system.

3. GITI will loose all "combined" GPA and "quality points" functions… since they aren’t really valid anyway.

4. All current GPA calculations will be modified to cause a database check for the existence of a grading scale, if found, it will be referenced  for all calculations, if not, the default grading scale will be used, and a further check will not be run for the situation.

5. All grade input screens will be modified to use the special systems in their lists… this will be done on an array to prevent the database from having to handle a query for each course on the record. As in #4, defaults will be used if no special case has been logged.

 

I really hate how GITI feels like i’m flying by the seat of my pants when shit like this comes up. I guess I have to work harder at expecting this type of thing.

 

All of this sounds good in theory at the moment, but I’m way too tired to code this fucker right now. 

Million Pockets

How many "pocket" devices do you carry? Why is there no single device to take care of all of the needs of "pocket" device users?

  • Cell Phone
  • Personal Digital Assistant
  • MP3 Player
  • Television Remote
  • Digital Book Reader
  • Blood Sugar Tester*
  • Global Positioning System Receiver
  • Compact Digital Camera
  • Garage remote*
  • Digital voice recorder
  • Laser pointer*
  • Handheld text scanner*
  • Personal Security Siren*
  • USB Memory Key (or equivalent in device form)

There have been a lot of attempts made at combining 2 or 3 of these things into one device, but no one has ever gotten close to all of them. All devices seem to be missing something.

The closest thing I have seen is a few Smart Phones that have phone, PDA, digital book, compact camera, GPS receiver and television remote (via IR output) capabilities. Those devices tend to lack in the MP3 player department though because of the lack of storage, and that makes the digital book end a bit crap as well. Also, those devices tend to weigh a ton and have really sucky keyboards.

Amazon’s Kindle is a great device, but it doesn’t do a lot for the money. Its biggest problem is it doesn’t do much. A few weeks after the device was released, Amazon started selling MP3s… guess what this device doesn’t do.

 

This post isn’t to be taken seriously. I have been up way too long.

Varying Grade Systems

GITI’s education module was written to be very simple, it understands standard letter grades (A, B, C, D, F) as well as a few other concepts (Pass [P], Incomplete [I]), but it doesn’t know how to deal with anything other than whole letters on a 4 point scale. Currently this is hard coded in GITI, and there is no flexible grading system stuff available. Perhaps this was short sighted when I originally wrote GITI. When I think about it, there are a lot of problems here, including the absence of understanding for "Credit By Exam" grades… those are currently handled as "Pass" with a note on the course’s record. Yet another area I have missed is "Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory" grading as might apply for a graduate program.

There are just too many grade systems to try to adapt for, so maybe on GITI’s next update I should bring in the ability to attach a grading system to each course using the fields module (which has handled way too few things lately). It would be cool to let the thing use a different scale attached to each school (but fall back to standard 4.0 when none is specified). I had a way not fun trip through the website for the UNC Registrar’s office the other day, finding stuff like graduate programs that use grades like H (High Pass), HP (Above Average), L (Low Pass). Each school at UNC has its own grading system. It would be impossible to interpret all of these possible systems and integrate them into GITI, so a per-school system input would be the only way to make this work.

When did it become so hard to just get an "A"? Confused

I just hope I don’t have to figure out how to tell GITI how to handle the possibility of me getting an "A-" in Digital Photo.