Happy New Year
Well, it’s been nearly a full 2 months since my last entry. Obviously, I’ve been a bit busy. I’m sure my friends would like to hear about what I’ve been up to, so here’s a couple of month’s worth of information in one post.
School
November and December were rough months in terms of school. Lots of things all around me started piling up at once. In particular, a project went horribly awry at work (Cleopatra, for those who are familiar with this project) requiring me to jump on board and spend a complete weekend from dawn to dusk working on unit tests. This was shortly after the whole Phoenix, AZ impromptu trip that I needed to make (read my last post to understand what’s been going on here). After this, the College of Architecture project really started ramping up and demanding a lot of my attention, which caused me to pull a lot of extra hours that I wasn’t planning on spending.
Past this, final school test preparations and studying was in order. Unfortunately, I didn’t spend nearly as much time as I would have liked this semester studying for my classes. My math class got the worst treatment of all, which essentially was me ignoring the homework most of the time and then cramming about a week before the test. This went well for the first test, as I made a 73, about 5 points above average on the exam. However, the second test didn’t go very well at all but was more because the professor was being very in terms of how he wanted answers formatted. This caused me to get a 58 on my second exam, which really concerned me because I got my grade about a week before finals. The final exam went better than I thought it was supposed to go, but my final grade was not indicative of this. I received a D in the course, which means I have to take it over again.
However, the positive side was that I thought I was going to get a horrible grade in my ECEN325 course, and turned out with a much better grade than expected: a B. This is not bad considering I was sitting well below the standard deviation of students before the final. So, I don’t have to worry about retaking that course. The only thing I have to worry about is the 3 foot mount of paper that’s sitting on my office floor. This is no joke: I have a 3 foot stack of paper on the floor from this class alone. And Melissa says essays kill trees- classes in general kill them.
CIS
Most of the winter when work was in session I have been busy working on the College of Architecture web site. Many of you probably don’t notice a difference in it right now, but that’s because there isn’t any publically viewable differences. Instead, it’s all how it processes files on the backend and what new tools are now available from the backend. The problem with this was we didn’t write the backend system - it was a developer that was forced from his position unwillingly. So, rather than him leaving a nice plethora of documentation behind for his application, he left with telling me as much as he possibly could with the application and I was expected to learn how it operates and figure out any problems with it. When we tried to deploy it the first time, I ran into numerous unexpected errors and problems which forced us to abort the deployment. Instead, I spent a couple of 50 hour weeks trying to figure out what was necessary to be able to get the application ready for launch. Once that had been determined, I spent a lot of time both documenting the system and fixing what was missing or broken.
