(no subject)
Hey Everybody! I'm Back.
I'm sorry for basically ignoring this for the last few months. The three classes I had were surprisingly, painfully intense. It was as bad as last term, where one class (thankfully my only class) ended up giving out 30-40 hour workloads a week. I shit you not. That one class required all-day meetings of 8-hour sessions each throughout the entire week just to finish the workload.
This term I was taking Virtual Worlds (a video game class), Distributed Systems (a class on high-level distributed-system concepts), and Networking (the previous one's prerequisite, which was pretty easy but added more work). I ordered books on Amazon to save money. But, of course, the one book I needed (for DS, the most complicated course), never came. It took them a month to get back to me that they never were sending it to begin with. Some of the most involved and difficult projects for that course I ended up being the leader of my group for, despite not having done any network programming before. It was practically a disaster.
And because all of these were 4th year undergrad courses being taken as graduate courses, each had a graduate project on top of the course-load that had to be done. Networking, a networked battleship game. It wasn't too hard. The other ones... for VW, a Super Bomberman knockoff built from scratch for an arcade machine. For DS, a 110-minute presentation and what ended up being a 55 page report, all on Peer-to-Peer Networks.
Networking had two midterms plus a final. Networking and DS both had random pop quizzes throughout the entire term. Ouch. VW didn't have any tests or quizzes, but required an entire project every two weeks from the start and until exam week. 2 entire mini-video games a month, demonstrating skill in different areas. We were allowed to make them in a special language/environment the teacher invented called Plasmacore at least, which made the workload actually achievable.
So I've spent the last couple of weeks taking time off and thinking about how to post the results of my work and things like that. I want to post a few mini-movies of some sort of what I made, and I'll probably do so in my next post.
For everyone who I have not been keeping up with, reading their livejournals, being around when they needed someone, I'm sorry. I'm only taking one course, a project-based one, and desperately looking for work. So I'll probably have a lot of time treading water this term. For Heather, who I owed a birthday picture that's still only half-complete, sorry too. >_<
And if you will, wish me luck finding work. If I only take this one class and I find no work, I'm wasting the entire term doing crap all. But I didn't have any time to spare looking the last term, which is why I need to try this.
I'm sorry for basically ignoring this for the last few months. The three classes I had were surprisingly, painfully intense. It was as bad as last term, where one class (thankfully my only class) ended up giving out 30-40 hour workloads a week. I shit you not. That one class required all-day meetings of 8-hour sessions each throughout the entire week just to finish the workload.
This term I was taking Virtual Worlds (a video game class), Distributed Systems (a class on high-level distributed-system concepts), and Networking (the previous one's prerequisite, which was pretty easy but added more work). I ordered books on Amazon to save money. But, of course, the one book I needed (for DS, the most complicated course), never came. It took them a month to get back to me that they never were sending it to begin with. Some of the most involved and difficult projects for that course I ended up being the leader of my group for, despite not having done any network programming before. It was practically a disaster.
And because all of these were 4th year undergrad courses being taken as graduate courses, each had a graduate project on top of the course-load that had to be done. Networking, a networked battleship game. It wasn't too hard. The other ones... for VW, a Super Bomberman knockoff built from scratch for an arcade machine. For DS, a 110-minute presentation and what ended up being a 55 page report, all on Peer-to-Peer Networks.
Networking had two midterms plus a final. Networking and DS both had random pop quizzes throughout the entire term. Ouch. VW didn't have any tests or quizzes, but required an entire project every two weeks from the start and until exam week. 2 entire mini-video games a month, demonstrating skill in different areas. We were allowed to make them in a special language/environment the teacher invented called Plasmacore at least, which made the workload actually achievable.
So I've spent the last couple of weeks taking time off and thinking about how to post the results of my work and things like that. I want to post a few mini-movies of some sort of what I made, and I'll probably do so in my next post.
For everyone who I have not been keeping up with, reading their livejournals, being around when they needed someone, I'm sorry. I'm only taking one course, a project-based one, and desperately looking for work. So I'll probably have a lot of time treading water this term. For Heather, who I owed a birthday picture that's still only half-complete, sorry too. >_<
And if you will, wish me luck finding work. If I only take this one class and I find no work, I'm wasting the entire term doing crap all. But I didn't have any time to spare looking the last term, which is why I need to try this.