School Stories

School is a joke. I am in the web technologies program in school, which is a small program, because a lot of the same people are in the same classes as me. I either recognize their names from other online classes or I see them in my other on campus class.

The reason I love online classes is becoming apparent to me, as this semester the courses I wanted to take were actually on campus. When online, I have a total disconnect from the things that everyone hates about school. I don't have to sit face to face with a professor, I don't have to listen to the girl that is in every class that asks question after question keeping everyone else from moving on (by the way, the same girl is in both my classes this semester). I also don't have to hear people talking about this class, and other classes in the program, because the only thing people talk about in the online classes are the assigned conversations.

From listening in on conversations in last nights class, I am certain the human race is doomed.

I realize that I'm not the standard student in these classes, I have almost 10 years experience in the web technologies field, and that's not counting the noodling I was doing all the way back freshman year of high school on geocities to learn how to do HTML. I understand that when I started I didn't understand any of this stuff either. I don't expect my fellow students to be at my level of programming.

That being said, I have students in this class complaining about how hard javascript was, and how they are struggling in the php class. These students have already taken, intro to object oriented programming, programming in java, programming in javascript, and now they are in php... they are complaining about struggles they are having in all of these classes. To me, at this point, basic programming fundamentals should be there. Now it's just learning syntax, and that's only a quick google search away.

The thing about this industry that these people don't understand is you need to be able to adapt. Sure they might be able to make an html page, but so can dreamweaver. You need to be able to keep up with growing technologies, learn new things, and be willing to change and learn a new language if the project dictates it. Ive' been in positions where I've had to learn:

1. HTML (first job)
   
2. SHTML (end of first job, allowed me to have includes)
   
3. CSS (start of second job)
   
4. JSP (start of second job, never messed with this before, but had to learn it to connect to an oracle database, which was also foreign to me)
   
5. Coldfusion (third job, to connect to sql server)
   
6. Javascript (because we started bringing in libraries cause this is the newest technology and backbone for a lot of what makes the web what it is today)
   
7. PHP (newest job, to connect to mysql, using all open source software)
   

And now I might be doing a side project that will have to be written in ASP. If these students are having such a hard time moving through all these programming classes, they are probably picking the wrong occupation.

If you are reading this and don't know programming, this might not make sense, so just understand that all programming is the same, each language has it's pros and cons, and therefore each language is used to do something different. In these classes, we are shown the benefits of each language, and the syntax those languages use. If you don't understand the fundamentals of programing, you will always struggle, no matter what language you are learning.

If you struggled in the first programming class, and couldn't quit grasp it, I understand, I'm sure it's a lot to handle in one semester. But since that class you've taken 3 maybe 4 programming class, all of which go over the fundamentals of programming, and you are still struggling... then you are in trouble.

For instance, one woman in the class was saying how much she struggled in javascript. She went on and on about how she bought extra books that weren't required, stayed up countless hours to work on the class, and still barely scraped by. Why then is she still moving on in this program? Where is the shut of valve that says "you know what, this isn't for me, I don't get it, I've given a fair shake at it, I need to move on." It isn't there... and that is what is scary. She was commenting all programming classes should be in class because online, you are teaching yourself. Well guess what, that's what the real world is, teaching yourself.

She's going to get a job in this field after she finishes. I don't know her back story, but either, the company she works for needs someone who can do web work, or she is trying to branch out to look for another job. Either way, she is going to go in to an interview with javascript, php, java all on her resume. She's going to end up in a position where she just pulls the whole team down because she is incapable of the tasks she is given. I've worked with people like this. They have the resume, they have the bullshitting down... and then they bring the entire team down in flames because they don't pull anything close to their own weight. Even worse, is the fact that she just got out of school, so she "thinks" she knows this stuff, which is even more dangerous. She'll take on projects way above her level, and then she'll start asking everyone how to do things on her team, and everyone will stop their projects to hold her hand, and everyone suffers.

So for the sake of humanity, I want to pull her aside and say, "look, I'm not trying to be mean, I'm really not. I'm looking out for you, and whatever web team you may end up on the future. Stop taking these classes. Find a new career path. Do something else with your life. Programming is obviously not for you. You will not make it in the web world, because the most important ability you can have in the web world is the ability to adapt, and you can not do that."

Or I'll just sit in the back and laugh at her on the inside.

garbage fail kids

computer drama

So I built a hackintosh over the weekend. it was a pain in the ass, and I can see why some people would just prefer to buy a legit mac then deal with that. My problem was, I needed something that apple doesn't offer, so I had to build it myself. With Rob hooking me up with a free case and power supply my total cost was around $350 and I was able to build a nice theater pc that will hide in the closet and provide all my movies and music and such to the living room. This was less then a mac mini, more powerful, and more upgradable.

One of the main problems I had was getting OSX actually installed on the hard drive. The mac can't read any IDE CD drives and needs SATA. I went to best buy, and the only sata drives they had were bluray and I wasn't interested in spending that much money for something I would never use. so I ran to target, and they had a cheap $40 internal DVD drive that would be perfect since all I would ever use it for would be to install the operating system. I probably would have just returned it afterwards.

I get it home, and it turns out that it's IDE, so that's a waste.. So I got this idea to install the OS by getting it on the hard drive before installing it in the new machine. Problem is, I only have an iMac and laptops, and there is no way to add a SATA drive to those machines to install. So I remembered a $50 thing at best buy that was basically an external SATA-usb2 device, and I could just install the OS on the drive like that... except, when I get there, best buy closes at 7pm.

I get home distraught because I can't finish the project, and then I get this genius idea. I bust open my mybook and it turns out, it's a SATA drive in there. So I unhook it, hook the new drive in, plug it in to the laptop, and install OSX right on the drive. Take the drive out of the enclosure, put it into the new computer, and everything is working great.

This long ass back story is just to show the irony of this part. Last night I get home, run upstairs to hop on the iMac for a second, and it's not working at all because the hard drive cashed. It's shot. The computer had been running really weird the last few weeks, and I upgraded the ram thinking that might be the culprit, I never once thought it was the beginning of a hard drive crash. I ran disc utility which was saying that the B tree was screwed up, I looked it up online and found a program that can apparently rebuild that tree called diskwarrior. I downloaded that, and that couldn't even find the drive. So I knew then the entire drive was shot. After spending my entire Sunday working with hard drive problems, and staring at the insides of a computer, I spent all Monday night doing the same thing.

This was a little bit different though. While the media pc is just a case with all the junk and guts easy to access, this was an iMac, an all in one pc that looks nice, but is a serious pain in the ass to access anything but the ram.

This is what I had to deal with to get into the machine... it's actually easier than it looks in that computer abortion picture above. Take the ram plate off, unscrew the other 4 screws on the bottom, lift off the front panel, unscrew the 8 screws around the lcd, lift that out. Now you have what you see in that picture. The hard drive, which I always thought was a laptop drive, is a legit drive. So I put the hard drive that's in the external mybook, and hooked that up inside the media pc, copied all the media off of it onto the internal media pc drive, and then reformatted it and put it in the iMac, and reassembled. I used the discs that came with the iMac, but that only installed Tiger, so I'll spend tonight after class loading Leopard and the slew of software I used to have on there.

Luckily I keep my important stuff in an online dropbox and on external storage so the data loss is minor. Just read this windy post and remember to back your stuff up, and remember that stuff always goes wrong.

Expensive Purchases

I have a slew of expensive purchases that I've recently made, or plan to make because even though we are in a recession, I'm rich, so I plan to flaunt it and take advantage.

During the remodel of our basement I bought:

new couch: $800
new window: $300
new drop ceiling: $300 (still to be installed)
outlets and paint: $200
plus probably $200 in trim and other related purchases... bring my spent total to $1800 so far.

But I'm not half done.. at least in my spending spree.

I'm going to get a TV to mount to the wall, luckily I'm taking advantage of Costco's generous return policy, so I'll probably only put out $600 for that. And I'm moving all my components out of the room and under the steps to hide them. This is going to require an RF remote ($450 including the ir repeater) as well as a bunch of other odds and ends. $30 piece to allow the playstation to receive ir signals, $30 usb hub so I can still play rock band (thanks drew for the idea) and hopefully that will be it. Of course I'm sure I'll be doing other things... I may end up moving the router downstairs if I can get verizon to send the internet through cat5 instead of coax, and that will be a few bucks for a cat5 cable, but oddly enough I will have more things that need to be wired to the internet in my living room than in my office.

Also on the purchase list is an HTPC. I've been toying back and forth with a bunch of possibilities. I've researched popcorn hour, the playstation, apple tv, the western digital box, mac mini and a home built computer. My requirements are the ability to stream every movie I have on my external hard drive whether it was ripped or downloaded, and access to hulu, and netflix streaming services. This leaves me to the mac mini or a home built solution because all other options are missing one or more of the features I want. I'm not spending $600 for the current gen mac mini, and they didn't update it last month, so I'll probably be exploring a hackintosh, which is something I'm really interested in trying out. This way I'll be able to built an HTPC for around the same price as a mini, only it will be a beast and not a 2 year old outdated junky computer.

All in all this looks to be ANOTHER $1800 in expenses on the downstairs, bringing my total to $3600. Hopefully I'm happier with the finished product more-so than I was the last time I re-did the basement. My roommate Sam was a huge help over the project and I couldn't have done it without him. The window in particular went from a 2/10 to a 10/10 easy. He also helped fix all the flaws in my original drywal installation and made that look like a million bucks too. Once we get the floor in behind the bar and drop ceiling finished, it's going to be a room I'm not embarrassed about anymore. It's crazy to think but 2 super bowls ago, Fuzzy and I were tearing out paneling and getting ready to put up drywall, and now it's finally almost finished.

After this I'm going to move on to the bedroom I believe. That's going to get a basic upgrade of furniture, and a paint job, I may look into replacing that window too since Sam did such a good job on the last one. I will also try to enlist his skills on fixing the terrible closet we threw together last time. It will be nice to have a completely finished floor of my house. then I can move upstairs. Oh and the front porch, and the shed. I'll never finish this house :)