Caught In The Whirlwind
Posts tagged school
Post Cold Update
Oct 16th 2009
Time for an update. I’m still working on getting over the cold I contracted earlier in the week. It’s been pretty mild except for Wednesday where I had to call in to work on account of being very tired and a little dizzy. It was one of those colds that just went straight to your head. Thankfully the cough situation has been mild, but knowing me, I’ll probably have a lingering cough for a few weeks. It’s how I operate.
Speaking of Wednesday, that was the day the apartment complex maintenance guys decided to actually do some maintenance. On the roof. Above my bedroom. And then when that was done, the punk kid who lives across the hall (but our bedrooms share a wall) apparently discovered techno music which he enjoyed playing ridiculously loud with the bass turned way up. People really need to understand the physics of sound and subwoofers when they move into an apartment…
So needless to say, my day of rest wasn’t so restful. But despite it all, I’m feeling better and want to actually be productive this weekend. I haven’t done much non-class graphic design stuff in a little while, so I want to get back to working on my mom’s website and trying to finish that design this weekend. I also really want to do a theme for this blog/my personal website at some point to make it look less…generic. Maybe I can poke at that a bit this weekend too.
Speaking of school, things are going well there. I can’t believe it’s roughly halfway through the semester right now. Time’s been flying by and I’ve been busy working on my projects. We’re recreating one page articles now from magazines and I found a review of Dream Theater’s latest album in my Classic Rock Presents Prog magazine. It looked fairly simple when I chose it, but it ended up being…complicated. Lots of images and text boxes and lines that I had to spec out and measure. I’m about ready to start working with it on the computer though. Making some good progress and my grades are good as well.
Looking forward to a (hopefully) productive weekend.
School Stuffs
Oct 9th 2009
Just figured I’d throw out an update on my school stuff considering we’re almost halfway through with the semester already. Man, time just flies.
Anyway, my Digital Typography course is going pretty well. I’m sporting a perfect grade at the moment based on the quizzes we’ve taken. Hopefully that continues onward when it comes to the projects we’ve been turning in, but I think I’m in good shape there too. I finished making the business card/letterhead/envelope project (tied in to my mom’s website as previously mentioned) last night and started work on recreating a one page article. The one I settled on was out of the reviews section of Classic Rock Presents Prog magazine containing the review of the most recent Dream Theater album. Always good to find something you’re interested in to work on.
Wassy and I were there later than the rest of the class (apparently, everyone decided to take off at like 9:30 despite the fact the class runs to 10:20ish) and we got to discussing with the instructor. It’s always fun when instructors complain to you about other students in the class. Like this annoying guy who used to be there (wasn’t there this class) that made all this annoying noises. Or the kid in the back of the room that hasn’t turned ANYTHING in since the class began. Why even bother going to school if you’re just going to treat it like a joke?
In other news, the wine country trip might be looking a little iffy right now. Wassy has a pretty bad cold at the moment and I dunno if she’ll be up for going. We’ll have to see what the situation is today and tomorrow. These illnesses this year are turning out to be very inconvenient for planned events. First the stomach bug, and now this.
Random Happenings
Sep 18th 2009
I’ve got a few things to report about since my last update.
First of all, I think I’ve finally settled on a basic color scheme/design for my mom’s quilting/craft website. I’m still tweaking it at the moment and I’m trying to decide if it looks too…web 2.0-y for the craft content. But I finally found something I liked well enough to take it out of the initial planning stages. Going to see if I can get some more work in on it during my lunch here.
It’s a good thing that’s getting finalized too since one of the first projects in the Digital Typography course that I’m taking is to do a business card/letterhead/envelope for something, so I figure I can work her up some stationary while I’m at it. The course is coming along quite well. We’ve finally started working on the computer and with InDesign which I’m finding pretty cool. I’m learning some stuff and generally enjoying myself which is a pretty good sign. I’m not regretting the decision to go back to school.
On a totally different note, I got a little bored yesterday and continued my blog transfer. I’ve got everything that I’ve posted on Vox from when I signed up through November 2006. Once I get out of 2006 the months will speed up as I settled into more relaxed posting style.
Lastly, on a product review front: The new Muse album has REALLY grown on me since I posted my initial review. The weaker songs clicked and it’s become one of my favorite albums of the year. Which only serves to diminish the Porcupine Tree album more…Oh well. I’ve also been enjoying Scribblenauts. But I’ll save that for a separate post when I get a minute to do a proper review.
Long Week…
Sep 12th 2009
Man, I’m glad it’s the weekend. This week at work was really hectic. We’re extremely busy right now with stuff…we could use a couple extra employees but that’s not going to happen due to the money crunch we’re under. And that was before they cut our hours. Now it’s even worse. I have a bunch of projects going on at once that are taking up all my time and then they add some other stuff on top of it… Sigh. It’s just frustrating.
Makes me kinda wish that I could just stop and do the school thing full time, but that doesn’t work for me financially either. I’m more interested in doing that than anything at work right now. Ah well. Just need to keep on plugging.
At least my work has gotten recognition by the president of the company. He apparently really likes what I’ve been doing on my web billing project. So that’s a definite plus right there.
I’m going to take this weekend to relax and decompress a bit. I want to work on some design stuff this weekend too since it’s been a little while since I’ve touched some of these things I’m working on. My mom’s website particularly, as I started that a looong time ago and haven’t really gotten anywhere. Hopefully I can get moving on it somehow…
That’s One Way To Do It
Sep 10th 2009
For my Digital Typography course this week we had to do a little homework assignment. The instructor gave us a sheet with 6 different kinds of type and we were supposed to look through magazines, newspapers and things like that to see if we could locate examples of each one.
I was able to find every type pretty easily in the newspaper and the copy of Cycle World magazine (wonder what the person at the Rite Aid I bought it at thought of me, a guy who most definitely has no business on a motorcycle buying a copy of Cycle World). Except for one…the gothic old style calligraphy type font. It’s just not used very often these days. I found one example (Colonial Laundromat) but Wassy had already used that and I wanted to find something different.
So I jokingly mentioned “Oh, I know! I’ll go get my diploma and cut that up!”. This brought up the fact that my friend Jay actually has two diplomas from when he graduated college. One of them was screwed up and didn’t list that he graduated “magna cum laude” so he got a replacement. But he still kept the screwed up one. So he offered to give it up to the homework gods and so it came to pass that I glue-sticked calligraphic text reading “Bachelors of Science” to my homework. I put the colonial laundromat one just below it in case it had to be from a newspaper…but I figured it doesn’t hurt to be unique!
Ready For School (Maybe?)
Aug 11th 2009
I swung by the local college that I’m going to be attending in the fall to see if there were any books to buy for my course (there wasn’t) and if there was anything else I needed to do in order to make sure I could attend classes without trouble (nope).
The book thing, knowing the book store, is probably a result of somebody not ordering a book. And the second reply is probably somebody who didn’t know what they were doing, knowing college administration.
But they say everything’s set and I’ve got all my supplies (aside from a potential software purchase for the Digital Typography course that I’m taking) so I’ll just have to see what happens. I’m really excited to be going back to school, which still amazes me because I didn’t think that I would ever be excited after I graduated with my Computer Science degree. Hopefully this helps me find the path that I’ve been searching for.
Unfortunately, it’s not all rosy on the design front. I’ve been trying to work up a design for my mom’s craft business website but I’m having a very hard time with it. I have a bunch of ideas, but nothing seems to be working right. It started with fiddling with the color scheme but then that devolved into the entire idea I had for the look and I’m not sure that I can salvage the idea at this point. I’m getting the feeling that I’m just trying to force something that is destined not to work at all. Might have to switch back to a more conventional website design.
I'm Alive! And…Done!
May 5th 2008
As you may or may not have noticed…I've pretty much fallen off the face of the earth for the past couple weeks. This isn't because I wanted to stop blogging or because I died or something. It was because I was spending my time working extremely hard on finishing up my last semester of college.
And I'm proud to say that, as of 12:30pm on May 5th, 2008…
I'm done.
Letting that sink in for a minute here…
I'm…done.
For the past 7 years I've been working through school, sometimes full time, sometimes part time while working full time…fighting against people giving me the wrong information, taking classes I didn't really need…not knowing that I had to take certain classes that I wasn't…
But it's over. I handed in my final project this afternoon, I have my final grades, my overall GPA, my name was in the paper as graduating from the school.
I'm done…
*collapse*
I'll write more when I can stand up again.
The End? Possibly? Maybe?
Apr 23rd 2008
My meeting with the professor overseeing my project yesterday went fairly well I thought. I really should have been keeping on top of things before so it didn't come down to the wire like this, but all in all it wasn't bad. He generally liked what I had done and just had a few suggestions for extra functionality to add which I'll try to stuff in over the weekend. It's going to be a fairly busy weekend/next couple days for working on stuff. He also told me I had a little buffer for getting things in if I needed to take it in order to get the project finished up correctly since grades don't absolutely need to be turned in until the end of May. I should be done next week or the week after at the absolute latest.
In other news, it looks like my degree evaluation has been completed finally and I meet all of the requirements for graduation assume I pass all of my courses this semester. So it looks like the end is in sight. Hopefully. Maybe.
Something will get screwed up, I know it…
Couple Quick School Updates
Apr 18th 2008
Just some quick school updates in case anyone was interested. First, statistics. I ended up getting a 90 on that test I took last week, despite finishing about 30 minutes before everyone else. So that's a definite plus!
Also, I was finally able to get my project sponsor to acknowledge my presence (also mentioned in my post last week) which is another definite plus. I'm supposed to swing by his class on Tuesday and show him what I have done. Hopefully he likes it and doesn't make me totally redo it because that would mean one very, very long week for me next week, and I'd rather do more constructive things with my time.
So, as promised, a couple of quick school updates for you. I have some musical stuff that I need to write about too later if I remember. I've just been (again) too busy to post anything recently, so I've got a backlog of things that need discussing.
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