There is nothing happier than walking in a bit early to work and being handed back your Pocket PC you shipped back to Toshiba only days before. I had Wizard with me the whole day, but because his battery was drained, I couldn't really use him. It was good to know he arrived safely back though. At some point while tutoring in the morning, it dawned on me that about 90% of the schools were probably not in. It then occurred to me that I must have been one of the "lucky" schools that ignores holidays. While there was still a happy mood present, I felt somewhat cheated out of a beautiful day as I sat in class for 8 hours. However, through this sitting in class, I learned two very important things. The first of these was that Adobe Photoshop and the University's Deep Freeze program mix about as well as oil and water. Deep Freeze works by creating a fake drive (mirror) of the data, from which the user works. This becomes very flawed when you break out Adobe Photoshop and have a very large scratch disk going. I managed to kill the operating system and get the BSOD 8 times across 3 machines using this method. The file was an 8x10 image, 300 DPI, and that was all it took for errors to come out of the woodwork. I finally gave up on the imaging and decided to pay attention in class. We were continuing our discussion of Big-O, and I couldn't get the Big O theme song out of my head.
The second thing learned was more of a reaffirmation than anything else. Thomas asked me to talk about the material in our database class, so I explained intersect tables and relationships to the class. Since nobody really cared about Mountain View Community Hospital, we had some fun with it. We came up with silly criteria (for example: patients needed to have an id number, first and last name, and an animal of some kind). This pointless randomness seemed to help spawn creativity, and what would have otherwise been a very boring database to practice on become somewhat amusing, and most people seemed to get the information. And I had heaps and scads of fun. Yes, it was so much fun that it was worthy of the title "heaps and scads". It was a good reminder of why I was wanting to go all the way through the school hoops and come full circle to teach at a University. It was fun, they had fun, and they were learning something because they wanted to. The actual concept of people (my peers) wanting to come to class and learn still amazes me. It is fun to be casual, be informative, be helpful, and see people get the concept. Aspiring to be the Computer Science teacher that people actively want as their professor is why I am doing all this to begin with; it feels damn good. Now for those who know me or have read this for a while, teaching is something that tends to stick around in my family. The exception to this, however, is I don't really care for kids all that much. While I know University students are still kids in a lot of ways, they aren't the kind of kids that run up and wipe their nose on your jeans or things like that.
I ditched my 6-10 class early, as everything we needed to cover was done by 8. I spent the night finally turning everything on my page into XHTML (still have to do a few more things for full compliance) and configured my RSS and RDF feeds.
Despite the Monterey cold, I am so glad we don't get snow.
all you have to do is ?
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