Details

And...I’m back.

I finally talked with my parents about this whole IT not working out nonsense. Well, with my dad anyways, my mom wasn’t home. I decide that the easiest way to break it to him was telling him I was passively aggressively skipping my classes and not doing the homework. “IT is just not for me” I told him about the sort-of plan I had where I’d pretty much live at my grandparents place & take a few classes while continuing with my on-campus job, parkour & whatever other side projects I start on.

My dad took it all pretty well considering. He said it seemed alright-ish to him. Just that I would have to find a job & my own place, pay rent…(at this point I was kinda feeling the punch, how do I find a job in an economy like this? College grads can’t find jobs!). He said he would talk to my mom, and she would probably say pretty much the same thing.

This was all fine & dandy, I didn’t do much thinking about it until later. See, dropping out of college for a semester to get a job & whatnot would be great and all, except that its not a solution to The Problem. The Problem is that I don’t know what I want to study, working for a semester won’t fix that. On the other hand, if I were to take a semester to audit tons of classes I may be able to figure out what area I am most interested in. That’s something that would be more beneficial than just taking time off. Hell, this blog could become where I write about my experiences in these different classes I take and am therefore able to make a far more informed decision than I can right now. I’ll try pitching that idea, it seems far more reasonable than my original plan. The good news is that the drop period deadline is next Friday, so maybe I can pull this off.

Signs

Another Tuesday, another class. I debated wether or not to bother showing up, in the end I grabbed my bag & walked over. I got an email earlier from the IT department referring student to tutors, and informing us of the final drop dates for classes. I really should drop this class. Or one of my other ones, any one will do really.

Now I’m about to go off on the crazy train, but I feel like the universe might be trying to tell me something. First my hours of web design homework go down the tubes due to no fault of my own, classes are uninteresting at best, on my way to the library I’m thinking about how to tell my parents this isn’t for me (like I’ve been trying to for the last 2 years) and I see a praying mantis, then in the library I open up a book on poems (by Ray Bradbury if you’re interested) & it was basically about following your passion. Of course this is me with selective memory looking at the events that are signaling what I want them to signal. Then again I think about it & the only IT stuff I remember going well is my job.

I know I should just call my parents & get this over with. The later it is the harder it gets. That & the school will refund more of your tuition the earlier it is in the semester.

Possibilities

A few days ago, my web design homework was due, the teacher gave me the chance to turn in everything we’ve done up to this point. I didn’t do any of it. In part because I was in DC and therefore a little busy hanging out with friends, and also, because redoing work is something I’m not a fan of. I’ve basically decided that what I should really be doing is living at my grandparents place where I can help them out when they need it (they’re quite old) and still be able to take a few classes here, practice parkour, and generally hang out with my friends.

The idea would be that I can spend more time on things that actually matter to me, because even if I don’t ‘accomplish’ anything, I’ll be a much happier person than I am right now. Don’t get me wrong, the college environment is awesome, amazing really, all these people concentrated in a particular area, with all kinds of ideas about the world and such. Then There’s classes. I find that they mostly just get in the way of what one really wants to do. Anyway, signing off.

Lost Time

Fortunately I did say this blog will be a bit more eclectic than the last, otherwise this post wouldn’t exist. Not web-design related in the least, but worth mentioning that I got a tutoring job in addition to my other one restarting computers. It pays $20 an hour and my student(?) is great.  He just needs to pass the class and does seem genuinely interested in learning the material, which is a nice plus.

One of the first things he asked me was if I was a Spanish major. “Nope, but it would be a lot easier if I were*” It turned out he had forgotten his book, but he brought index cards to make flash cards with, which was immensely helpful as we ended up working from what he knew would be on the tests and filling out the flashcards with vocab words he needed to learn. Before calling it a day, we agreed on Friday for the next session.

Apart from that, I still heard back from my Web Design teacher, then again, I haven’t redone my 2 hours of lost work either, nor am I inclined to. Since paying attention in class is out, I’m figuring out what I can do instead while still being in class and looking like I might be paying attention. Like writing this post for instance.

Now that I think about it I’d be much better about doing the HW if it were all due by some fixed date near the end of the semester, that way I could do all the homework for one class, then all the homework for the next class, then all the home work for the class after that...as long as I handed it all in by the due date, I wouldn’t lose any points. By me at least, it would be much easier to do this way than to have something due each week for each class, you have plenty of time to do the assignment, and importantly, you can focus on one class at a time instead of freaking out about multiple subjects at once and having to force your brain to switch subjects constantly. It’d make me feel better anyway. /end rant

*I checked, my school only offers a Spanish minor.

DOA

My flash drive sails across the room and bounces off the wall & onto the floor. Fuck that I think to myself before deciding to read my book for a while.

Let me back up some though, three & a half hours earlier I got back to my dorm after a shopping trip with my brother. I stopped by my room long enough to grab my step-by-step web design instruction manual (which really is the best description for it. Actually, I’ll think of a better one later) and the flash drive with my web site stored on it, and my laptop, then went off to The Temple of Apollo to use the computers there because they have Dreamweaver on them. 

I put on some jazz, opened the manual & started following the directions it laid out. Make the headings h1, create a css for the body paragraphs, change the background, oh, just kidding, change it back to the bland white it was before. Add a photo, switch to the index page, take a moment to look at the html for no real reason, rinse & repeat. Some people stopped in briefly, but for the most part I had the lab to myself.

After about two hours I decide I was probably caught up with where we were supposed to be, so I saved all my work & ejected the drive, then plugged it in to my computer to back up.

Device not recognized

My computer alerted me. I tried a different port.

Device not recognized

With a sense of impending doom I tried plugging it back into the computer I’d been working on

Device not recognized

Shit.

I wasn’t even pissed off that the flash drive had decided to kick the bucket leaving me with nothing to show for 2 hours of work. Why should I be? I couldn’t do anything about it, & I wasn’t about to start over right then either. Maybe on a PC I hoped. So I packed up & headed back to the dorm. You know where it goes from there.

I sent an email to my teacher explaining what had happened. Since he hasn’t replied, I have no idea whether he believed me or not, I just hope I have the patience to do all that busy work over again.

So yeah, this finishing all the web design homework ahead of time thing if off to a flying start. If I’m lucky I decide to repeat the process again tomorrow, if I’m not, then its on to plan C, whatever that is.

Scratch Beginings

My last blog was hyper-focused and highly organized. This one will be less so. Mostly because I have just a foggy notion of what exactly it is going to contain. When I sat down to brainstorm ideas for what my next side project was going to be about I came up with several good topics/themes, but in the end I decided to go with one that I was initially austere about. I’ve often told my parents that my college classes are more about following directions than actually learning the material. If anything, prior knowledge of the material is more of a detriment than anything else. “I could finish the whole semester of material in a few weeks if I wanted to” I’ve told my parents (on multiple occasions), so I’ve decided to put my money where my mouth is and show that I can walk the walk.

That said, I don’t know what I’m supposed to write about; how I spent a few hours following directions from the book? Reading it would be the literary equivalent of watching grass grow. I’ll probably end up posting screen shots of what I ‘accomplish’ along with some colorful description of description of how pointless it all is, or the symptoms of my boredom or somesuch. Like I said, those details are still being hammered out and will probably solve themselves as time goes on.

Anyway, this is probably enough of an introduction as to what will be happening on this blog, hopefully this weekend I’ll post a progress update detailing the cloud patterns observed out the window while I was practicing my direction-following skills with regard to web design.