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Last weekend was my graduation ceremony. I now have a Bachelors of Science degree in Computer Science. I think it’s pretty cool, but now I have some serious thinking to do about my career.

I should have worked to complete my degree immediately after high school, but I wasn’t really interested in it at the time. I attended community college for a couple years, but never finished. The funny part of my not completing my time at community college is that I was originally majoring in whatever their computer programming degree was at the time. I took a class on systems … Continue Reading

Tonight I finished the last assignments for the fall trimester at school. Of my 3 classes I know I got an A in one, expect to get an A in a second, and am pretty sure I will get a D in the third. Windows Administration and Business Communication were both a lot of work, but not difficult. Calculus was bad. I actually feel like I learned a lot while getting the worst grade of my college career. In any case, it should not hurt my GPA too much, and should be acceptable to let me graduate in two more … Continue Reading

I just came across an O’Reilly article about the reasons people switch to Linux, and how most people who switched did not do it out of hatred of Microsoft.

I’ve used Linux off and on since around 1996 or 1997, and am currently in one of the rare periods where there is no Linux box anywhere in my house. I think in a lot of ways it comes down to choosing the best tool for the job. In 1998 I built a dual-homed Redhat box to act as my firewall for my home network. At the time you … Continue Reading

A while back I posted about Paul Graham’s Startup School. Basically he helps groups of CS students start a company by giving them business advice and just enough money for them to rent a cheap office, buy bandwidth and some computer equipment, and buy a few months supply of Ramen Noodles and mac and cheese. The kids then spend a few months focusing on building a product and hopefully end up with a commercially viable company when they are done. I just came across a blog entry from a guy named Chris Sacca who attended one of the … Continue Reading

The concepts in my Calculus class seem cool enough, but I’m just barely passing. Each week we get problems assigned and I do ok on them, but on the first exam I just blanked out. There is a big difference in reviewing a section in the textbook and solving several problems using a particular technique and getting a list of problems where you have to figure out what techniques are appropriate. The real bummer of the whole deal is that if I exclude the math classes I’d have a 4.0 GPA instead of my 3.7 or whatever it is.

Oddly, the paper from my last post received a perfect score while the class average was only 88%. Now if I could be that lucky in my calculus class…

This is a paper I just finished for my technical communications class. I argue that software development should be considered as a creative art like other forms of writing. It’s not especially well written as it was one of those “write a paper by next week in your spare time between work and other classes” type assignments and I had to throw it together in a few hours, but the main point is still valid. Maybe another argument for coding being creative is the fact I’m better at it than I am writing papers.

I think that the process of creating … Continue Reading

One of the reasons I decided to return to school to finish my CS degree is that I’ve always thought it would be cool to be self employed as a software developer. When I was a kid I thought I could spend my time creating cool stuff and people would pay me for what resulted. Now I’m older and know the world generally doesn’t work that way, but today I read this really cool article about Paul Graham’s new company that gives seed money to college students to help get their startups off the ground. Ok, so he … Continue Reading

It’s confirmed, I still hate math. Last week was the first of fall trimester, so I’ve now experienced a week of two of my classes. The third is only a 6 week class and don’t start for a few more weeks. I have now confirmed that I’m going to be miserable until calculus is over, and technical communications will be 15 weeks of busywork. How’s this for busywork? For next week I have to write 2 papers to email to my professor, write summaries of them to post to the class bulletin board, and then read other students summaries and … Continue Reading

It’s the first week of a new semester and I’ve been looking over the syllabus for my Applied Calculus class. I hate to say it this soon, but this is one of the few classes that will hurt my GPA. Right now I have a 3.79 with 7 classes left to complete my BS in Computer Science, and the 3 classes I failed to earn an A in were the 3 classes I have taken from the math department. My other classes this semester are Technical Communications and Windows Administration, so they shouldn’t be so bad. The communications class will … Continue Reading