Rise or Fall

I turned twenty-two today. My Ancient Near East professor jokingly asked our class what we had done with our lives when talking about Alexander the Great. The man was twenty years old when his father, King Philip II, was assassinated, most likely in a plot formed by Alexander himself. By the age of twenty-two, he was invading the Persian Empire and Asia. People always talk about turning over the reins of control to the next generation. I am seven months out from my collegiate graduation. I watch the fate of today on the news. I think about the fate of tomorrow when I go to bed. I have spent the last 17 years of my life studying in school for the day when I will look down and see the fate of the world in the palms of my hands. You can call me arrogant for thinking I will have such importance when that day comes. I will call you ignorant for not realizing the weight which rests on your shoulders. It is not about you or me. It is about us. The choices we make as individuals affect us on a whole. Whether we like it or not, we are in this together. Remember those classes in school when you were assigned a group to complete a project? It is time to pull those skills down off the shelf and dust them off. You are on this planet with the rest of us and we have to find a way to make it work. You can stand in the corner uncertain of what to do. If you do, I will climb up on the table and start to direct you. We might do everything wrong. Maybe we will do everything right. I am guessing we will make some mistakes along the way, but we will also get a lot of things right. However, in the end, rise or fall, I am determined to make it one hell of a story. Regardless, get involved. I do not care where or with what, but do your share to make a difference.

The Finals Dance

I am currently in the middle of my finals week. I had my easiest test Monday night which I got a B+ on. All I had to get on it was a C or so to maintain an A- overall in the class, and it was impossible for me to get an A overall so the test was pretty pointless. That was for Personal Wellness, a class which is two-thirds pointless; hence, my lower grade in it. I do not do well with pointless schoolwork. I never have.

I spent the vast majority of today studying as I have my three hardest tests tomorrow: Ancient Near East, History of Ireland, and the dreaded Perspectives on Death & Dying. I have to get a B on my Death & Dying test to pass the class since I need an overall C to have it count for a major requirement. It will be my lowest grade ever largely due to difficult content, busy work which I also do not do well on since I see it as pointless, being in the thick of my mono during the first test, an overwhelmingly busy semester anyways, and all topped off by the fact that my professor and I do not see eye to eye. The class and his test questions are all highly philosophical with no single correct answer. Unfortunately, the only answer he accepts is his. I tend to be too stubborn to go along with such games, and it gets me into trouble.

As for the other two classes, my Ancient Near East test will be fine since that professor and I get along great as far as class content is concerned. This is my third time having him. I got an A- and an A in the previous two classes with him. The only reason I got an A- in the first class, Ancient Greece, was because I was not quite sure what to expect of him in regards to his tests and paper right away. His classes are just tough enough that it cost me an A. The second class, Ancient Rome, I passed with flying colors. I expect the same for this class. History of Ireland will be difficult, but I should do alright on it. I am expecting somewhere in the B+ to A range overall in the class.

My last final is a presentation for my Translation of Programming Languages class. It will simply be a demonstration of our semester long project, the language we designed, and our compiler for it. Our compiler still needs some serious work to be ready for this; not to mention, we have some documentation to write up as well. My last final tomorrow ends at 7pm. After that, I will grab some "Vitamin C", Skittles, and prepare to go to work. I expect to pull the stereotypical CS all-nighter to complete as much of the compiler as possible. I have to take a break at 10am on Thursday to go into work to have a meeting with my boss and Jess who is filling my position over the summer. The meeting will be rather simple and straightforward to get Jess caught up on anything and everything she needs to know to pick up where I have left off. After all of that, it is time to hit the parties Thursday night and catch some undergraduate research presentations on Friday morning.

Right now my latest tweet on Twitter is "am in the calm before the storm." In a very sick and morbid way, finals week is kind of fun for me. It is stressful due to the importance of it along with the amount of work to be done. Yet at the same time, there is a lot of fun to be had in destressing and taking breaks from studying. This has been one of the busier finals weeks for me due to the difficulty of my classes, the business of my semester, and the lateness in the week of my actual test times. Normally, I have bought a new videogame as a sort of destressor. This year I have simply made good use of my NHL 08 videogame while watching the Stanley Cup Playoffs on television. Attempting to balance the work and play gets interesting. In some ways, it becomes like a dance as the two play off each other. The harder you work, the harder you need to play to make up for it. Every once in a while, there is a chance to sleep. I guess you could say the expression "work hard, play hard" could not be more fitting. I normally prefer the altered phrase "work hard, play harder" but it just does not always work that way during finals week alone. The week following is another story...

Compiler Project Review

I am currently in a Translation of Programming Languages class. The primary focus of the class is on building a compiler. My class, all six of us, decided to be one single team. We then decided to create our own language which we would compile to Java bytecode. We have been severely behind schedule the entire semester. Recently, I have been thinking about some of the reasons why.

I believe the largest problem was our use of the waterfall lifecycle model. It was not our intention, but we fell into it nonetheless. This caused us to attempt to develop components from start to finish without error on the first try. Not a good idea. The other problem is we have six people on the team. There are not enough different pieces to each component for all six people to be working on one component. An agile pursuit would have suited us far better. Towards the end of the semester as we have started to make progress, I have seen us shift a little more to such tendencies. The nice part about it is it gives us more parts to work on. This allows us to divide the team up rather than clustering on one component and getting in each other's ways.

The second largest problem we are having is lack of documented project management. Everyone is kind of off working on their own random thing and we randomly bring it together in the svn. However, there is no rhyme or reason to what different people are working on. We have a wiki for documenting decisions, plans, et cetera, but we have not made proper use of it. It probably would have been a better decision to use some sort of project management software to accompany the wiki. One example of the software I am referring to is Trac. This would have let us keep better track of our different requirements and bugs. From there, we could have potentially had a better idea of who would be working on what.

We have had a few other problems along the way such as our use of Subversion for version control. That being said, these other problems have been minor in comparison to the two problems I discussed above or they have been a consequence of those problems. Moral of the story: Software Engineering and Project Management is important!

My Experience with Death

For my Perspectives on Death & Dying class, I had to write a paper on an experience with death. Here is my paper:

It was midday one Saturday in February of my junior year of high school. I was hanging out with a group of friends playing some games. It was the usual routine when we were not off on some school activity. My buddy, Chris, got a call. One of our friends had been shot in a hunting accident. It all seemed a bit surreal. Surely, he was going to be alright. We continued playing games as if things were not too shaken up, but phone calls kept coming. As the day progressed, the story changed. Our friend had committed suicide.

I have a thousand stories I could tell regarding that day and the week following. The Sunday morning church service was awful because he was not there. Sunday night, I was at Pizza Hut with people I had not hung out with in years. Monday night was a special church service which had more in attendance than I have ever seen in twenty one years. The wake resulted in a line of people stretching out the front door and down the sidewalk. There was a school gathering. A group of my friends walked out the front doors of the school in the middle of the day on Monday. We skipped the second half of Wednesday too. There were no repercussions. They still held class on the day of the funeral, but it was pointless. The cemetery was packed. There was an empty chair at graduation the following year.

Out of all of this, perhaps one of the most important thing I learned is suicide is not simply about the individual. I watched a town of 2,500 people come to a screeching halt in a single weekend. When the topic of suicide comes up in any sort of conversation, my mind starts looking at all the people around me who would be affected. Let me just say it is a long list that stretches across the continent. Not because I am important. Just because that is the effect it has on every single person we know. When I go home on holidays, I still have a few momentos sitting in my bedroom. When Chris and I hang out, I see our friend's baseball glove sitting on his desk just below a picture of them. When I was home for Christmas, another high schooler had committed suicide. Everyone at church was expressing their sympathies. Turns out I knew his brother. Did I mention my friend committed suicide on his mother's birthday?

The other major lesson I learned was how quickly it all happens. The expression “one minute they are there, the next they are gone” is not something to be taken lightly. I remember one night in junior high when a game of hide-and-go-seek had broken out on a city block. My friend and I hid out behind Chris's house just talking about life because the game was not all that exacting. I remember baseball games, making silly videos, and the hours spent playing Golden Eye on the N64. Never even thought about the idea we would not graduate together. Quite honestly, up until that point, I had never thought about anything like that. I was too busy pushing through high school to get into a good college, build a career for myself, and setup the rest of my life. I guess you could say I learned to “stop and smell the roses.” It became alright if I was not playing my best during a tennis match. Taking time to get away from school work and play a few hours of videogames during a stressful week was not blasphemous. I still find myself buying a new videogame during finals week. I put off writing this paper on Monday night because my girlfriend and I had a carton of ice cream in the freezer.

I guess what I am trying to say is take a moment to look around you. When you find something you like, take the time to enjoy it. It will not be there forever.

Stumbling in the Dark

I frequently have to write journal entries about things I have read for my Perspectives on Death & Dying class. This week we read Seven Choices: Finding Daylight After Loss Shatters Your World - A Pocket Guide by Elizabeth Harper Neeld. I have not written anything new in a while so here is my journal entry for this week:

“If anything, this time of Stumbling in the Dark feels worse than the original crisis-, the news of the loss itself.” (Neeld 2003 12) I thought the name for this phase was perfect. I remember the week following my friend's suicide in high school. I could not describe it any better. It really was worse than the original day. The first day was not too terribly shaken up simply because I could not comprehend the news. The following days found me completely clueless about how to handle myself. The first day back to school was ridiculous. It all seemed pointless. It was as if I was just putting on an act. I really did not care to be there, but at the same time, I preferred to be there over sitting at home staring at my wall. My nights were filled with as many distractions as possible. Not one moment was dedicated to homework because that would have meant sitting down by myself. There was Pizza Hut, ping pong, movies, videogames, pool, and so on. A group of us took a couple half days off from school to just run around town. Many of these things we had never done before and would never do again.

Neeld mentions an “increase in accidents” as being normal. (Neeld 2003 12) There was a special church service one night that week. On the way there I was involved in a minor fender bender with a couple other classmates. It was not my fault, but I do not doubt for an instance that I would have been able to prevent it if I were more focused. We did not bother even stopping to deal with the accident. Everyone of us knew where the others were going. Once we got to the parking lot, we glanced at our bumpers, had a minor discussion, and left it for our parents to deal with.

It was the same night as the church service that I got into a fight with my girlfriend. She thought I should seek consolation and comfort from her because she was my girlfriend. I essentially stiff armed her in an effort to stand on my own. It does not surprise me since that is a normal reaction for me in my high school years. However, at the time, I was just stumbling in the dark.

End of the School Year

You know it's the end of the school year when:

• it takes you 30 minutes to drag yourself out of bed to go to class
• your girlfriend misses you so much, she is happy just to get an opportunity to talk to you via instant messenger
• you remember enjoying the nice weather during spring break through a window because you were stuck in the library doing research
  
• it is still snowing, but at least you can find your car
• the police were called in for a domestic disturbance last night when neighbors heard you fighting with your compiler code
• you were happy the police were called in because your code was kicking your butt
• you spend your morning writing a blog rather than doing homework because you are still not on talking terms with your code
• you speak of your code in terms of a bad relationship with a spouse
• you have finally recovered from straining a muscle playing drums on Rock Band because you did not have the time to play in three months
• Duke failed to make the Elite 8 again despite always being in the dance
• your professor gives a lecture on the military aspects of the Assyrian Empire and The Illiad comes to mind instead of Call of Duty 4
  

Graduation

As of right now, I am intending to graduate on December 19th of this year. By my count, that means I have exactly 272 days left of college. I remember graduating from high school. Everyone was talking about how they did not want to leave and how they would miss their friends. I felt completely different. I was ready to move on. If you ask me, my junior year was more like a senior year whereas my senior year was almost like an encore. I put a lot of time and effort into excelling at all the various activities I was in during my junior year. I definitely made the most improvement. I also probably had the most drama that year, but I guess that is what high school is for. How else are you supposed to start building your character? By the time my senior year rolled around, I knew where I was going to college, and I had a scholarship locked up in October. I was primarily kicking back and enjoying my last chance to do everything. In some ways, I think maybe I should have cared a little more about the outcome than how much I enjoyed just participating. Still, I am perfectly happy with how high school turned out for me. I knew everything I did was my last and it could not be any other way. Why worry or be sad about it then? Finally, graduation came and I was more than happy to cap off my high school experience with the traditional ceremony.

Now I am nearing the end of my college years. Today is the last day of my final spring break. I have to go back to class tomorrow and all the homework that comes with it. I will spend one final summer living in Des Moines working as an intern for Principal Financial Group. I will return to Cedar Falls in August for four months of classes, homework, and work. There will also be one final UNI football season to enjoy. I have only missed four home games the entire time I have been attending UNI. They were mostly due to family events such as a wedding, a couple birthdays, and Thanksgiving. However, I think I more than made up for it by being in the marching band my freshman year and going to the national championship game in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 2005. As friends and family can attest, I live and die by the success of the UNI football team every fall.

Still, as I sit here thinking about needing to get some homework done (I have put off almost all of it this entire week), I cannot help thinking how much I will not miss the classes and the homework. I love the access to professors and all the knowledge. I hate the time some professors expect from their students. This particularly applies to the liberal arts core professors. The classes I have enjoyed the most are by far the ones where the professor realizes we have lives and would like to do more with them than their class. I probably retain more information from these classes too because I find myself becoming more immersed in them and enjoying them more as well. I had one professor once tell me their thoughts on how much homework a student should have per hour spent in class. Based on their formula and my calculations of a typical college student's needs for sleep, eating, showering, and work, a college student needed 172 hours in a 168 hour week. Awesome...

The more college drags on, the more I find myself missing free time to hangout with friends, play videogames, watch sports, or tinker with my latest techno-toys. I have realized this as it is primarily what I spent my spring break doing besides preparing to move to Des Moines for the summer where I have the time and money to do all these things as well. I remember people telling me when I was in high school that college was the time to get your hobby projects done because otherwise you would never have time again. Looking back, I just laugh at that. College is precisely what gets in the way of me having the time to do them. By the time I get to my breaks, I am so burnt out, I usually get very little done. I realize what I classify as hobby projects has changed quite a bit, but I will still have more time once I am done with class. You can tell me I am wrong, but I will not listen to you. You can tell me having a family and kids gets in the way, but I will tell you I count that as a hobby project because you would not choose to go that route unless you get some sort of pleasure out of it. Having to go to Little League games, soccer practice, and dance recitals sounds just fine to me. I still take time to sit at Little League games or watch the Little League World Series on television.

Long story short, I am going to graduate soon. I am not sad about moving on with my life. I will treasure my final nine months, and then I will continue to go forward. I will come back to hangout with friends and go to UNI sports from time to time, but I will not be depressed or say my best days are behind me. Graduation, here I come.

Grad School 2

If you need an update, here is my first blog on grad school. On Friday, I was throwing some general questions to Dr. Wallingford about various things in relation to grad school. He asked who I am looking at. I told him Dr. Cook from UT and Jeremy Siek from CU. It turns out Wallingford knows Dr. Cook personally and has worked with him on a couple different committees in the past. This is very good news for me. Being able to have someone like Wallingford put in a good word for me and make sure my application really gets looked at very easily could be the difference between me being accepted or rejected at a large university like UT. The best thing is Wallingford knows Cook himself. It is not that he simply knows someone on the UT CS faculty. He knows the guy I want as my advisor. Then I hope my track record will speak for itself and get me in.

Grad School

I am now a senior in college. If you go by credit hours, I will be a super-senior in December. Technically I am 14 months and 2 days from graduating college. What does all this mean? It means I am starting to try to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life. On Wednesday, the Computer Science Department here at UNI hosted a seminar on grad school. I decided to take off work and check it out.

I had always had the idea of grad school in the back of my head as a potential future possibility (a lot of uncertainty in that phrase, no?). Last month, Dr O'Kane had brought up the GRE's and the idea of grad school in one of my classes. It got me thinking a little more about the idea. I have really enjoyed college. I feel more comfortable sitting in a classroom than perhaps anywhere else. Afterall, it is the primary thing I've done for the past 16 years of my life. I am also extermely talented at it if I may say so without sounding a bit too presumptious. I like listening to lectures. I learn a lot from them. I used to jokingly think I should be a student for the rest of my life. I could just continue to take various degrees and quite literally never graduate. These thoughts inevitably lead me to the notion of going to grad school. Let's not forget that I could carry on the Dr. Sparks title too! :D

The seminar turned out to be only the department head (Dr. Wallingford), a professor (Dr. O'Kane), and me. At least I got a lot of personal attention. With me not graduating until after next fall, I got told I have plenty of time to think about things and figure it out. I also have yet to do my undergrad research. I am planning on doing it in my last semester. It was suggested that I do that in a topic related to what I would like to do with my graduate studies should I pursue that particular path. I really don't know what I would want to study if I did go to grad school. I know it would be in Computer Science. I love history, but I find myself occupying more and more of my time with computer stuff every day. I see the history degree turning into a great hobby when I need a break from computers. It also rounds out my education really well so I am glad I will have the B.A. in history. Seeing as how I didn't know what I really was interested in yet or where I would want to go, they recommended I just start researching various universities and professors. This would be first and foremost. Once I had a few ideas, I could take the GRE next fall and any other tests if required by my hopeful schools. Then it would come to applications and seeing where I would end up.

I spent a fair amount of time later that evening when I got home looking at universities and their computer science programs. Most really did not reach out and grab my attention. The two that did so far were the Colorado University and the University of Texas. Both have some interesting software research going on. A professor at Texas definitely caught my attention the most. He does some research on web technology which I have yet to fully look into. He also does a lot of research on object-oriented ideas and inheritance. That is the stuff I am really good at and enjoy. I have actually been considering toying with some of those ideas in web applications. Now you see why this Dr. Cook from Texas was so appealing to me. I have been slowly developing ideas about doing my undergrad research on a similar topic. I also want to try it out with some of the websites I build.