BIGmog's BIGblog

My wardrobe is separated into a winter set and a summer set. Twice a year, I swap one for the other. Memorial Day being the official start to summer is a good time for the change. It's a bit like getting all new clothes and helps to keep me from buying new things.

Also part of the cycle is to cull some of the clothes that I didn't wear as much the previous season. This offsets the purchase limiting that I just mentioned however as I can then justify spending to fill the gaps. Ah well.

I've just finished my first semester as a graduate student at Virginia Tech. Some thoughts so far:

The school itself is way big but online students are just a small part of the student population. They attempt to treat both types of students equally which can backfire.

A student ID can only be issued on the campus and they won't mail it so I have no easy means of proving that I'm a student. Although I do get a .edu email address which is occasionally useful for discounts.

Once or twice I got an email inviting me to attend an event that was only local on campus. I notified that the organizer that such emails made me feel excluded and that they shouldn't email remote students with such events.

The top moron award goes to the IT help desk that tried to call me at 6am for input on a ticket that I had submit. They assume that everyone must be on Eastern time despite my phone number clearly being from a Colorado area code. I raised hell on this mistake and I'm not done either.

I took two courses: Fundamentals of Computer Science and E-commerce.

The computer science course was super interesting and I challenged me to learn a lot about how computers work. The instructor, while certainly knowledgeable, struggled in using technology like WebEx for her lectures. She would have benefited from some capable teacher's assistants.

TA's are the real work horses in academia. In the other class, the instructor only did the first meeting and they left all the rest to his TA. Now, this TA was excellent but why isn't the instructor more involved? I'll raise this question with my advisor.

That course wasn't nearly as interesting perhaps because I've been a web developer in a previous career. The technical aspects of running an e-commerce site were reduced to configuring a hosted WordPress. Yawn. Sure WordPress is super popular and could be worth knowing but not very challenging.

Now I'm nervously awaiting my final grades. In order to have my tuition reimbursed by work, I need a 3.0 or higher. I kept up on the homework and projects throughout the semester so I'm hoping that will offset my poor scores in the final exams.

After nearly 14 years at LiveJournal, I've transported to DreamWidth.

LJ is a shell of what it used to be. Most of my friends have abandoned it over the years so the community aspect is lost. More accurately, nobody blogs anymore.

Even my own entries have slowed lately but I still try to post regularly.

The tipping point was LJ's full transition to Russia. The servers have been moved and the terms of service adjusted for the worse.

In truth, I would have preferred to switch to Blogger or Wordpress but neither has a reliable method of migrating from LiveJournal.

So, I'll settle in here for a while at least. See how it goes.

My first semester as a grad student is underway. Getting a good start is important to me so I'm being diligent about the reading, writing and other assignments. I suppose you should expect a reduction in blog posts as a result.

2016 was a difficult year for many but in my case it was quite good. I'll forgive you if you decide to skip my happy memories. Here are the highlights.

Resolution to cut back on sugar: mild success. I lapsed into my typical habits but not until summer time.

Places traveled: Las Vegas, Tokyo, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands

Shows attended: AC/DC, Metric, Weezer & Panic at the Disco, Rob Thomas & Counting Crows, The Legend of Zelda Symphonic, Huey Lewis & The Bangals & Kool and the Gang, Christopher Tidus, Nick Thune, Dave Coulier.

Accomplishments: Got a raise & a promotion (with another raise), AWS sysadmin certified, took a community college programming course and was accepted in grad school.

Ahead of my advanced education, I took a level 100 course in programming at the local community college. Fortunately, the language taught was python and not java. I enjoyed the class and did well enough to get an A. Programming is interesting and fun as a hobby. Coding as a profession however I cannot suffer.

The community college adviser called me and ask why I hadn't yet enrolled for any spring courses. Of course I have. Just not there. I've been accepted to Virginia Tech and start an online graduate program in the spring.

That leaves just a few weeks to finish up any leisure reading for the next 2+ years. After that, I expect to have very little social life. Not much of a loss to me.