Tyler Hunt

With making becoming so popular recently, it makes a lot of sense to have a facility with the space and tools that normally wouldn’t be available to the average maker. TechShop is just such a place.

TechShop is a fully-equipped open-access workshop and creative environment that lets you drop in any time and work on your own projects at your own pace. It is like a health club with tools and equipment instead of exercise equipment…a Kinko’s for geeks.

With everything from automotive and manufacturing tools, to electronics, silkscreening, and plastics, there isn’t much you couldn’t make at TechShop. And, if it’s knowledge you’re lacking, they have plenty of classes to give instruction on using all of those fancy machines. In some of them you even build things like motorcycles or hot rods, which are then sold on eBay, with the proceeds split between the build team and TechShop.

It’s too bad they’re located in San Francisco.

This ended up being a very lax work week. Between being sick and trying to catch up on homework, I barely got a single days worth of work in. I spent most of today finishing up the Use Case Model assignment for Software Systems, and Daniel tells me that after showing his to a coworker, what we’re doing is much more complicated than it should be, and even exceeds the complexity of what graduate level students are required to write. Go figure. Anyways, it’s finished now, which means I’m free to go out on a date tonight, and after working on that all day my brain is ready for the break.

I thought technical writing was something that I didn’t mind to much, up until our current Software Systems assignment. We have to write a use case model for an automobile refueling system. What this basically means is, we have to turn a gas pump into a system capable of translation into software. This includes breaking it down into smaller subsections of the process, drawing diagrams to show how each part of the system interacts, and then explaining everything four times over just to make sure the intended audience gets the message any way they look at it. As a software developer, writing this type of document isn’t really the sort of activity I’d like to be engaged in. What they should do, is assign each Computer Science major their own Technical Writing major to write these documents for us. That leaves us free to design and implement the system.

Summer school is just now starting to kick into high gear. With a programming project and an exam tomorrow, today has not been fun. I’m completely wiped out from the rest of the activities this weekend that I’m not sure how much of the studying I’ve done today is going to stick with me. I’m going to crash and burn here pretty soon. The advice undergrad advisor that I talked to last semester about my summer course load comes to mind now. He warned that it my not be wise to take these two classes at the same time. So far, it hasn’t been bad, but I can see the potential for things to get worse. I know it will all work out fine in the end, it’s just hard having to do homework when everyone else is enjoying their time off from school.

So far this summer, I’ve found that I’m very distracted in class. This distraction can be attributed in part to the PowerBook. I’ve had a laptop since my senior year in high school, but it’s never been as consistent a distraction as the PowerBook has been. Ignoring the lecture isn’t all that bad though. I’ve managed to be fairly productive at other tasks while in class. But it’s about that time of the semester when I start worrying about not knowing any of the material. The first assignment was due today, and it went well enough, but the upcoming test is starting to scare me a little. All of the notes are online, so it shouldn’t be a huge deal to get caught up on things, it has just been a little disconcerting when I realize that I’ve been in class for three weeks now and have yet to solidly comprehend a single concept from either class. No worries though. This approach has worked out fine for me in the past, so there’s no reason to believe it won’t work this time.

Today was a good recovery today from the long, hot weekend. The trip was a lot of fun, but the length was about right. It was nice to be sleeping back in my own bed, in the cold A/C.

This bliss, however, was promptly and inconveniently interrupted by a pending homework assignment. Making it to the fourth week of class without doing any major work has been quite an accomplishment, but spending all day catching up wasn’t the most ideal situation. I’m a little perturbed by the whole thing, actually. Mostly, Computer Science courses consist of two things: programming projects and exams. Apparently they do things differently in Operating Systems. We had several pages worth of questions to answer, and pseudo-code to write, and simulations to perform. It also forced me to buy the book. I held out as long as I could, but the book store still ended up taking my money anyhow.

A few new things going on with me right now. I received a call today from FCE (who Daniel works for). I put in my resumé last week, and I now have an interview this Friday. I’m still really torn about taking this job. The experience would be good, but it also means a much longer drive and a pay cut.

Class work is starting to pick up a little. There are now two programming projects and a third homework assignment with fast-approaching due dates. I’ve been putting off doing any sort of work or study for either of my classes, but I spent some time during class today to work on the Operating Systems project. I actually came really close to getting it finished and working in the limited amount of time I spent on it.

I’m really starting to look forward to the trip this weekend. With only two days to go, it’s time to start thinking about things to bring, and making other final preparations. Assuming I don’t become violently ill beforehand, there should be plenty of good times to come.

Lots of stuff going on right now. Kirby is back in town as of yesterday, and is a fully-graduated man now in search of a job. Let him know if you hear of any good ones that sound like something an MIS/CIS major would do. We’ve been hanging out the last couple nights and having some good times, so I’m glad he’s back.

I, on the other hand, still have another year before I graduate, but in an attempt to hurry that proccess along some, I’m taking a couple courses this summer. Having just finished with the spring semester two weeks ago, it seems pretty sudden to jump back into it again, but the first day went well enough. It’s still too early to say the whether they’re interesting, hard, or just a waste of time.

Work is still going well. I’ve been putting in a lot more hours, and even managed to go in today for a few before class. I talked with F some last week about the future of the company and where things are heading. Since I haven’t heard anything back yet about an internship at Lockheed Martin, it’s looking like I’ll be sticking around at my current job for a while. I’m happy with that, though. The idea of working for a company as huge as Lockheed never appealed much to me.

The last of the exams today marks the end of another semester, and while taking a physics test a 7:00 in the morning probably wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice, it was nice be finished with it all by 8:00. This semester had to have been the weirdest yet. It never really seemed to get started. I kept anticipating a rush of assignments and tests, but that never happened. Right up until the last minute, things seemed fairly easy and stree-free. It could just be that after three years, college is becoming routine, but I think it was due more to a strange mix of courses this semester.

Alas, there will be no long summer break this year, only a short two weeks off before classes start again. I’m looking forward to the summer though. It’s not going to be much fun going to class every week, but I think working at a different company will be good. It’s a change that I’ve resisted for a long time, but I’m ready to try something new.

School is starting to wrap up now. One day of class remains to be enjoyed before finals the onslaught of finals, but that last day will actually bring the passing of the worse of it. With the final presentation in Topics, the final for Architecture coming early, and a last minute Prolog assignment for Languages, there’s a lot to get done this weekend. I think after that day, however, I’ll feel mostly finished with the semester, and there’s no better feeling than that.

That leaves just two finals spread out over the rest of the week, although getting up for a 7:00 AM on Friday for a physics test won’t be fun. I think I might be one of the few people in this world who actually enjoy finals more than the rest of the semester. Sure, it’s a lot of studying for the hardest tests of the year, but with no classes to attend, it really leaves a lot of free time. This is usually the time when I pick up some new computer game to spend every spare minute in distracted bliss, but I don’t think that will happen this time around.

Anyways, despite my lonely Friday night at home, I was able to accomplish a decent bit of what’s due for Monday. I had forgotten how much it sucks not to hang out on the weekend.

Last spring, I was involved with a technical writing class based around the service learning approach, meaning that we were required to work with an organization in the community in order to foster a sense of civic responsibility through alternative pedagogy. This semester long project resulted in the production of a professional-grade promotional video for the Boys & Girls Club of Pinellas Park. Developed for use as a tool for the Teen Center to share its experience with other clubs around the country, and improve awareness of youth leadership, the video has most recently found its way to Armenia where it has inspired a group of teens there to start their own youth-led organization.

When Blake Scott, the instructor of that technical writing course, contacted our team about presenting our project at the first annual Service Learning Showcase at UCF, Mark, Erik, and I went for it, and after today are glad we did. It was great fun spending time together once again working on project into the wee hours of the night. It was great fun putting together a tri-fold presentation board, a web site demo, a DVD, and a last minute document. It was great fun manning our table as judges flew by on a whirlwind tour of the twenty-six participants. We knew our project looked good. We knew a couple of the judges were impressed. But, based on the evaluation criteria, it seemed that other projects may have had an advantage. When the winners of third and second place passed by without our names being called, we had mostly ceded our defeat, and then were astonished to hear our project called for first place. It’s still hard to believe, but we honestly had the best project there. In the words of Mark, “Dude, we rock.”

I’m really wishing I had a decent laptop right now. Ever since my screen started to die a few weeks back, I haven’t been using mine any more. Then, I got it out tonight to set up my presentation on it, and found it to be utterly useless. If only I had my PowerBook, I could be giving a slick Keynote presentation tomorrow like Mark and Rick are so fond of doing. With true alpha support, high-quality anti-aliasing, and gorgeous animated transitions, this would truly be a sweet presentations. Alas, I’ll have to settle for mediocre at best, as my PowerPoint file silently reverts back to the older version on the classroom computer.

Registration for summer classes is already here. I had my appointment this morning, so I was looking over my degree audit last night to try to figure out what I should take when I realized that I only have about five courses left to graduate. With as much as I’ve been loving school lately, this is pretty exciting. I’m going try to and get a few of those out of the way this summer, which should leave me with only a couple to finish up in the fall and I can graduate a semester early. If I hadn’t screwed around so much the first couple years, I probably could have been done by now. It will still be nice to finish early, though, even if it means taking classes all summer.

In physics today we had a couple demonstrations today of magnetically induced currents. The best one was a coil of wire that created a force strong enough to shoot a metal ring into the air. There was another one with a magnet dropped through a tube that nearly got stuck because of the field that it induced in the metal pipe. The saddest part is that this was the best physics class of the semester. In Physics I we did crap like this all the time, and it made the classes fun, and worth coming to.

Anyways, the architecture test went well today and I felt better about this one than the last. I still feel like I might have missed some things, but I at least had a clue about every question this time. It really helped having Daniel go over all the material with me. I need to start paying more attention in class. I think I just missed some of the key ideas toward the beginning of the semester and never really caught up to the point where I didn’t feel lost any more. Maybe I can do that now that I’m more on top of what’s going on.

I think I’m finally starting to get a little more motivated about school. It’s sad that the motivation is fear of failure, but at this point I really have to wake up and start working harder or I won’t be a happy camper come semester’s end. School is still really crappy, but I’m not betting on that changing until after I graduate. There’s just not too much to be excited about on that front at the moment, and it’s discouraging that there’s nothing even on the horizon that I’m looking forward to other than a diploma. I can’t wait for the weekend. I can’t wait for summer. I can’t wait to be done for good.