Hooplah.Org A Story of Graceful Stumbles

School talk, Weather appreciation

I just put my contacts in after having worn my glasses for a couple of weeks straight now. My eyes have instantly gone back to looking like red and agitated, but I don't really care. I was trying so hard just to see what I was doing clearly in PSP, but straining my eyes to the point of it being painful wasn't accomplishing it. Ah well... I had missed seeing the actual size of everything, anyway. A day or two away from the horrid things won't be so bad.

I'm happy to say that I have A's in both of my classes. At first I was worried, since on my first round of turning in homework I got an 81% and an 80% on another. It upset me so much that I cried for roughly an hour, since the material was either painfully easy or I had spent the previous week reading the text and highlighting it, and I even hand copied down the lecture notes to make sure I knew it... but I still got less than the minimum high 90s that I was expecting. Later on I found out the reasons why I had missed the questions was due to my tendency to right click in "blank" areas of the page when I'm filling out forms. It was just my way to ensure that the page was selected to scroll when I spun my mousewheel, not a textfield, and I now do it out of habit with every form I fill out regardless of whether it has a textfield or not. With the school assignment forms though, if you right click anywhere in the plane of a radio button or the answer associated with it it'll automatically select that answer. Maybe that's how all radio buttons work, but I always assumed you had to click on the actual circle... but anywho. Lesson learned, and I've been getting high 90s or 100s since.

I believe I have exams next week or the week after, and I am a little worried about them. For one, my Business Applications class (which is my shortened name for it) has been so easy, I have not had to read the text... so I haven't. There have been a few things I needed to look up, but otherwise, I knew most of the questions either from common sense of how Microsoft programs work, or from having used the program so much in the past. Programming Design... is different in it's own way. I'm confident I know the material, but I'm a little shaky on my ability to make the correct decisions when proposed with a problem. My recent assignment for that class is a perfect example of that issue... I'm a little worried of getting a big fat 0 on it, but even if my answer is wrong, maybe I'll get partial credit since I stated the reasons for choosing the answer I did. Aside from that, there's also the vocabulary... I know it generally, but when there are 5 or 6 terms that something can go by, and the book constantly mixes and matches the terms with other things that have multiple words associated with it... it just ends up being confusing to me.

After having taken the Programming Design class, it's actually spiked a little interest in me for a career. But maybe it's just the way that it's being taught... possibly if someone had taught me how to make web pages or graphics centering around what a customer wants instead of what I want... maybe I could have made something with the mountains of HTML and CSS data in my head. Course, that would have had to have happened sometime in 1998, long before I ever took my first web page class. In my Programming Design class, I'm drawn to the way that with every new element they introduce, they instantly relate it to an example of how to use it to create something for someone else. But then again, we're only going to be getting into things like flowcharts and psuedocode... none of the real coding languages. I would bet if I were ever thrown into one of those classes I'd change my mind about it real quick.

I mentioned before that I was working in PSP, and I have been... on a new layout. I really do enjoy this one, but I wanted something a little more springy and upbeat. Everytime I look at this layout... it just feels like winter and cold. I look outside and the sunshine already looks like summer... all the plant life in the area is growing at a shocking rate. While this time last year the area was being drenched with rain for nearly a full month, we have basically been flung directly into summer this year. I barley went outside at all this past winter (most people believe that is pathetic, but it was *my* choice not to... why go out in freezing cold weather when you have nothing out there to do) so to me it already being summer is a pleasant surprise. Sometimes I stand out on the porch, just amazed at how everything changes. If there's one good thing my extended break has given me, it's the appreciation of how beautiful the world is. And I'd like the things that I create to reflect those feelings.

I wish I could get back into updating this journal daily again. Usually I find myself mindlessly reading message boards about the games that I play, or even playing a game that I really had not wanted to... just did because I couldn't think of anything else fun. Writing in here might not always be a thrill, but I'll appreciate that I did later. I've got to make myself remember that.