Jer 09/10

Not a Sprint, But a Marathon...Right?

In something like 48 hours, I'll have graduated. Sure, I'll have the relatively insignificant realities of two more final exams and one presentation to complete, but by and large, I'll be done. For all intents and purposes, 5 years of effort will culminate in me walking across a stage at the fieldhouse and collecting my fake degree (they mail the real one later, once they know I've graduated) with a probable 3.5; not what I was hoping for, but given the circumstances, I'll take it.

So now, to just pass these last two final exams, do this last presentation, and walk out of here with my sanity at least as intact as when first I started.

I Live in the Future

I am currently sitting in my senior design class watching and playing with a demo of the U of M Dearborn Android app. If you have Android 1.6 or higher download it yourself.

Who Needs Sleep? Well You're Never Gonna Get It...

There are certain time honored traditions that go along with being a college student. Most of these have disappeared over the years—stricken from the collegiate experience for being sexist, dangerous, foolish, or some clever combination of the above; some simply don't exist due to the commuter-campus nature of our school. So while we don't have panty raids, keggers in the quad, frat hazing at the UC, or other Animal House-style shenanigans, I did get the chance to take part in at least one classically “college” experience: the all-nighter.

My busy schedule finally caused me to slip; somehow, I lost track of a single term assignment's existence, so yesterday at around 5pm, I realized that I had a term paper due today. A class I am teaching runs from 6:30 until 9:30, so I didn't get a chance to even consider the paper until about 10:30pm last night when I got home and looked it over…and immediately started writing.

At about 5:30am this morning, I was done; roughly 12 hours after I found out about the assignment and approximately 7 hours after I had started working on it.

Is it art? No. But it is done, fulfills all of the requirements (save for any that might wish for coherence or rational thought), and resides on a VLT server awaiting a grade. Is it readable? As I pointed out on my Twitter this morning, perhaps if you are into Vonnegut.

The really obnoxious part, though, is that I have so much to do this week, I doubt highly that this will be the last time I have to do this before Monday, I'm just hoping it's not every day, because when I left for work at 7:30 this morning after about 90 minutes' nap, I started feeling every bit of my age.

I Have No Witty Song Title for This One

As I sit in my Programming Languages course (CIS400, for those that will ultimately have to take it), I am currently marveling at how little of this is new material for me—not because it was covered in other classes (very little of it was), and not because I am brilliant (despite the fact that I am).

No, the real reason is because of my participation in programming competitions. I participate because they are fun, but as we cover materials about different data structures, different algorithms for handling things, and various methods for hashing, I find that much of it is review of stuff that I picked up over pizza or a sub while hanging out with friends at programming competition practice.

Well, there's a chance for you to get started down that path tomorrow, Wednesday the 1st of December in the CIS building. The ACM will be hosting a small, UofM-D contest with prizes, food, and a lot of fun. For more information, check out the ACM's Programming Competition blog post.

Come on out, eat our food, have some fun, and be entertained by me. Oh, and program a bit.

Hope to see you there!

Walk Through the Fire

Who gives homework over Thanksgiving break?

Seriously, this was the most homework-laden break ever…and this time, not by virtue of my own procrastination.

In the next precious few weeks I have to knock down about 5 more homeworks, a fairly major project, a seriously major project, 2 huge documents, and studying for two final examinations, and the last bit of my Master's application. Oh, plus work and such.

…it's like a final trial by fire before completion.

If it gets quiet around here, you know why!

Round and Round

At least three times per week, I remember that I need to post to this blog, draft a message in my head, revise it several times, fall in love with it, get distracted by school work, then tell myself, "Self, you can post this later on." It seems, given my nearly 3 week gap in posting, that I lie to myself a lot.

So much is going on. The semester is not so much coming to a close as it is yelling for us all to brace for impact as it plummets toward the ground at a terrifying rate amidst a flurry of half-done homework and poorly written term papers. I feel less like I am guiding my collegiate ship into some graduation harbor and more as if I'm holding onto the back of an out-of-control cigarette boat operated by smugglers and chased by the national guard as we careen toward shore. At the risk of under-expressing the matter, things are out of control.

I paid for my cap and gown (and have them in my possession) so that part is squared away, and it feels like there's really not much of a chance that I won't be finishing at the end of this semester. It is really about to be over!

In addition to all that goes into the process of finishing school, there's the irritating process of applying for grad school. Essays, letters of recommendation, CVs, updated resumes, and the like all are pretty simple, but they take time…valuable time which is the commodity of which I have the least to trade today.

Let me say this, as well, to all of you who might in the not-so-distant future be graduating: don't forget the additional stress that comes with having family and friends that want to participate in your graduation. Chasing down tickets, arranging for hotels, and preparing to throw a party is a nightmare when you're already stressed to the limit. Just say no! I wish there were the graduation equivalent of eloping in which there can be a quiet ceremony with just me, my diploma, and some fat minister dressed as Elvis.

Call me when this year is over…I'm done with it now! :)

It's the End of School as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

Only 6 more weeks. Six more weeks of term project work, finals, homeworks, and studying. Oh, and finishing my grad school application stuff. And figuring out how to finance grad school. Oh, and coordinating graduation. Plus work, family, and life.

Piece of cake.

If nothing else, this mind-bogglingly severe schedule that I've maintained for the last four or five years has inured me to the stress and pain of having too much going on…well, that and I self medicate with energy drinks and sushi (and more energy drinks). If nothing else, the winter break is going to mean significantly more sleep than I've had in years. I hope.

Currently, I'm focused on figuring out this commencement process. As far as I can tell, each graduate attending gets 4 tickets, which will cover my children and my wife with one left over. Apparently, this is sort of a big deal to my family, though, so I have five other people that want to go on only the one last ticket. I'm not a math major, but I don't think that is going to work. Recognizing this (after minutes of harsh calculation and a new set of batteries in my TI89), I started investigating how to go about buying more tickets.

You cannot buy more tickets.

I assumed I was just missing it, but it appears that you literally cannot purchase more tickets. This is pretty unmanageable…so now I'm considering writing a quick message board application that allows people to submit their ticket needs and others to submit their ticket surplus and somehow join the two.

Because I have time for that.

I suppose the alternative is to have my family members fight to the death for the tickets, which would have the added benefit of trimming the number of gifts I need to buy come Christmas time.

Yes, I am warming to this idea…

You're the Best…Around!

Saturday, October 22, the University of Michigan Dearborn campus sent two teams—one consisting of Scott Hoffman, Matt Smudz, and Andrew Hagen, and the other of Jer Lance, Jordan Lampi, and Blake Farrugia; both coached by Dr. Elenbogen—to compete in the regional competition for the ACM's annual International Collegiate Programming Contest at Grand Rapids State University, coming home third on site (beating Michigan State, among others), 28th of 116 in the region, and tying UofM-D's best ever performance in solving 5 problems.

The winners of the region this year were the University of Waterloo in first place, Carnegie Mellon in second, and the University of Michigan Ann Arbor campus—assistant-coached by University of Michigan Dearborn Alumnus Dennis Matveyev.

The Dearborn chapter of the Association of Computing Machinery will be having a meeting on Wednesday, 17 November at 6pm in the CIS building to go over the problems and discuss the competition of pizza and soda with anyone interested in more information about future ICPC competitions, how this one went, or the local programming competitions coming up on campus. If you enjoy programming even a little bit, you should come out and join us.

More information on the contest can be found on the ICPC official site at http://cm.baylor.edu/welcome.icpc and the complete results for this region can be viewed at http://acm.ashland.edu/.

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Now that the boring stuff is out of the way, this weekend was a LOT of fun. We did fantastically…it was quite the coup beating State. I would really love to get two teams going next year…and I think that our little local programming competitions are a great way to practice for that. It did, however, ruin my time in the last weekend that probably should have been at least partially spent studying for this week's midterms. These are going to SUCK!

Congratulations to both teams! You did great. As Joe Esposito would have said, “You're the best, around (plus or minus a little bit), nothing's gonna ever keep you down (very far).”

Use My Delusion

Oops, I missed a week there.

Actually, I came dangerously close to missing another week, this time too. You see, I have a little conspiracy theory that goes like this: I am confident that teachers collaborate on how best to stage projects, homeworks, and exams in such a way as to amp up stress and generate discomfort. My evidence? Well, like any great conspiracy theorist, I don't actually have any, but I do have a list of facts:

• Fact: Midterms and Finals always seem to land all at once.
• Fact: Homework ramps up to full intensity (and frequency) around the same time in each class.
• Fact: Our professors all know each other, especially those in the same department.

I don't want to say there's a smoking gun here, but there is certainly a projectile-expelling object with pungent fumes emitting from the hole at the end. I'm just sayin'

Now, add to that the fact that I'm still preparing for this weekend's ACM ICPC Regional Programming Competition over at Grand Valley State University, and I'm feeling a little overburdened. Well, actually, a lot overburdened. Okay, I'm seriously slammed.

Have we noticed a theme? I have a tendency to underestimate how time consuming things that I want to do are…and I overestimate how much time I'll have?

Me neither…

There's An App for That

One of the things that I love most about the Software Engineering program here is that, at times, there is a strong dedication to giving us real-world applications for all of this classroom learning. None of that is more apparent, though, than in the Senior Design seminars. Other program capstones might just have lengthy projects to perform, but in ours we have real clients that we have to manage, provide documentation for, develop for, and ultimately satisfy sufficiently as to get “paid” in the form of that oh-so-important acceptance letter that says “these guys and gals did a professional job, and we are satisfied with the end result.”

This semester, I am working on a project that I am pretty excited about, but recently I have gotten my hands on a project that just blows me away. A group of my classmates have been working on an Android and iPhone application for UofM Dearborn students, and I am loving it.

When you click on the familiar “M” logo, you get a menu from which you can launch pretty much everything you might need to get to related to the school: calendars, course catalog, your UM-D Connect, schedules, and your email. It even has a bunch of fun stuff, like links to the various university twitter feeds, facebook pages, blogs (and who doesn't want my blog perpetually in your pocket just waiting to be read, studied, no, SAVORED at every possible opportunity), and YouTube videos.

This app did more than just replace an irritating set of bookmarks with a slick user interface, though, they brought something that I wish existed when I first started at this campus: the map. I cannot tell you how many times I had to whip out my paper copy of the map .pdf or, absent that, try to open it on my phone to figure out roughly which building my next class was going to be in. It wasn't until I had been here several semesters that I knew what MOST of the buildings were, and I am sure there are still many I couldn't name or find if I was pressed. Now I have used the demo version of the application to find my way around to infrequently used buildings or just to play with the “Show My Location” and “Mark Parking Spot“ functions.

For those of us often found staggering around campus under a pile of books looking for some obscure building to which we never, ever have to go (what is this “CASL” of which you speak, and how does one get there?) being able to click on any one of those dots on the map and see what it is, a picture of the front of the building, and a quick blurb about it is a life-saver.

Watching the birth of this app has been a pretty awesome experience. It is impressive to see the lifecycle of a software package when you are genuinely enthused about the outcome (and how can I not be enthused about making my life easier while making it so that I can play with my phone more often…I mean, seriously, it is the marriage of my two favorite things: my laziness and my phone), and more so when you know the folks creating the package and get to see regular updates in class about the process.

At the risk of sounding needlessly like a shill (and frankly, if my enthusiasm for the application hasn't already done that, then I have a bunch of things of dubious value to sell you), this is the reason I started back to school. I was hoping to do more than merely learn a bunch of dry material and obtain a mystic piece of paper that says I am educated; but so many people that I spoke to said that their college experience was just that…so much paper. I am profoundly grateful that we have something more than that to serve as a capstone to our academic labors.