Wednesday, May 6, 2009

School Daze

I'm finally getting the hang of this school thing, at least it's not so difficult to get motivated and keep up. I do a little each day before class and a little in the evening. I'm procrastinating now, just a bit.
It's a drippy, dreary day outside and my soul wants nothing more than to crawl back in bed and sleep for another couple of hours. Hope the coffee kicks in soon.
So I'm taking three classes this quarter, a diverse little grouping of engineering classes, Fluid Power, Digital Electronics and Advanced A+ Certification.
Fluid power has possibly the worst-written text book I've ever had to wrestle with, could they not afford an editor? It reads like a rough draft. A very rough draft. Another challenge is keeping a straight face when the instructor starts talking about extending and retracting rods and pistons. The nomenclature is very phallic. Pressure, pumping, relief valves, etc., maybe it's my own bent mind, but the giggle factor gets really high during some of the lectures. At least I amuse myself. As is the norm I'm the only woman in the class and giggling must be kept to a minimum so I spend a lot of time with my eyes wide open grinning, I hope the professor thinks I'm just very attentive and not a little nuts.
Digital electronics is a lot of review, I had self-taught a much of the material at work. I'm now learning boolean algebra which is fascinating stuff. Did you know that your computer can't subtract? Not really. It uses a complex method of adding ones and zeros that makes it think it's adding but comes up with subtracted totals. Behind the slick interface that you are looking at are thousands and millions of tiny signals that have only two values - 0 & 1.
The last class I'm taking is A+ certification. Yes, I will be fully qualified to trouble-shoot computers and networks. It's already coming in handy, I've set up the wireless access for our computers at home and have helped my sweetie chase down some problems with his system at home. I'm thinking of buying a computer to tinker on, but don't want to spend the money just now.
Ah, the coffee is kicking in -- back to work.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

School Daze.....

So it's been even longer this time, I have a great excuse. Really, I do.
Honest.
I am now a full-time engineering student. Surprised? Me too. I wish I could take the credit for this being a part of a grand scheme that came together just the way I had planned, but alas, I'm not that slick. In fact this is a serious case of lemons transforming into lemonade.
Raspberry lemonade.
Sparkling raspberry lemonade.
hmmmmm, now I'm thirsty.
Anyway I've been a tad busy with the whole homework thing. Actually I thought that if I could take 10 credits while working full-time I could carry 20 when unemployed. I did it for one quarter and will cheerfully never try that again. I'm not sure how, but I managed to pull a 3.58 for the quarter. With electrical engineering courses, and crazy lab partners, and more books than any book bag could hold. Oi.
I'll try to update whenever I can, in the mean time feel free to send me good study karma.
;)