Thoughts, Week 4

Whew, this week was a lot of work! We had to add the usual two new sections to our Capstone Proposal - Deliverables and Methodology - and we had to create a powerpoint for the Capstone Defense. The Deliverables section was about what we would actually produce - always good to document. I already had a good idea of the elements that would be needed because I did a similar (though much smaller) project for my PHP class (CST 352), but I wanted to be very specific about how the functionality would be divided into different pages. This was also the section to talk about documentation, which isn't a big element of my Capstone, I think. Documentation is obviously important, especially when implementing a new system, but in my case it's built on an already-known system and its functionality isn't especially strange.

Methodology was a lot more specific, and I don't think I have as much content there as I should. I've only got two resources listed, but I'm sure there are more that I'm just not thinking of. I'll probably discover more as I start to work on my project too. There are probably other risks as well. In general, I'm fairly sure I need to expand this section more.

The big thing that took up my time this week was creating the powerpoint. The content was fairly easy to come up with because I was just restating what was in my Capstone Proposal. But a presentation is a lot different than a paper, and working out how to communicate my ideas clearly and succinctly, and still take up 6-8 minutes was a challenge. I need to rehearse my presentation more, and maybe I'll change a few things around a little bit, but I think the structure is fairly well laid out. I'm just glad I'm presenting next week because it means I get another week to rehearse.

I still haven't completed a few things I missed on the previous sections. The main thing is that I haven't adequately researched and documented other similar projects. I know of a few, but I haven't put in the time to write about them. I hope I have time to do that in the coming week, because I didn't this week.

Time Management Articles

For those not in CST300, this assignment involves going to this site, reading at least the first 5 articles, and talking about 3 things we learned.

In reading those articles, I learned that a little effort goes a long way, if structured right. With good planning, good preparation, and the right mindset, it takes very little time to get things done. I also learned that procrastination is much more dangerous than I previously thought. I've been learning that for myself lately, because I tend to procrastinate. This website lists it very clearly though. The third thing I learned is that a to-do list helps. I've had some experience with this in my own life, but I still don't use to-do lists as much as I probably should. Hmm, I should make a note of that. "Todo: use to do lists more." Hope I remember to check this to do list.

Class Summary, Sept 20

This assignment is about what I learned in class on September 20, 2007 (last Thursday).

In this class period we started out by talking about online classes. Next year, some web design courses at CSUMB will be available online. The plan is to make the courses available every semester, but to trade off so that they're available in a classroom one semester, and available online the next semester. This would also probably make the materials easier to update for the next semester, since the materials for each course don't have to be updated for the Fall->Spring date shift, just the 2007->2008 date shift. This is a small thing, but it'd be a whole lot less work for somebody.

There are about 70 web design courses being offered right now, and they plan to do this with 10 of them initially, and see how it works out. CSUMB's goal is to have 12k students, and have 4k of those take classes online only.

We moved into time and stress management. The general conclusion was that we should prioritize school over work, because the average salary almost doubles for people with degrees.

Convey's Time/Task Management Matrix was mentioned. It doesn't sound too useful to me, but here it is.

	Urgent	Not Urgent
Important	Crises Pressing Problems Deadline-Driven Projects	Prevention Planning Relationship Building Research
Not Important	Interruptions Email Phone Calls Meetings	Trivia Busy Work Time Wasters Pleasant Activities

We went into more detail about time management, but I'd rather talk about the speakers. Bobbi Long, Mike Machado, and Ken Wanderman talked to us today. Well, I'm not sure if Bobbi talked to us. I think she had a class she had to be in. She does graphic design though, mostly posters and logos.

Mike works in the ITCD lab, teaches the Intro to UNIX class, and is part of an ad-hoc network research group. He's also the guy to talk to if we're in the Tmac program and want some software. CSUMB has a deal with Microsoft to let us use most of their products for free. Unfortunately, Microsoft Office isn't part of this deal. Ahh well. Mike also to us about MySpace, a personal storage server each of us can get access to if we email him about getting an account. I don't think this is useful for storage - it's only 600MB, flash drives are cheap these days, and most things can be uploaded to Gmail. It will be useful for my programming projects later on. It has PHP and MySQP set up, so once I learn about those things I can put up demonstration pages on my MySpace.

Ken deals with the M in Tmac - the multimedia. It's called "interactive media" these days, but the concept is the same. It involves video, text, moving images, and, most importantly, interactivity. There are a lot of uses for multimedia - instruction, gaming, recreation, advertising, social interaction, etc. All you need are web design skills, some programming, and graphic design ability. Writing skills help too; I've seen tons of advertisements on the web that I wouldn't admit to making, had I made them. People who can work in this area are highly sought after, especially for flash animation.

Personal Time Survey

For those not in CST300, this assignment involved completing the personal time survey and posting it here.

1. 8 X 7 = 56 Number of hours of sleep each night
2. 1 X 7 = 7 Number of grooming hours per day
3. 2 X 7 = 14 Number of hours for meals/snacks per day - include preparation time
4. 2 X 5 = 10 Total travel time weekdays
5. 1 X 2 = 2 Total travel time weekends
6. 2 Number of hours per week for regularly scheduled functions (clubs, church, get-togethers, etc.)
7. 2 X 7 = 14 Number of hours per day for chores, errands, extra grooming, etc.
8. 3 Number of hours of work per week
9. 16 Number of hours in class per week
10. 14 Number of average hours per week socializing, dates, etc. Be honest!
11. 138 Now add up the totals
12. Subtract the above number from 168 - 138 = 30

"The remaining hours are the hours you have allowed yourself to study."

Study, and do homework. An estimation I've heard is that you have 2 hours of work outside of class for every hour in class, including study time and homework. I'm in class for 16 hours a week, 16*2=32, and I've got 30 hours "for studying." With all my homework, I don't have much free time. I don't know how people can go to school and work too!

My Weekly Schedule

Yep, it's here. I've got lots of free time on Saturdays and Sundays. Unfortunately, I've also usually got homework for Math, Spanish, and CST 300L due Sunday night/Monday morning.

You'll need a Google account to view it, as it's a Google Document. I got the idea to do it like this from Phillip Wessels.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pW4UTAoRL6v_zVK3fHG4dWA

Edit Sept 26: I've updated this to include Anime Club, and tagged it as week4 because it's mentioned as an assignment for that week too.