…and that’s why cell phones are dangerous.

Here’s another story.

Leading up to the end of my first college semester, my software design course swallowed its anchor chain and abruptly changed direction. We had spent nearly three fourths of the course studying basic programming concepts, with some rudimentary diagramming and an overview of object oriented design (I think high-level structural programming concepts like first-class functions are more interesting, but that’s another post) mixed in. Where, then, did the anchor fall? Unfortunately, it fell during my month-long illness, but after one missed class I found out that we were far south of our high-level comrades: We had come to an archipelago called 3AA0 1FA0 2F41 2F43 … sorry, “Machine Language.” We used a RISC-like machine simulator with 15 registers (0 through F) and 255 main memory “cells” (00 through FF), where each instruction occupies two cells (two bytes). I’ll spare the other details.

So here we are in this foreign archipelago (let me stress that most of the adventure was point-and-click), and I can tell that the crew is getting disoriented. A few weeks passed and Mr. Mendonsa gave word of our final test. Lucky for us, nothing that we covered in the first three fourths was on it — instead, the entire thing was about binary, hexadecimal, and our fabled machine language. One of my classmates asked if the test was to be taken there or online, to which the response was a resounding, “I’ll let you know” (paraphrasing).

Another week passed and I was becoming particularly worried that I wouldn’t be able to take the test at home. On the day of the test, about two and a half hours before class was supposed to start, an e-mail arrived bearing great news: The test was online! I could stay home! Furthermore, we had until the 15th of December to submit all unfinished work (including the test). This was on the 9th.

On the 10th, I took the test. There were 30 problems spread across 30 pages. Many of the problems required multiple answers (eg., “suppose you want to complement the middle four bits of a byte while leaving the other four bits undisturbed. What mask must you use together with what operation?”). The test had a possibility of 78 points. I was able to answer many of the questions with a fair amount of certainty (although this may have been because of my calculator, a two’s complement calculator I found online, and testing the machine language problems in the simulator before giving an answer… but hey, who’s counting?). The only problems I had to guess were the ones that I just didn’t really grok (I’m looking at you, binary fractions).

When I came to the final page, I had been taking the test for nearly one and one half hours. The problem was unceremoniously easy: “What is the hexadecimal value of 1001 0101 0110 1111?” I selected my answer (it’s 956F for the uninitiated), but I was not yet satisfied enough to press the submit button. Instead, I paraded around the livingroom, knowing that I had done well on the test. Lo that as soon as I returned to submit the test to my teacher, Firefox and some Java applet decided to go crazy and lock up my computer so that I had to restart.

Panic! Horror! The test remains unfinished!

Well, when I was able to use my computer again, I logged back into Blackboard to see if I had caused any major damage. I ventured onto the assignments page, clicked the final test link, and it told me to press “OK” to take the test. “The test is complete. Press OK to view the results.” “The test is incomplete. You cannot view the results. Press OK to continue.”

It was at this point that I wrote an e-mail to my teacher about my technical mishap. Two days passed with no response, so I decided to write another e-mail, just in case the first one had been lost. That didn’t yield any results either. Saturday rolled around, which meant that my teacher wouldn’t be checking his school-related mail. On Monday (if you’re keeping track, Monday was the 15th — The Last Day), there was still no reply.

Just to be sure, I went into Blackboard and checked the grades page. The results for my test had finally landed, but it wasn’t something to celebrate: Although it recognized that most of my answeres were correct, my score looked a lot like a 0.

Panic! Horror! I failed the class!

Instead of chancing another e-mail, I took the direct approach and called his office. Very fortunately for me, he answered, and I was able to go over the problem again. He explained that he had been too busy to check his e-mail over the week and that he was glad I called. He looked over the original e-mail, then went to Blackboard and manually scored my test. I ended up with a 71/78, not a 0. As the semester came to a close, my grand total came to a 96. I got an A. (The average grade on the test was a 34, but I suspect it was so low because certain layabouts didn’t take the test!)

What’s the moral of this story? Cell phones are still dangerous.

When I get to class, I

1. insert my Kingston DataTraveler and go through the barrage of “new hardware detected or installed or please open this in Windows Media Player!” (what?),
2. set the resolution on the monitor to something sane,
3. turn on cleartype for slightly nicer font rendering,
4. get rid of the search bar on the taskbar,
5. adjust the mouse speed so that it doesn’t take an hour to get from one end of the screen to the other, and
6. open Firefox Portable to check on things before the teacher gets in.

There has to be a better way to get my education.

They canceled the course I was taking.

>:(

When one (or four) boards a boat, one (or four) usually knows what they’re doing. I’m not really a boating man, and I don’t know much about being out at sea (basic survival skills apply, but uncharted waters will be uncharted waters). But still I find myself tripping at the big dock of life and falling into an unfamiliar boat called “college.”

I enrolled in a ten week summer class called “Software Design,” taught by one Mr. Mendonsa. Although it’s called software design, its purpose isn’t how to tell me how to create the next overpriced product on the market; and instead offers an overview of computer science so that we understand what goes on in the secret lives of computers while we are designing our software. This includes several fundamentals, like binary, hexadecimal, data storage, et cetera. (For the record, we start programming in C near the 6th week.)

This is all very new to me: I’ve never really been exposed to a classroom setting, and certainly not one where I have to worry about a grade, so I didn’t know what to expect.

My mom, brother, and I left our house at around 5:15 PM. After dropping my brother off at Synagogue, we trudged through insanely slow-moving traffic from Norfolk to Chesapeake… a treck that ideally would have taken about twenty minutes. Still, we arrived at around 6:30 and I hurried awkwardly to classroom 2038. Standing in front of the room was none other than my teacher (I didn’t know it at the time), who directed me instead to room 2010. Luckily I knew where it was because I went the wrong way upon building entry.

I brought along my new Kingston DataTraveler 4GB flash drive (on sale now, buy buy buy) just in case we were in a room with computers. I’m not good at writing by hand, so that I thought I might be able to take notes that way. Unfortunately we were in a small room with rows of chairs squashed together in a stick-your-gum-under-the-desk-and-pass-notes sort of way.

It’s a small class of seven people, but of the Enrolled Few, only four showed up. I sat as far back as I could. There was a brief discussion on intelligence where we were asked to give our opinion of what it is. Knowing this was going to turn into a “computer intelligence” shpiel, the best answer I could come up with was “the ability to learn.” For the moment I felt proud of my answer, until we had to expound upon why we said what we said… that’s where I start tripping over my words.

Incredibly and much to my disbelief I survived the fiasco (but not before saying that computers had to be “encouraged”). The rest of the lecture was focused on binary. Logical operations with binary, math with binary, shorthand binary, how binary relates to storage units, binary representing text… binary. Binary for three hours. Have you ever listened to someone talk about binary for that long? It does a number on your brain (or two numbers—I’m sure you can guess). It’s more interesting than it sounds, it’s just that I had to clean up the brains that leaked out of my ears when we were finished. Much of it I already knew, but Mr. Mendonsa was able to connect the pieces that were fragmented for me, so apart from trying to be an answer hog I was able to do some learning.

Class finally ended (late) and I was able to go home. It was nearly 10.