After some technical difficulties, the blog is back! I had to look into some settings, but I finally found out what the problem was (bingsuns doesn’t support SFTP, yet my publishing was set for SFTP anyway, which was odd since I didn’t change it…), but whatever! My journal to the world is set once again, and now I don’t feel the urge to slit my wrists as a result. (That’s a joke… I was not contemplating slitting my wrists because my blog wasn’t working… don’t email me. I like living. I’d like to keep living for the next 70 years or so.)
Aaaaaanyways, lots of stuff between the time the Ultimate Warrior making crazy-liberal-hippies at UConn cry and now. Since I’m kinda tired, I’ll just bullet point them (or something which accomplishes the same purpose as a bullet-pointed list.)
In no particular order…
First, I graduated! I am now a Binghamton University alumnus, as in, no longer a student. I now join the elite ranks of Tony Kornheiser, Karl Ravesch, Billy Baldwin… and some other people listed on Wikipedia’s entry. But more than that, I am now (theoretically) in possession of a piece of paper (diploma) signed by a bunch of people (SUNY Board of Trustees and BU President Lois DeFleur) which says stuff which will allow people to hire me. (I’m not in physical possesion of the diploma yet. Hopefully that’ll happen soon…)
I was once told from an interviewer that the only reason people go to college is because employers require it. For many jobs out there, a college degree isn’t required to actually execute the job; it’s just that you need one to compete with everyone else who wants the job. It doesn’t make them better, it just looks like it makes them better. And after graduating, I can pretty much confirm this. I worked at my internship for a combined 4 months (starting for another 3 on Monday). While my Computer Science education (and college in general) these last was interesting, informative, challenging and stimulating, the actual knowledge propigated in lectures and classes have had little impact on real life work. If I’m going to be programming in Java (which I hope to be doing eventually), I learned everything I need to know in 3 classes (CS 140, 328 and 455). That’s it. The rest was conceptual, ethical and theoretical rhetoric. I’ll admit what I learned has merit in academia. But, as an example, it really doesn’t matter how an operating system handles daemon threads when working in an office. No one beyond the tech guys will even know what you’re talking about, and there’s a good chance that knowledge of it won’t even help you in execution of the job. The only possible application for such knowledge would be in building an operating system, or modifying one at the kernal level (and for IT stuff, it matters little.) The same goes for Automata and Programming Languages. The material taught in these classes is only useful if you will be in development of high-level computer languages or researching the possible development of another type of computational engine entirely, which doesn’t make much of a living unless you also happen to be a college professor.
So… the point of that rant was to really say “College Diploma = 4 years of college experience”, but not “College Diploma = More intelligence”. With the college experience comes the knowledge to get to the solution to a problem, not necessarily handing you all the solutions. In a round about way, a college diploma says something about intangable value.
So much for a bullet-pointed list… it turned out to be a full-on rant…
What else…
Pipe Bomb… ahh Pipe Bomb… the college newspaper parody which sparked outrage and protest from a number of student groups and the administration. It never came to SA Judicial Board, but since I’m no longer on J-Board, I can say without repercussion that some people have to seriously put some things in perspective and slash or remove the sand from their respective vaginas. Were the jokes made in bad taste? Yeah. Should Pipe Dream be censored and “watched over”? No fucking way! It’s an independently run student newspaper. For most issues, PD does its job well and without incident. To alter the way it operates based on one badly executed parody issue is inappropriate, rash and hasty. To paraphrse Paul Zwirecki, the whole Pipe Bomb drama really did remind me of the movie PCU in the whole “students against students” kind of mentality.
That’s all for now. I’ve written enough. I should go to sleep before my recent cold and sore throat relapse.
P.S.: Home computer’s Hard drive and floppy drive are dead, Laptop speakers and CD drive are dead as well. :heart: hardware problems…