Uni Blog Week 02
Last updated: 14 hours, 54 minutes ago
Intro
This was the first week of having a full course load. Monday was the hardest, having two classes back to back on campus, and forgetting my lunch at home. Good job me. It was also a really long week. But I got through it and now I have a better expectation of what this semester has in store for me: 3 decent and potentially fun classes, lots of group work, and 1 really horrible class that I probably should not be in.
Project Management (Monday Morning)
Lecture
This week's lecture was fairly simple introductory stuff. We went over the syllabus, the professor introduced himself, we covered the first two chapters of the optional textbook, and we were assigned two assignments. I don't feel like I learned much during this course being the intro week and also because I have taken a project management course before.
Assignment One
I already finished this before class started. It was just a simple introduction to ourselves in the class forum and then respond to at least two other people.
Assignment Two
We are supposed to create a rough, 2 page project outline for bringing in a new course to our University about how to have better relations with the United States and Canada. From a political standpoint, this may be hard for me. I typically try to stay out of politics since they are depressing, frustrating and a whole slew of other negative emotions and also because there is nothing I can do to change what's happening. Which is also sad, frustrating, and a whole slew of other emotions. But the assignment is about making a course not about going into politics, so I tried to focus on that more than anything.
update
This turned out to be way more about the politics and procedures of the University than about US-Canadian politics. This was actually far more interesting, fun, and useful to me. I learned about how courses are proposed and the approval process that they have to go through before they can become a course. Also, all the teachers' salaries are posted publicly, which was interesting to see, and they don't make nearly as much as I thought they would. Mostly $70k-110k CAD.
Software
Proff mentioned Microsoft Projects. I asked him if that would be required or not. He says that no software outside of a normal MS office will be required, and "don't buy anything." That means I can destroy my windows VM, thankfully. But I also got curious about what options there are on Linux. I found one project called LibreProject that is free, open-source, and supposed to be very similar to the MS product. Naturally I installed that and am going to learn to use that going forward.
ProjectLibre
I went through a few tutorials on how to work this software. Now I am building a small c++ project to build Pong using this software to track progress. The software is really quite genius and really helpful to take the guess work and labour out of project management planning. Which I suppose should be obvious, but I have never used any project management software before.
Operating Systems
Lecture
The professor seems good and knowledgeable. The course is pretty basic so far, I have definitely covered this material before. He covered a lot of basic memory concepts (like difference between volatile and non volatile memory), user mode vs kernel mode, applications, processes, daemons, Timer, interfaces, multiprogramming, multitasking, cpu utilization, deadlock handling, memory management and file management.
He also tried to give us a very short demo on linux and compiling c code, but something happened to his VM and he blamed updates.
The professor said that the Linux portion of the course is only going to be about 4-5 weeks and I am disappointed by this. He didn't say what we would be using after that, I assume that we will be using Windows, so I will keep that windows VM from my Projects course around for now.
Assignment 1 & Group Work
We had to form a semester-long group for the course assignment work. I kind of hate that, but the group mates could become friends, who knows. I already did the group work last week. But that has worked out, because we have all agreed to solo the project and then bring everything together in the end. Group members seem nice so far.
Data Communications
Lecture
This is going to be the worst course of the semester. This professor is one of the absolute worst professors I have ever had, and I can say that safely because I have had him before. This course looks like it is going to be Networking 1 from 1st year again except without all the hands on packet tracer stuff. So all the OSI layers knowledge. Which is good knowledge, but I have already had it in several classes. The professor spent the first half hour talking about himself, the next hour going over the syllabus, then an hour on student introductions, and finally half hour of reading off slides verbatim.
Assignment One
This professor over engineers so bad. All assignments are group assignments that we do individually. We were assigned a semester-long group of four people and we each had to do the assignment, then we are expected to meet and discuss which answer is the best, and then submit the best answer and all the other answers as one group submission. And we need to read CH 1 & 2 from a textbook that I need to physically show him for next class.
Homework One
Surprise Homework! Just when I thought I was done for the week. He releases homework one with the statement "This doesn't need to be done." In my mind, that statement is a trap and this homework does need to be done; something in the homework will be in the testing. Question 1: buy and show the professor the text. :| hahaha. Otherwise this hwk is same as assignment; it has two questions pulled directly from the text book.
Extreme Programming
Due to my child being in a lot of pain from having her orthodontics changed, I did not make it to this class. There was no homework assigned but I'll have to catch up on the lecture slide still and she left access to the inclass lab available, so I'll work on that too.
Conclusion
At the end of the week, looking back on the week, it was a very slow and frustrating week that felt both overwhelming and underwhelming. I am hopeful that at least three of the courses are going to be good.
References
Actually remembered some references this time for you all
ProjectLibre Video Tutorial 1
ProjectLibre Desktop
Operating Systems Textbook: Operating Systems Concepts by Abraham Silberschatz
Data Communications TextBook: Computer Networks by Andrew S Tanaenbaum
Project Management Textbook: Information Technology Project Management by Kathy Schwalbe
If you want me to elaborate on anything, please message me on Discord, Mastodon, X, or email me. I’ll be happy to go into more detail one-on-one or to create more posts.
