Sunday, September 18, 2011

Post 3 or Pulling an All Nighter

The week before last in my Object Oriented Programming class we were assigned homework that was due the following Thursday. It was 6 problems long and two only had to be written, and one were allowed to work with a partner. Seemed simple enough. I could not have been more wrong... The first three problems weren't all that bad. The first two were written problems and were done within a few minutes, and the third was a simple calculation program. It was the last three that were the trouble-makers. With the previous program problem were given the first half of the program by the professor and simply had to plug-in the rest. The others, besides 4, required us to do the ENTIRE program from scratch starting from Square 1. If I made any error in either half of the programming then the entire thing would not run  properly and I would have to scour back over the code and attempt to discern what the problem was. Sure enough I did something wrong on every single one... On problem #4  the goal was to create a function that calculated the decimal equivalent of a fraction. Seems simple enough seeing how it is basic math. It wasn't as easy as it sounds. I typed out what I believed to be the correct coding and attempted to run it. The first thing I saw was that there was an error. I looked back over the program and could not find what was wrong. I tried running it multiple times and  tried fixing the code  ways trying to correct the code, but nothing seemed to work. On what was to be my final pass over the code I found my mistake. When I found out what I had done wrong it annoyed me to no end. I had forgotten one, single, solitary parentheses.... In programming the smallest of mistakes can ruin the entire thing. The last two problems had similar issues. The "little" errors kept me and my friend Matt up all night and we even considered switching majors around 3 in the morning. At one point we went to Whataburger just so we would not destroy our computers in frustration. Eventually we fixed our mistakes and turned them in. However, we got very little sleep that night and promised to keep each other awake in our classes the following day. We even vowed to never allow something like happen ever again. At least not anytime soon...

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Post 1 or Don't Panic

I never really thought I would ever be doing one of these. Always figured I would never have anything to say or that no one would bother to read about my life, but here I am. I am writing my first blog. Just a few short weeks ago I started school at Texas Lutheran University. And my how the days have flown. Exciting days at that. I mean every day presents something new here, and every day something new is learned. I was skeptical at first figuring that I would never make it past the first week. I was thinking that I would have an anxiety attack or something of that nature. Then when the day came for me to start? Nothing. I was nervous. Yeah, who isn't? But all is well. I have made new friends and am in my third week of school. The end of the second was kinda rough as I was home for Labor Day Weekend in Cedar Creek when the big fires broke out around Bastrop. Quite possibly one of the scariest three days of my life. All I heard was how the fires were getting bigger and that there was nothing that could be done. Hours ticked by and some of my friends lost their homes. Me missing two days of school seems petty when there are people I know that don't have a home to go back to anymore. Before this gets to long or to depressing let me say Don't Panic.

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Post 2 or The Next Frontier

Stardate: -312699.79. Not much has happened since I got back to school. Each day was another day of school. Although the days have started to blur together I have learned something new everyday. I hope that my days here pass by in a fuzzy haze of studying, and tests. I want everything to be new. I wan each day to be a new frontier waiting to be explored. The only downside is the homework. Sometimes the work is challenging and, dare I say it, fun. In the end it has to be done. Sure, I could spend my time lounging about not doing it, but later on it would cost me more effort than if I had done it in the first place. Heck, even this very blog post is a homework assignment. Like the rest of the homework it has to be done. I never really was any good at these things. I tend to bounce around and the post(s) never really come together cohesively. Back to the title of the post. I know that one day that this will be over. That I will have graduated from TLU (Texas Lutheran University) and be let loose on the world. Then yet another Frontier shall have been discovered. Maybe in the future or as I go along I will get better at this. Until then I will write about what comes to mind concerning school and the musings of my life so far. Back to the title of the post.