Posted on: December 25th, 2009 by Famous Phil

First, I would like to wish you a Merry Christmas!  This has been a long year for me!

6 score and days ago (clever huh? ) I was preparing for a new semester at the University at Buffalo.  Little did I know what I would be getting myself into.  I was enrolled in 17 credit hours (8 undergrad, 9 grad) with a really split schedule.  This and an unexpected Teaching Assistant position pretty much took all of my energy away for most of the semester.  Included I’d like to provide some tips after looking back that might help others facing similar schedules.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t make my schedule in such a way that I could have classes in a long solid chunk like I have had in past semesters.  I wasn’t expecting this to be hard to handle, but I was expecting a bit of lost time throughout the semester.  This is because most of my work is project based and I’m not very efficient with doing work when I have an hour here and there to do the work.

The reason why is because it takes me a good half hour to an hour to get into an efficient working rhythm.  I prefer having a large chunk of contiguous time to handle any chunk of work that I need to get done because I enter a mood and I work very quickly and efficiently.  Programming is one of the huge tasks that I do that requires large chunks of contiguous time.

During the semester I couldn’t find large chunks of time to get work done and this probably hurt me a little bit, but I did get through it.  I managed to get by through losing the concept of a “life”.  Most of my weekends were spent working on projects that were due, and I was limiting my sleep to 6 hours a night.  During the last 2 weeks, I had so much work left to do and so little time that I finally gave up on the concept of getting it all done in time.  I switched over to a “best effort” approach and started getting my 8 hours of sleep every night again.  This probably saved me the most because I quit worrying as much and I started being more productive.

After adjusting, I did start a paper todo list.  I found this to be very helpful compared to my computer based todo list because I could cross stuff off and it would still appear on the paper.  My computerized todo list removes my items from the list so I can’t see what I’ve accomplished.  This was a huge set back for me until I realized it was happening.  I will hopefully have a solution to this problem in the next few weeks to prepare for next semester.

Here are my tips: If you are in a situation where you don’t have enough time to do all the work, I recommend taking the stress out of the picture and start sleeping again.  I found that losing sleep wasn’t helping the problem at all.  I just couldn’t focus.  I also admit that I didn’t get everything done, but the tiny details were the things that I left out.  In my best effort approach, I quit doing the stuff that wasn’t worth a lot of points for my time and that was a huge help.  Another huge thing that helped was a todo list on paper.  This managed to keep me organized until I could finish and proved to me that I was moving forward.

All in all, I did enjoy the last semester.  I learned a lot from it in many aspects that I can hopefully take away into future tasks that I need to handle.  I would like to thank everyone who had to put up with me last semester, I probably wasn’t in the best of moods most of the time

Tags: christmas, school, semester, stress, time, work
Posted in Student Life
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Posted on: April 12th, 2009 by Famous Phil

Happy Easter to all of you reading my blog today, or Happy late Easter to all of you who read it in the near future

Unfortunately, today won’t be all that happy since I am doing the normal Sunday chores like laundry and cleaning up after myself with stuff that I’m too lazy to care about during the week.  My weekends are generally less hectic than my weeks, but with all the work I end up doing during a single week, I do let stuff go.

Anyways, Today I will be finishing up a Java Chatroom and Erlang Chatroom for my CSE305 programming class that is due tomorrow.  I intend on releasing this script on Friday to dev.matthouse.us along with a few older projects that I have completed like a Trie in Prolog (Yes, you can make a trie in a logical language).  I also will be doing a lot of French homework which will prepare me for my final exam in a few weeks.

It is amazing how the semester is coming to a close.  I only have a few more weeks of classes then its the summer and I will begin working on websites, in particular: eberlecontracting.com and retreadproducts.com.  If all goes well, I hope to have those both redesigned and finalized by June 1, 2009.

So there you have it   I hope your Easter is a bit more relaxing than mine is going to be, if not, I feel your pain!

Happy Happy!

Tags: college, easter, projects, work
Posted in Personal
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Posted on: February 10th, 2009 by Famous Phil

Over the past week or so, I’ve been getting extremely busy with my normal college workload that is a fact of any Computer Science Major’s college career.  Over the past week, I’ve learned 5 new languages in a project for my programming languages class.  Those languages are ML, Lisp, Erlang, Prolog, and Ruby.  I’ve done limited Ruby in the past, however I have never done any string parsing operations until this project.  I’m confident I’ve finished this project fully and I intend on posting it somewhere on my homework section after I receive my grade for this project.

In addition to my programming class, I’m taking French, Algorithms, and Probability.  Of the three, French takes about 3 hours of my week for homework, probability takes about 4 hours of my week reading the book so I know whats going on, and I put about an hour a week into my Algorithms course so I know something when the test comes later this month.

Now that you have an idea of what I’m doing for college, lets move onto AdminReference.  In my free time, I’ve been looking at numerous design ideas for the site.  I’ve pretty much made up my mind that it will contain a main site and a forum.  The main site will simply be an introduction to what the site is about, while the forum will be where community members will be able to interact with each other.  The service will be free unlike experts exchange because I want an easy reference thats freely available to anyone who needs it.  Initially the site will be ad free, however if traffic grows so much that I need to put a lot of funds into the site, I may insert an ad or two although I am not a fan of advertisements on websites (I feel they slow the site down and hurt its appearence).  Eventually after some content is added to the site, I may work on making a wiki-like interface where tutorials on the forum (or whatever guides are posted) will automatically be tied into a dynamic electronic reference manual that is easily searchable.

Thats all that I really have time to blog about for today, so stay tuned for the next blog within a week

Tags: college, reference, school, server, work
Posted in My Site
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