thenyelabs.com

This article was nice to see, I even got quoted in there, ahhh yeah. It really is a pretty sweet program, I’m just glad we’re getting a little PR.

The best part is after the jump (continue reading…)

So misty (see little brother Jakes wife) has requested that I give up some of the juicy details of my life for her entertainment pleasure. I thought this was a great idea until I realized that I have very few juicy details to give up right now. I will be honest, I’ve tried hard lately to get some juicy details, but no matter how much I want to, I just can’t make myself be a man-slut. I go into dates with the manly intention of grabbing a cheap make out and running, but then I just feel guilty for compromising my standards and what not, then in the middle of the deliberation, the girl will spout off something ridiculous like “Do you think I’m stupid cause I’m transferred here from BYU Idaho and not BYU Provo?” or the always popular “are you mad at me?” at which point all ill conceived dirty pleasure is forgotten and the girl is promptly taken home to wallow in her insecurities or whatever it is that makes the women I’ve been going out with lately be the way they are. And it’s not just one either, I can’t figure it out. But without fail, I’m always grateful that I held to my guns and didn’t end up getting “involved” with one of the crazies. Blessings all over I reckon. So there’s my juicy gossip, the more I date, the less I like it, I’ve actually taken to BBQ’ing some brats with the roomie and inviting married couples over to play games on the Wii, we laugh, have fun, eat well, and don’t have to worry about poor susie who can’t figure out the nun-chuck controller, or betty who doesn’t realize that the controller is a pointing device. I am finding more satisfaction in losing myself in math, or SIFE projects than I have found in love, so for the time being, I’ll leave it at that. Programming and saving the world via SIFE, that is the Life o’ Doan.

so i’m in the middle of my first spring term, and I had it all setup to be nice and easy, then I thought 6 credits, or the minimum, would be an insult to my college prowess, so then I added another class, went to my first day of all of them, then skipped a week. I have since returned and enrolled in a 14 hour a week (in class, so like 6-9:30 every day) course teaching Lean Six Sigma, been promoted to president of SIFE and charged with turning us into a top competitor next year, and been tasked with making up all my homework/quiz’s/projects for all my classes. I haven’t been this busy in a long time, I’m either in a meeting, at work, in class, or on a project literally every waking moment. I’ve fallen asleep while eating lunch cause I can’t get to bed before 2am and I’m back up at 6am every day. Life is crazy. The Six Sigma stuff is fascinating though, and I’m finding that I really like the idea of consulting, or building value within a company, or finding and fixing problems in the system as a whole. Tony Laturner seems to know his stuff pretty well, so it’s worthwhile now, who knows what doors it will open for me in the future. It’s tough for a lot of people because the theory behind it is counter every business/finance class you’ve ever taken, and makes most economists full of garbage all of the sudden. People don’t like when 4 years of study is contradicted, for me, however, it’s kind of refreshing because every one of those classes I’ve been in has always been a strugle to sit through because it never made sense in my mind, every chart and graph seemed to be missing something key to the process, now it’s making sense to me. Kind of nice to be on the side of “ahhh, I see” instead of “so your sure, this is seriously how it goes?….. mmmkay” Pretty good times

Anyway, life is dandy, I’m alive, can’t wait to get home though.

Maybe I could have called this something like what I wish I’d known when I was in homeschool, or life after homeschooling or something like that, but essentially, I want to share a little bit of what I’ve learned about how to be successful after homeschool.
My situation is thus, I grew up in California, being one of seven kids in our family, we were all being happily educated in that great state’s public school system. I made it into second grade and found myself in a bilingual class, everything the teacher would teach would first be in English, then we would do it again in Spanish. Due to some frustrations other siblings were also having with their respective situations in school, my mom made the decision to pull us all out and this began our, and her own, homeschooling career. So going in, I could read short chapter books and do subtraction. :)
So I’ve been homeschooled my whole life until my freshmen year of high school, at which point, I felt like I was missing something, so I went for that year, decided it was a waste of my time, took my GED, and am now in my senior year of college. This post is what I would, and have many a time, muse if asked for advice from a homeschooler, or from a mother or father who is considering homeschooling.
First, homeschooling is not for everybody. It’s not for every family, it’s not for every mother, and it is certainly not for every child. I have argued many a debate with (continue reading…)

So I’m an employee of the Information Systems (IS) department of the university I attend and have been working on innovating some ways to improve the teaching of our upper level IS classes here. The IS classes we teach are your typical Windows 2003 server, which is essentially a MCSE prep course, advanced networking, which is essentially CCNA prep, systems development and implementation, more business process yada, your intro and advanced linux coursen, as well as some database flavors. The traditional setup we’ve gone for is open up as much as we can in the advanced classes to give the students a real feel for using the networks and servers and so on. The problem comes in the fact that if you have more than one section of a class, every student who sits down at the machine personalizes the heck out of it, causing frustration to the other students using the machine, and ultimately to myself as I spend time rebuilding Active Directory after one student tries to teach the other one a lesson and ends up hosing the machine. The traditional solutions of Deep Freeze, Altiris weekly imaging, or any other non persisting software just doesn’t work because often over the course of the semester a student does projects that build on projects, they need their data to persist. Additionally, if you build an AD setup, or a linux network and build yourself a firewall to sandbox with, you run into the problem where the big stuff, the stuff every kid wants to play with, is only one in a classroom (one promoted domain server, one firewall everyone connects through, etc) and if they want to play with it, they’re just out of luck. (continue reading…)