It has been a while since I have actually written anything on here. I could make excuses, as I usually do, but there really is no good reason. Sure I was doing school work and busy with something, although I am not really sure what that may be, it does not make my lack of writing acceptable. Let me correct myself, it does not make my lack of writing acceptable to myself. I am going to attempt to write here more often. We shall see how that promise works out.
I have my first summer off in roughly five years. As many who know me are privileged to hear, almost constantly, I have been taking university courses part time. It has been a constant move from one set of courses to another, but the end is definitely in sight. I cannot wait to be done, but I also ponder the thought of “what will I do?” after I am finished. This question does make me think, but then again I will most likely do what I am doing now during the summer : fill my time with hobbies. I am just not sure if that will be satisfying enough. Two months of fishing, video games, and other things is great, but what comes next? That will be a question for 2010 though… September marks the beginning of the end, my last two courses.
Some history is in order for the rest of this post. I completed college in August of 2003, but was never satisfied with the education I received from Conestoga. I always felt that I was being taught the basics over and over again, only with a different language every semester. By basics I mean syntax of language, and not the FUNDAMENTALS that I believe that any decent software developer should know. Nobody taught us about data structures – Hash Tables, B-Trees, Lists. We never learned about how an operating system really worked. We were taught about Windows – How to operate it. We were taught VB, Cobol, and C – How to program in them.
Taking university courses in Computer Science has really opened my eyes. I have seen the guts of an OS and how it works with hardware. I know how my databases work behind the scenes, and can make better informed decisions on their design. I know how my computer network is designed and really understand how it works. I have dabbled with the semantic web and can make my documents part of it. I will be learning about Artificial Intelligence and Distributed computing next.
I also brushed up on my mathematics, something which was severely lacking in Conestoga. We learned “Business Math” and “Statistics”, but this is not nearly enough. I have the power of Calculus and Discrete Mathematics under my belt. I even tortured myself with a class on ODEs (Ordinary Differential Equations). This is the sort of learning that I longed for when I was in my early twenties!
Unfortunately, looking back a decade or more, my late teens made the trip to university impossible. I had a choice between friends, school, or a compromise between the two. During my first three years of high school I chose school and participated with friends to a lesser degree. After grade eleven, I tried to get into the social scene much more and my studies fell to the wayside. I even went for a sixth year of high school to attempt to bring up some grades and join the university crows a year later, but to no avail.
In one way, I do not have much to show for the bad choice I made above. The friends I keep company with to this day are those whom I spent time with before I made the choice to let school slack. In other ways, I do not think I could have done anything differently. I have a beautiful wife, whom I would never have met if I changed the way I lived my life, and a life I would not give up for anything. It is hard to imagine how my life would have turned out if I had changed even a single thing in the past.
It is funny, I did not know how this post was going to turn out when I started it. I am quite satisfied with the results, even though there is much more racing. The mind is a beautiful thing, and I must exercise mine more to keep it in shape.
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