Semester ends back to projects and assorted fun

Well it's official the Spring 2007 semester has ended for me :) This is both a good thing, and a sad thing. It is good because I have a lot of projects that I can now devout more time to, it is one responsibility off my shoulders for the next 3 months. It was a good semester, I have learned a good amount, of the inner workings of an x86 CPU and some Assembly, more then I thought I could about the History of Rock & Roll, and that Visual Studio 2005 isn't as intimidating as it once seemed. I really was against taking an assembly programming class when the semester began, but it really did make me feel like a student and I was learning about the inner workings of something complex, and obscure. In the end I doubt I will ever make a living writing assembly but I can say that I now have a minute amount of knowledge in the subject.

History of Rock & Roll was a fantastic way to spend a Saturday morning and gain 4 credits fulfilling a North American inter-cultural requirement. I was lucky enough to have a teacher who wrote a book on the subject, and had an intimate knowledge and love of the material, Hank Bordowitz. Initially, I was surprised at how little I knew about the roots of Rock & Roll and then I embraced the fact that I was not educated and soaked up everything I could get my ears on. I have a respect for the blues, and how the blues affected all aspects of the Rock & Roll in the future, and key bands that I tossed aside like so many old dusty CDs were resurrected for me, two that come to mind are the Beatles & the Rolling Stones. For me the Beatles were a tired cliche of classic rock at this point in my life, and I was shown just how amazing, alive and influential their music really is through Hank's eyes. The Stones were the cliche British invasion after the Beatles band in my mind, and I never really had any respect for them without alot of reason to dislike them. Being shown how knowledgeable and really amazing they were and how what they did was new and interesting in their time, has changed my view of the Stones forever.

The final class I took was Intro to Programming with Visual Basic 2005, a mouthful and alot more relevant then I thought it would be. When the class started I was completely intimidated by Visual Studio 2005, and within a class we were writing code and never even really talking or thinking about the IDE. The class was slow paced compared to Computer Science classes, it was an Information Systems class (a business school major) so this should have been expected, since the target audience wasn't programmers but technology savvy business students. In the end I fell comfortable with the basics of VB 2005 and the IDE.

My sadness comes from the fact that I learned something every week in these classes, and that is over until September. I plan on trying to learn all summer long to hold my sadness at bey. :)