Sitting here today making some realizations

I am sitting at my dining room table today reading through chapter one of my C++: How to Program book for my Computer Science 2 class. When I started back to school I went back for many reasons, first was to finish something that I had started long ago, and I had once promised (and often reminded) my mother that I would one day complete my Bachelor's Degree. But as I have returned to college, I realize that more and more I am frustrated by students that have a genuine lack of knowledge and enthusiasm for the things that interest me. The internet and I have a very close relationship, from my blog to the "Web 2.0" application of the day, I love the internet. For most college students I find it is a way for them to keep up with facebook, chat on AIM, and generally screw around in class. This is far from the way that I view the internet, but I have a few years more perspective then the average student in my classes, with a lot of years learning how to pro actively screw off at work or school.

I am now facing my first semester of classes where my knowledge may be expanded, rather then just confirmed, and I am hopefully going to learn something I don't know. So, I am planning on reading every chapter we cover, and doing all the review questions, and write all the code that is related to covered material. This seems like a great time to become a little more focused and actually treat college not like a place I can go to validate how much I know but to actually make me learn by forcing myself to do the work. This is a big departure from previous school experiences for me, I tend ot be able to pull high marks in classes just by paying attention in class, and short term focusing on assignments I need to turn in. My goal this semester is to walk away with a comfort level with writing code that seems very far from me today, I have a lot of familiarity to concepts, terms and techniques without any real hands on experience.

So here it goes, I am taking:

1. Database Management Systems - I plan on walking away from this class knowing a fair bit of SQL and to utilized this new knowledge in my next class
2. Advanced Programming with Visual Basic 2005 - I am hoping to leave this class with a comfort level in developing windows based applications. I think I would like to write my own RSS parser, and reader that I can run from my thumb drive, also take some of the database concepts into this class and push this class to make it to Object-Oriented Programming to just add a little more comfort to the concepts I am familiar with.
3. Computer Science 2 - this class is a full on make or break you for the Computer Science major. C++ programming from the ground up, lots and lots of hands on experience, and a lot of object-oriented programming practice. This class is the most important to me, I feel that this class will hopefully provide me with knowledge and some skills to back up the knowledge that will carry over to so many programming languages that are based on principles of C++.

What is sad for me is that this semester will likely see less of the Drupal world, because of all that is going on with school. I am planning on launching a few actor's websites in the next few weeks, and maybe start offering this type of site to actors at schools in my area. I will see how things go with that a nice little package, of functionality and basic design for a fixed price. I will be keeping an eye on all things Drupal, that is what work is for :) and keep writing here as time permits. This busy geek is out...