stevengharms

Hi all,

After the lengthy tour of duty yesterday, I’m back in for another lengthy day. I think that Wednesday is really the grinder day.

First, you’ve been lectured to for the last 3 days. There are very few minds that can take 8hr. / day lectures without feeling a bit tapioca-ish on the 24th hour.

Secondly, you’re listening and then working very hard on something that you just were introduced to. You have these head bashing against a wall sessions and then, suddenly, you’re set free ( because you’re doing something that’s old hat, something you learned, say, that morning ) and then you hit the wall with all that built-up acceleration. It takes a certain mental flexibility.

Third, the sugar, the munchies, the food, etc. By this time it’s all having some funky effects on your body.

Homesickness becomes a bit of a factor. You remember how good your bed is, how nice it is to be among your things and your life.

Now, about the work. You see, you can slide on day 1. You learn the material, you review it, you’re probably OK. DON’T BE FOOLED this is your one and only chance to get ahead of the abbatoir days 2 and 3.

Then comes day 2. If you want to keep ahead you’ll be working late on day 2, maybe even thinking that you’re going to catch a break on day 3. But no, my friends, day 3 is the grinder. Day 3 says “OK, you’re determined, but how determined are you?” You’re bleary from day 2, the cokes, the mountain of water bottles, can you do another 18-hour run at things?

At day 4 you’re going to be exhausted. You’re going to reach your limit. You start to feel like your treading water capability is turning into negative progress. Unless you’ve stayed up on the exercises and mentally integrated the concept and become with the ‘way things are done in this language’, you’re going to feel a bit behind.

Fortunately day 5 is the wind-up day. There’s a sense of graduation and possibility. If you can integrate the first 3 days quickly you’re going to be in a good position to re-discover the last two days quickly. I think that may be the optimal take-away from a class like this.

I’m not sure, I’ll be a good empirical guinea pig for the next few months.

I know a bit more about internetworking than I did a day ago.

I’m pretty tired, I couldn’t sleep very well last night.

I decided to re-christen the Flash Card application “Memory Bank” and I got a cool icon for it done like HAL’s Eye from 2001. I got the idea because the instructor was talking about pluggable modules for large-scale network switches. These are essentially memory or task plug ins. This got me thinking about that scene where Bowman goes into HAL’s brain room and starts unplugging his memory banks. They were holographic cubes that looked like three-dimensional note-cards.

Note cards! I wrote aprogram with notecards! He was in HAL’s memory banks. My app helps you bank things you need to know in note cards, it’s an ectopic memory bank….yes, it should be called memory bank.

So I renamed the tool (which was made much easier by an externally programmed tool called RenameXCodeProject : why Apple doesn’t include this in XCode I have no idea.

I have some more studying to do before tomorrow.

I always write this program, for pretty much any programming language I know: Java, Perl + CGI, and now Cocoa.

I have always learned new information particularly well through either stories or through flash cards. The former, while poetic and colorful lacks the portability and immediacy of the latter. During college you would find me reading the material, making notes, turning the notes to cards, or reviewing the cards.

It was through this method that I memorized the rules of logic (modus tollens, DeMorgan’s Theorem), Dutch Irregular verbs (zijn, was/waren, geweest), French Irregular verbs (ai, as , a, avons, avez, ont). Learning certain basic facts, fast, is something that makes synthesizing abstract things later much easier. I learned this by watching the kids learn when I was an assistant at Kumon math centers: The faster they knew the basics, the faster they could be when they reached calculus. Calculus, by way of comparison, was “What’s the technique” - -the plug and chug of factors and additions was simply a bit of rote dreariness. By having mastered that, they could unfold solutions much more quickly.

In any case, and by way of digression, I’ve created a flash card program to help people learn and review things. A few friends are testing it at present, but I should share it with the rest of the internet in DMG format once I get a few free hours ( work’s rather hectic at the moment ).

Here are some screen shots:

Enter a question…

More questions being entered

The Exam Interface: Answers randomly shuffle to prevent positional memorization (paper cards can’t touch that!)

The final result: Looks like i should study math more and 80’s cartoon references less!

I got my sister a copy of Getting Things Done. We had a lengthy discussion about it, I hope it helps her get started in her professional career in an organized fashion.

Had I had some guidance like this I might have been able to feel more unburdened through the beginning years of my career.

7 Habits makes you existentially want to do better, GTD helps you actually do it….in my not so organizational guru opinion.

You will be typing a lot of repetitive lines. A simple for(n..q) construct can save you a lot of time.

XML will require you to write many, many lines that look 99% the same

<key> filenames </key> <array>

<string> 00.gif</string> <string> 01.gif</string> … <string> n.gif</string> </array>

The ability to have something spit out that n-many lines is very handy.

BTW. I’m re-adding all the other pages previously known in the previous incarnation of the site.

Please tolerate some ugly pages.