So long red truck

My brother Kevin came over to my house today to finish the paper work for purchasing my truck. After both the catilitic converter and subwolfer were stolen I knew I couldn’t keep it here any more.

He’s excited about having the truck and he wen’t to the wrecking yards over in Rancho Cambodia to yank an A/C unit off a similar truck, I’m not sure if he was successfull or not.

He has also started his college career so I’ve been giving him some advice on what to focus on and what to prioritize, the last thing I want for him is to be as directionless as I was when I first went into college.

I’m not saying that it was necissarily bad for me to be as directionless as I was, I learned a lot about myself and what I want and what I think I want. However, I think I’d be a lot further along in life if I had a bit more guidence. I do want to say in the same breath that I don’t want to impose my view of the world and college on him, or Matt and Katie when they graduate from High School. I want to make sure that they realize that they are the ones calling shots for their own lifes.

State test: 80%

So I passed! Woo-hoo!

What now?

Well… Yeah I passed but I need to be with in the top 3 rankings. I think I’m in #4 but I’m not sure, I’ll ask tomorrow at work and get more detail.

The questions were crazy ‘critical thinking’ type questions. Stuff like whats the next number in this sequence? and If yo mamma wears a moo-moo then she lives in Nevada. No one that lives in Nevada wears a moo-moo. Where does your mamma live?

I’ll post more of this later.

The beginning of the end

I just wanted to post up that yesterday was the last time (hopefully!) that I will have a ‘first day of class’ as an undergraduate. Sweet!

Yes ladies and gentlemen, my final semester has commenced! I have only two classes and both of them are with the same professor, the same professor I had last year for my MIS 160 class. Here are my two classes:

• MIS 161 – Systems Development Life-cycle II
• MIS 132 – Management Science TechniquesIs

These two classes will definately be keeping me busy this semester. MIS 161 will require quite a few team meetings, lots of planning, programming, and presentations. MIS 132 will require a lot of reading to keep up in the class but he is grading the class using a ‘grading by contrat’ methodology. How he has that set up is like this:

You take a test each week, if you get higher than 80% on that test you can then take the next test the following week. If you pass 11 of these tests you get an A in the class, if you pass 7 of these test you get a C in the class. If you don’t pass one of the tests he’ll let you retake it as many times as needed but you can’t move on to the next test until you pass. Pretty cool huh?

So this semester I hope to maximize my learning experience since I only have two classes, I want to get as much out of these two classes as I can. Last semester was a bad semester, I overloaded myself and had to deal with lossing my job because of being overloaded.* Since I had 5 classes last semester I didn’t get to emerse myself in the topics as much as I would have liked, but I still did good, I got 3 A’s and 2 B’s. But that’s in the past, gotta look to the future now.

Today I have a test scheduled for the State. If I do decent on the test then I’ll get ‘listed’ which means I’m eligible to get hired on with the State. If that happens there will be a lot of possibilities that will become feasible in the future, mainly the fact that most of the current staff will be retiring over the next 5-10 years. As that happens new people will come in to fill their places which will hopefully give me a good bit of upward mobility! But that all depends on how I do on this test.

Wish me luck!

* Just a side note of something I found out recently. I quit my job at BLHA/JTS because I needed to take MIS 140 prior to this semester, they won’t let anyone take MIS 161 without first having taken MIS 140. I emailed the professor at the beginning of last semester to see if MIS 140 will be availble over the summer, here was the exchange:

Jan – 29 2006
Professor Sandman,

I was wondering if you know whether or not MIS 140 will be offered summer ‘06. If so do you know the times? The time that MIS 140 is currently offered is extreemly inconvienent for my work schedule and may result in me loosing my job if I stay with the class this semester.
Thanks.
-Mike
Reply: Jan – 30 2006
No, I had suggested this, but it was vetoed. Sorry…

However it was offered this summer!

Oh well… It’s in the past now, I just thought it was kind of funny.