Current Happenings 2002

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Year 2002

December 13

Semester in Review

This has been a long semester. The hardest part ended yesterday night, when I took my last final exam. I still have a little bit of grading work to do for my job as TA for a USC class, and for that one-unit class I taught at Biola this semester.

Taking classes. (See the list of my Fall 2002 Classes) So, how did my semester go? Well, this is actually a bad time to ask. It's after I took my finals and turned in my final projects and homework, but before I know my grades. I guess some people have a feeling of accomplishment for a semester well-done at the end. But for me, it's more like: Ugh, I'm glad that's over, I should have done better in my classes.  So perhaps I'll be in a better mood when I get my grades and see that I didn't fail all my classes after all.

I did learn a lot this semester, and I'm glad for that. I had some interesting homework for my Cryptography class.  I'm proud of the Java Servlets project I did that implements a shopping cart using MySQL. I also wrote two pretty good Perl programs for my Database class.

Being TA at USC. I was also a TA (Teacher's Assistant) for the first time at USC this semester. I like it. It was tedious at times, but I enjoyed getting to know some of the undergraduate students, and it was nice to be able to teach a few hours a week (I taught the lab classes).

Teaching at Biola. I taught a 1-unit section of Marketing Technologies class for the business department at Biola again. That went well. I enjoy teaching that class. It's fairly easy to do, since I've done it so many times before, and it's content that I enjoyed teaching.

Travel. I haven't traveled anywhere this summer except to the San Diego and Escondido area a couple times. Once for Scott Ward's wedding, the other times to see Ted Haenggi.

Christmas Plans. My whole immediate family is getting together for the first time in four years this year. Joel and I plan to go be with my parents in Tucson, then we'll go back to L.A. to meet everyone else, and then all come back to Tucson again together.

Projects I Want to Do. Speaking of Christmas, it's about time for me to post my annual wish list. Not because I really want someone to buy me those things, but just as a permanent record of what types of things I want. This type of thing won't be that interesting until about 5 or 10 years from now, when I look back at what I wanted back in 2002. Actually, there is a list of things in the back of my mind that I want to do with my web site:

So, now that my semester is coming to a close, hopefully I'll have some more time to do some of these projects. For now, I'll close by mentioning one more thing that's new this semester. I've figured out that almost everyone I know now uses HTML-based email systems, so I've been trying to add a little color and my real signature to email messages I send (it makes my emails more usable (but not the backups thereof, oh well)).  The Biola on-campus email system is an exception to this -- it's not HTML enabled, but you can still do text formatting and pictures.  So, in my recent emails, I have been signing them kind of like I'll do now.

Later,


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Created and maintained by Matthew Weathers. Last updated Apr 20, 2006.