Phil: What didn’t work for you? What could have been improved about the course?
Mike: The few bugs that would pop up occasionally, would quickly be addressed in the forum and corrected. There was one time that the grader for a assignment became so overloaded that it crashed the system.
They kindly gave us another day to turn in our assignments, “and there was much rejoicing”. In hindsight, and though I understand their reasons for doing so, I wish they would have taught us to program in Terminal instead of using a GUI like Enthought EPD. I feel like this would have made my skills more translatable to the real world. It is a very user friendly interpreter however, and gives the user instant gratification and comforts galore, especially when it came to plotting graphs with pylab.
Now I have begun weening myself off of Enthought and am doing my best to become one with the way of the Terminal and Vim (I am writing this on it right now).
Phil: Why didn’t you give up?
Mike: It would have been very easy to, actually. My friend who had joined the class with me ended up dropping it, due to the restrictions it imposed on his lifestyle. Everyday it was a constant effort to continue and keep prodding through. In order to make the time necessary to complete the course, I imposed a strict regimen on my daily life. I would wake at 6AM every morning (much to the annoyance of everyone who had to hear me snoozing or not hearing my alarm for an hour) and then make a pot of coffee, all while the tourbus was still rolling to the next city.
Then I would listen to lectures and work on the quizzes till my brain was sufficiently fried, and by that time we would hopefully have arrived at our destination where I would proceed to take a much needed head-clearing walk through town.
After soundcheck I would sneak in some more time at the computer till it was time to play the show, and after the show (and after several drinks had been consumed) I would work in my bunk till the wee hours of the morning only to repeat again the next day. This was my life. I felt like I was isolating myself from my friends and they would constantly remark with amazement at my will to continue on in this way.
When I was home, there were many times when I would say goodnight to my fiancé, only for her to wake up for work the next morning and see me in the exact same place. There was one time, I recall, where I didn’t sleep for three days from being completely consumed by an assignment.
She couldn’t believe it and she coerced me into taking a much needed break, whereupon I returned and found a solution shortly thereafter. I quickly learned the value of stepping away from a problem. In many respects, I think that having everyone constantly seeing me endure this lifestyle gave me a certain gratification.
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