Ninth Semester

My Ninth semester (Fall 2012)

And it would be the final semester needed for the EECT classes. I only needed two classes for the EECT associates degree, but I took five classes, since I had a scholarship paying for my classes. I still want to take the class that covers solar and wind power.  Five classes is a new record for classes in one semester for me. But four over the summer was a lot more work, since it was eight weeks versus sixteen weeks.

 Only one of my classes was online this semester, but I had the same teacher for the two EECT classes, which made it a lot nicer than the other online classes I took over the summer.

 

Classes:

EECT 140      Networking (Monday 6:00-9:50)

Before this class I would have said I knew networking very well. But this class went into a level of detail that I have never dealt with, and that is the OSI model levels. The professor was Joshua Johanan. I had him for three classes this semester. He teaches his classes a lot like online classes, which I do not mind, so there is very little paper; homework, quizzes, and test are done online. Some of the questions were still fill in the blank and essay type questions.

EECT 232      Advance Computer Troubleshooting (Thursday 6:00-9:50)

This class was continuation of the spring semester’s computer troubleshooting. It was the same professor Joshua Johanan. The book was the same book; it was the blue sections for this class. So some of the chapters were ones we already covered, but now it was more in depth. 

There was nothing too earth shattering in this class, it covered windows XP and Vista. And it pretty much just proved windows is not that great at helping you figure out what is wrong. Either it fixes itself (getting new drivers or software updates) or you are on your own to try whatever you can to get it working. 

CINS 137       Visual Basic Programming (Tuesday and Thursday 4:00-5:20)

The professor for this class was Dave Bohlmann (he is supposed to start teaching EECT classes for the Spring 2013 semester). Since we used visual basic in CINS 113 one of the students thought we should go into more depth than just the tutorials from the book (Microsoft Visual Basic 2010 Reloaded, 4/e). So the professor came up with a new syllabus which included some on the other problems from the end of the chapters and some stuff that was not even in the book. Some of them were hard, such as random number generators, the one built into VB was easy, but the ones we had to code were not so easy. The other hard project was image processing, it was really interesting and I liked learning about it, but coding it was difficult, and of course after I got it done the other students were having a hard time with it and wanted it dropped, I asked for it to be extra credit. The final was also difficult, because I do not like coming up with my own projects, I did the game battleship. There also was not a lot of time to work on it, since I was working on image processing and other finals for other classes.    

We also did something totally unrelated to visual Basic. The professor was launching balloons, so I volunteered. I thought it would have been more interesting if more people would have volunteered. But very few people want to do anything they are not required to do. There were two balloon launches. And I programmed the cameras to take pictures. If you are interested in that you can Google CHDK.

CINS157        Web Site Development (Wednesday 4:00-6:45)

The professor for this class was Carrie Butler, and it was at the Elkhart campus. It covered using HTML5 to make webpages. The biggest thing was for HTML5 web browsers will be dropping plugins and new HTML5 tags will take their place. This makes sense because web browsers are running on everything now, including phones and tablets. Our mid-term was group project, which I am not too fond of group projects, but my group was pretty good, except one women never showed up or helped, but we had planned on that. The final could have been a group project, but we voted to have it an individual project. Mine looked a lot like the mid-term project, but most people did a great job on their web-sites.

CINT 108       Linux Fundamentals (Online - Warsaw)

The professor was Joshua Johanan. And I took it this semester because I would have him for other classes and could ask him questions, and I did. I had used Linux before but not Fedora, which is what we used for this class. It covered the basics, but we did have to compile a package, that was difficult, but I liked getting that experience. We also had to write some scripts, which I had not done before, but it was not that big a deal, but now I know I can write them if I need to. We also went over CRON to schedule jobs, again I had not used that.