Stephen Caldwell's Space » School

This is why we can’t have anything nice, pt. 2

Stephen — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 11:47:52 +0000

Apparently someone thought that it’d be nice to go through my mail and steal the DVDs I received from Netflix.

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving.

Fun with scissors

Stephen — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 01:10:12 +0000

So, for my Artificial Intelligence class that I am taking this semester, we are required to present a project on some artificial intelligence related topic. I decided that I was going to take a crack at Reinforcement Learning. I’m still at the beginning stages of my project, but once I get some more details I’ll post about it.

Down to the wire…

Stephen — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 04:25:45 +0000

It was brought to the forefront of my attention recently that I have only three months left until I’ve graduated. While the complete weight of the situation hasn’t yet hit me, I’m definately feeling some of the pressure that comes along with being finished. I have to go out and get a real job now. I’ve been working on my resume for about a week now. I had gone to Northeastern’s career services and I received some suggestions about what I can change. I’m still a little concerned that it isn’t quite “there” yet though. During co-op, the employers were fairly relaxed in their resume guidelines. I’ll be in the real talent pool now. I do however have an excellent network of people that I can talk to who can critique my resume for me. I’m hoping to start getting the resume out by next week.

Working Toward A Better Tomorrow Redux

Stephen — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 02:16:30 +0000

I partook in the remaining two classes on my roster today. The first being Systems & Networks. This class is probably going to end up being quite a joke. I somehow managed to get into a class that was approximately 50% IS majors. The professor had planned on giving us some programming assignments, but IS majors apparently don’t know how to program very well. This seems to indicate that the professor is going to have to make a lot of concessions in terms of the difficulty of the assignments that he can give. Additionally the course’s programming assignments are going to be in Java. A language that I’m neither excited to be using, but I’m not spiteful about it either.

Secondly, I attended Organizational Behavior and Design. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to perform in this class. It supposedly involves going over a lot of case studies and, like the Intro. to Marketing class and many of the higher level business classes in general, a large quantity of in-class participation. My participation in classes previously had been fairly rare. I am one of those people who like to sit by the side lines and just watch others do all the hard communication. Unfortunately, the goals that I have in my life are not congruent with my current behavior. For me to be able to accomplish what I want I have to be more communicative or I can look forward to a lot of setbacks and disappointment. I believe that taking these business classes will be quite beneficial for me and I’m excited to take them.

Working Towards A Better Tomorrow

Stephen — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 03:10:04 +0000

Today marks the inaugural day of the Spring 2006 semester. I am looking forward to what this semester brings forth. I had my three of my classes today: Introduction to Marketing, Beginning Swimming, and Network Fundamentals.

I believe that Introduction to Marketing will be quite the interesting experience. It will depart with the typical teaching method that I’m used to having with the majority of my classes which were all lectures for the most part. Nearly 35% of our grade will be based on classroom participation. Trying to hide in this class will clearly hurt ones grade. This leads me to a bit of an aside.

What is the deal with Boloco? Firstly, the glaring fact that they don’t serve burritos in the traditional sense. There offer could more be classified as a wrap. The name “The Wrap” just made more sense and had been around for a long time. It was a perfectly good brand name that went well with their product. Everyone knew what “The Wrap” was. It was a place where one could get a wrap and a smoothie. It just made sense. They are now pretty much starting over now. They have to try and reattract customers who didn’t know that The Wrap had changed their name to something less indicative of the actual product that is sold. They have to also try harder to attract new customers because it’s not clear what it is they sell. They clearly don’t sell “bolocos”. From a marketing perspective, it seems rather dumb. If they wanted a new logo, they should have just made a new logo. There was no need to change the company’s name.

All I can say is I hope I actually learn how to swim in Beginning Swimming. It’s rather sad. Out of the twenty or so people in the class, only two of us don’t actually know how to swim.

I believe that my Network Fundamentals class will be relatively easy. It’s mostly going over different interent protocols like HTTP, FTP, TCP, UDP, IP, Ethernet and what have you. So far the only thing I didn’t know in the class was little “o” notation. I had learned it in my Algorithms class and that was a year or so ago so it wasn’t really expected to sit around the bowels of my gray matter for too long. I think it’ll end up being cake, especially the programming assignments. I am a God among men.

I’ll tell you what my other two classes are like tomorrow.