Summer Week 5

The first mod is almost over.

Leadership

More presentations to begin with. This week's presentations really sucked. I was bored out of my mind. I hope ours isn't boring. The first one was about servent leadership ... they talked about the usual suspects ... Gandhi, Jesus and other leaders. It was very un-memorable. The 2nd was about charismatic leadership. It was a little better. After the presentation, Rasberry was asking us questions and he asked what an un-charismatic leader was like. Just before he asked that question, I was thinking to myself about Michael from The Office ... how charismatic he is, but just an awful leader. So I was chuckling to myself when Rasberry asked what an un-charismastic leader is like. No one was answering. So he said, "Rocky?" He made it sound like I was an example of an un-charismatic leader. So I said, "what, you think I'm an un-charismatic leader?" The class got a laugh out of it. You had to be there to really get it ... one of those moments.

The other presentation was about volunteer leadership. Boring. All three groups were painfully boring. Maybe it was the topics.

After the presentations, we took a break and then came back and discussed the movies. Then he let us go an hour early since the Mavs were playing. I thought that was really swell of him!

The Mavs lost however ... pitiful.

Next week, our group presents. I also have to start on my final paper. I'll be taking a bunch of self-assesments today and gathering data. I really want to have my rough draft done by Monday.

Database

Rogers talks way too fast. He had a ton to cover last night, so he kicked it into overdrive. It was a blur. And this is supposed to be the most difficult part of the course! We talked about first, second and third normal form. 1st ... make sure all the "cells" have data. 2nd ... are there subsets? Can you make a lookup table from it? 3rd ... I'm drawing a blank right now. He gave us a quiz and it turned out to be just a practice quiz. So next week we'll have the official quiz. It'll be over update anomolies. He said something about secondary keys too. He assigned us the 3rd and final homework. It will take us the longest. We have to fix a bunch of tables and it's supposed to take us a long time. I'll be working on that all day tomorrow.

Quixote Update

I'm a few chapters into the 2nd part.

Chess Update

The number one reason BabasChess is better than Winboard (in my opinion) is that BabasChess has the ability to use a different port other than 5000. Port 5000 is usually blocked by firewalls. Port 23 is used for telnet sessions and is probably not blocked by most firewalls. BabasChess has this option under 'Preferences' (hit F11) then go to the 'Server' tab and click on the 'Advanced' button. Select 'Use alternate server tcp port (23)' and now you can probably log onto FICS from places where the firewall blocks port 5000.

Winboard may have this option, but I never found it.

Discovering this setting really made me happy this week.