Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Short Reprive

Last week was a small break from the rapid pace I was keeping up. I worked little more than my permanent hours, but had a couple of midterm exams and assignments. The midterm for my database class was interesting; it was the first item we've turned in to be graded or assessed in any way. Many people felt that they weren't comfortable at all, because they didn't know what to expect, or what sort of material might show up. I tend to agree that some homework would have been useful, but I thought the test was pretty straightforward. Then again, I haven't gotten a grade back, so maybe I just grossly misunderstood. I took the second midterm for my differential equations class tonight, and I know I didn't do spectacular, but I think I did okay.

In the humanities class, we're starting a pretty focused study of Epictetus' Enchiridion and Stoic philosophy. The Stoics believe that to be happiest and most in harmony with nature, a person should basically view events in the world without emotion, to protect oneself from sadness and worry by changing their perspective. One of the key features of Stoicism is that a person should only place their attention on things in their control, and not worry about things that are not in their control, like other people's decisions, or death. What I find really interesting is that this is the exact philosophy that I was taught by the Army in preparation for going overseas, and again while overseas. It's an extremely helpful philosophy in times of hardship, because a Stoic's view of events doesn't allow them to worry about things that they can't change. It may not be the best philosophy to take all the time, because it also protects a person from being overly joyous, and doesn't encourage setting or achieving goals. Is life really worth living if you can't experience some highs and lows in emotion?

Among all of these questions of higher learning, I did have some small bits of free time in the past week. During those, I learned a couple of subjects for programming that I've wanted to figure out for a while: unit testing and version control. These are concepts that can be applied to almost any programming language and any project, and they'll be extremely useful in years to come. I've already used these ideas to make one of my class projects more accessible and portable, and it really helped in getting that project finished quickly. Hopefully, my self-investment will pay off!

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Full Swing

Obviously, I've fallen behind my goal of weekly posts. All I can say is that I've been busy. School work is steaming ahead at full speed, and work has just been crazy.

In the past weeks, I've taken and passed my differential equations midterm, and had numerous homework assignments in all of my classes. I just finished a project for differential equations, and wrote it within Google Docs. I've been using Docs for a while to take notes and write small spreadsheets, but recent feature additions allowed me to write a report worthy of printing and turning in. You can check it out here. Since this was for a math class, being able to insert an equation with LaTeX syntax and having it print nicely was invaluable. And I really love that I can access these documents from any computer, and don't have to carry it around on a USB drive or manually synchronize with an internet file system every time I make a change. I still hesitate to put everything in the clouds, but it worked well for this assignment.

Driving the bus for the past couple of weeks has just been a bear. They were already just getting by with getting enough people to fill all of the runs (without violating DOT regs or putting people in overtime, etc). Then, the wife of one of the staff drivers had a baby, and he's taking paternity leave. (Congratulations, by the way!) I fully support him in taking leave, because it's an important time for him to be at home. But it also leaves the managers scrambling to get enough hours out of the rest of the drivers to cover runs.

Long story short, I've been working a lot more than I like. Last week I worked every day with starting runs at 7am, got off just in time to get to class, studied for an hour or two, then hopped back on the bus and took it back to base at 9pm. Those kind of hours make for very long days. With commute time, I was home often enough to sleep. I was getting pretty burnt out, and Ashley was concerned. This week has been a bit better, mostly because I'm getting better at saying "no" to the dispatcher.

This past weekend was also my first drill since the deployment, back with my original unit. It was great to see many faces I recognized, both from other people who went to Iraq with me, and also people who stayed at the unit that I hadn't seen in over a year. This drill reminded me that I need to get my PT back in order. I've been working on it a bit, but not nearly enough.

How am I supposed to fit all of this in? I'd have plenty of time if I left the buses, but then there's the problem of having enough money to eat...