Yesterday, I attended the TechFest here in town, sponsored by The Creative Coast. I was there to present a poster on the research project I help on, Integrating Information Retrieval into Undergraduate Curricula. While other people were presenting posters on HaptEK16 and using RFID chips to help the blind "see," my poster was mainly about searching the Internet and other databases. It just made me feel stupid being around those types of projects. Well, some good did come out of the presentation. I gave out 2 résumés, the local school board was interested in our presentation and adapting some of the features for primary and secondary education, and a start-up company spoke to Dr. Zhu about e-commerce projects. Ivan, the guy that present the HaptEK16 poster and a classmate of mine, told me I shouldn't feel too bad. All that matters is that I show the ability to learn. I did get a free t-shirt out of the event.
I did want to kill one of the guys that was presenting with me. He mumbles. I can't understand him half the time. He waited until the last minute to transfer the files to our backup system for the displaying our presentation. He had over a week. That really pissed me off. I hate people that don't get ready nor help. He didn't help me with getting the poster ready, either. And he's one of those guys that would poo-poo anything I said. I said something about it's important to know the history of computing to advance computing. He would say there's no reason. He thought understanding ham radio was a waste of time. And from all the time I've spent with him, he clearly lacks some tact in the social skills department. At the Tech Fest, I will say the presentation by the school board's technical people and our new guy in the project whipping out his ham radio operator's licence showed I'm not wrong in my knowing the past helps the future beliefs. However, I doubt Mumbles got the point.
In addition to the Tech Fest making me feel dumb, I have been trying to get an ASP.Net project off the ground, with no luck. I'm also installing Apache, PHP, and MySQL to my laptop. I'm having trouble with the MySQL at the moment. It's just making me all feel dumb. I know I'll get it working, even if I need to get some help. It just frustrating I can't get it to work the first time. Well, I have to learn somehow. At the moment, I'm working on cleaning up my laptop. I need to get ride of many files on it. That means backing up files on to the external hard drive and cleaning up the hard drive as well.
After the Tech Fest and dinner, I went back to campus to drop Mumbles off. I hung around to drop off the stuff I took to the Tech Fest and attended the school's Friday night production of Three Cornered Moon. Hai had a starring role and I've been meaning to get to one of his productions. And after the production, Melissa was serving dinner for the cast and crew, so I hung around to help. The play was good. It's one I think my siblings so see, but I doubt they'd understand it. Tonight, I am going to the Savannah Arts Academy to see Guys and Dolls. This is required for my theater class. I just need to see the play and write up a paper on it, and I will be finished with my theater class.
[♪ Listening to: "Apprends-Moi" - Céline Dion and Jean-Jacques Goldman]
Posted by Shawn at April 28, 2007 3:17 PM in Savannah, Schooling.
