The Shadow Begins

.... another post!

Okay, so to dispense with the school-related stuff first and then on to buisness (Stong Bah joke (another Strong Bad joke)).

Hmm, I put a semi-colon at the end of that sentence and had to go back and change it. I guess I've been programming too much lately (in many computer languages, a semi-colon means the end of the command or line or "thought" essentially).

So where to begin..... Well, last week was rather busy, which is funny because it's supposed to be "dead" week where I assume not much is supposed to be going on other than studying. Well, I had no time for studying while trying to get my teams prepared for their presentations. Our Digital Logic presentation was due Thursday and on Tuesday I spent the day hooking up the FPGA board to the controller that my team member had made. That was a little more of a hassle than I had intended because I had to make some pull-down resistors because otherwise the signals coming in from the buttons would be "floating." The resistors they had in the lab weren't small enough so I ended up going to radio shack and getting a package of 100 assorted ones to use, I only needed three though. Speaking of which, did you know Radio Shack sells a package of 100 assorted 1/4 watt resistors for the same price as 100 1/2 watt resistors? I found that interesting, so of course I picked up the 1/2 watt ones! My partner actually hadn't finished the box yet on Tuesday. On Monday he had e-mailed me and asked me if our presentation was the next day. I didn't specifically say so but I intimated that it was tomorrow because I knew if I gave him two extra days, he'd not do anything in them. So he finished it up Tuesday night apparently.

I was surprised, it looked really, really, nice. He told me he had a friend at Kicker who helped him put it together in their shop, ours was the nicest looking box there and I was grateful he was able to finish that. Wednesday we hooked it all up and tested it out. All the other teams were there scrambling to get their projects done but ours was all finished and ready to go. I felt a bit of satisfaction pass by at that, I really did try hard to get this done on time, no thanks to *cough* partners.

The presentation went well, only the girl who was supposed to do the documentation still wanted to "perfect" it and was going over it all throughout the hour we had allotted. She wanted to take it over and get color copies and have it bound but I put my foot down. "No Stella, print it out NOW and turn it in." She had plenty of time to do it beforehand. I'm glad she wanted it to look nice but there comes a limit when you have to actually submit the thing!

On Tuesday I also met with my Engineering partners and tried to line up what I wanted done for Thursday night. One of the guys was working on the final drawing for our project (which turned out really nice by the way, he was my favourite of the three partners I had and was most focused) and one of the guys I set working on the slideshow presentation. I told them I needed everything done by Thursday so I could put it in the report and submit it the next day.

I've learned my lesson though, always set the "max" due date to a day early, otherwise it won't get done until that night. The guy who was working on the slides had no outline or real order so I made up an outline of every category I wanted to cover in the presentation, and assigned the categories to my partners and gave time limits to each one. Then I broke down each category into subpoints and also broke that down into time limits (we had 12 minutes total for the presentation). I sent this to everyone as the outline I wanted to follow, and told them to write up their parts and what they wanted to say and we could practice Thursday night.

Come Thursday, one of the guys was in the lab trying to finish the drawing, the other one showed up at the specified meeting time and began working on the slides (which he should have had DONE by meeting time) and no one had prepared their speeches except myself. I had given myself two of the five parts and one part to each of the other teammates. So I sat for about an hour and helped organize the slides and get graphs and charts to put in them and get the slides in order, then we sat down for a practice run. The lack of a pre-preparation really showed, I thought I delivered my topics very well, I had a thorough knowledge of my subjects and was able to provide a clear, methodical speech for my parts. The other guys just tried making stuff up on the fly. I had assigned myself to the research and statistics sections but Jon (not Jon from church) said he wanted to do them so I gave him my paper I'd written up with all the key points I wanted to cover. He could have memorized my speech word for word, I told him to get familiar with it then. Also, when it came to do his part (he was doing the introduction to the project) he just read the points on the slide without any kind of elaboration, I told him to take a look at the abstract I'd written (it was online, in the final report) and to make sure he knew the project well. "Oh yeah! I'll memorize that abstract."

I also went over each part with each person and told them how they could say things better (subtly telling them what to say) and tried to get their speeches prepared. They really didn't know the project very well because I'd been doing the report and asking for input and trying to get them involved but they never read what I wrote. One good thing about that (for me) is that rather than having everybody submitting pieces and then putting them together, the entire report was very cohesive and I knew it inside and out because I'd done it all! Yes, all 97 pages of it :)

I also told all of them to be there early and to dress in slacks and collared shirts (there is no question who is the leader on the team in my opinion :) ) and I got blank stares and "what?! why?" I told them it really does make a difference. One of the guys didn't have slacks so he came in jeans and a collared shirt which was unbuttoned three buttons at the top and not tucked in. I told him to tuck his shirt in and button the shirt up and we'd be good to go ;)

One of our team members (Jon) arrived late but we were all ready I think. I had everything prepared and ready to go to the TAs, the journals, the slides, the report, the evaluations, it was all ready to turn in, all the other teams were scrambling though and one teams said they just prepared their slides about an hour beforehand.

We got up and my teammates did better than expected, Jon still just read the five points on the slide without elaboration (thought he SAID he'd memorize the abstract) but that was okay, the rest of the team was able to keep it all going smoothly. When it came time to do the statistics though, the slide came up with the graphs and Jon just stared at me. He told me afterward he didn't know that was going to be on there but he was the one who told me he wanted to do the statistics, luckily I'd anticipated that and was able to smoothly cover that part of the presentation and go over the parts I wanted to highlight anyway. Frankly, I was prepared to jump in at any time and take over because I'd sort of lost faith in my teammates oh.... six weeks ago :)

Our team's project was voted the best in the class and we got certificates signed by the TAs and the professor, which was nice. I was happy it all went well and smooth. I wasn't nearly as nervous as I thought I'd be and I THINK I delivered everything convincingly and clearly. My teammates did better than expected as well and I was glad they were able to pull it all off. I told them "see how hard work and planning pays off? Just being prepared is very helpful!" I do hope they learn after this project. Honestly, I don't know how it would have gone had I not stepped in and done things like the outline and assigned parts, there would have been no order or organization. I was told by another team that just having the outside information, the graphs and statistics I'd gathered, was just very impressive to everyone there. Personally, I think our presentation and project won by a landslide, but of course I'm biased :)

I did hear that on another team there was a guy who got scared at being in front of everyone and during the presentation, when it came to his part to talk, just stared at everyone for a few minutes and then bolted for the door. The professor was visiting classes and apparently found him outside the door, sitting on the floor crying. He talked to him for close to an hour I heard, trying to calm him down. And I thought I got scared! Poor guy, but he's got to learn to face it. Thankfully that didn't happen on our team or that would have been... disturbing.

I must say that in retrospect I think I learned a LOT in this course and working with the team members I had. I grew accustomed to taking the lead, something I've not really done much of before, and was able to keep everything organized and operating smoothly. Jon, when it came time to do the peer evaluations sat down and jokingly said "Okay, peer evaluations: Shadow did everything, I did nothing." Which was sadly true. Unfortunately according do the system for evaluations, you had to keep an average of three (out of five) for all of your team members on a certain category, so if you ranked someone at a 4, that meant someone else had to go down to a 2 to keep that average, so all of my team members just did three for everything because though they did say they wanted me to get a good grade, they of course don't want to hurt themselves. I tried to be honest in my evaluations but wasn't as harsh as I should have been perhaps. If we get a 95 on the presentation, one member will be right up around a 95, one will be at an 85 and another will be at a 72, according to how I ranked everything. By all rights at least two of them should fail but I can't do that. I'm loyal to team members I guess. I did rank myself lower on one category because it had to do with drawings, and though I'd done the preliminary drawing myself (because another team member had failed to deliver), the other guy did make a very nice drawing in the end so I scored him higher than myself in drawings.

I do feel like I learned a lot and feel much better prepared for a variety of things, preparing a report, doing a presentation, leading a team etc. In retrospect it's good, when it was happening: not fun. And I hope they do take a few hints I laid along the way.....

Other things in school?

Well, Saturday I was finally able to get some studying done and spent the day solving Calculus problems and studying for my Computer Science exam. I had the former exam scheduled for Monday morning from 8-10 in the morning, and the latter from 10-12, so I knew that the only chance I'd have for studying would be Saturday. It went well and I felt well prepared (and wanting to get going!) when the time came to take both exams.

I did take them today and I do think they went well, better than previous ones (on both of them) I believe. I have no idea how the teacher will grade in the Calculus class and only a little bit of an idea on the Computer Science class. That class I am pretty much resigned to the fact that I will most likely get a B, there was just times where I had to say "enough! I need to study and do other things" because that class was so time-consuming. I did learn a lot. Mostly I learned I'm a bad programmer :)

I did come up with a nice recursive method for finding a value in a stack though to answer a question on the final exam.... which seemed to work. The professor said that wasn't how he was thinking of doing it but he didn't say it wouldn't work. All I can hope is that I did it right and got a good grade :)