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The Whole Year
So at the beginning of the semester I was bouncing between several different tasks that dealt with reconstructing the LAIR. One of the first projects was cable management with the new pods. That project went decently well, unfortunately the hooks that were going to make the cable organization great turned out to be duds and sucked for basically every task we attempted to use them for. So that project went mildly unfinished a couple people that helped out at the other pods did a great job so I think about 2/4 pods are in good shape with cable management. The next project I worked on was organizing the LAIRbrary which was going decently until we found out that we had way more books then actual space to store them. Tyler was working on a checkout/book inventory system. I am unsure of how far he got. Overall that project was a failure due to an overwhelming amount of books. The final project I am working on is re-organizing the LAIR shelves. This is the most successful of the projects. I have a good amount of the things that have been moved from the old lair to the new lair on shelves and twist tied. I have also been counting all of the items we have to make a sort of inventory system. Certainly not enough time in the semester to brainstorm that out into a more fleshed out system. The major problem with this project is that I had to take on a job that has slammed me with hours so i have had to miss more days then I would have wanted to. So this has really hampered progress recently but I feel as though it has come together pretty well. I would really like to finish up that project by the end of the semester so at least I have one good sized project done. The inventory project really taught me a lot. So my previous semester project was to do a very similar thing on a smaller scale. After the move one would think it would be as simple putting things back on the shelf but it turned out that it wouldn't be that simple. The biggest thing that I learned is that there is always ways to improve on anything. So the first time I did this it involved a lot of collecting items and dismantling the shelves because there previous state was horrid. That was a big time dump. Now for the second go at it, everything had already been organized which allowed for more time to actually sort and organize. So with the second run at this project I was really able to improve on the prior system by taking what i learned from the first time and stepping it up and improving on it. One of the most major improvement was twist tie all the items in the boxes so now there is no more tangled cords. That will definitely help improve productivity now that people can quickly grab and go. Think that is pretty much it for this class. If you had any other questions I missed just let me know and ill add them to the post.
Datacomm was a very interesting class. So the semester started out solid with us working on the sleep data project. This project was interesting. We learned how to decipher data packets using a hex editor. We also learned how to use the GD library to create graphs for the data. After a few weeks one of the students dropped so that left the class with 5 students. We continued to progress onto the next project which was a tic tac toe project that would work with a touch screen. This one had a very cool algorithm we created to check for a winner in all situations without using any if statements. Now one of our classmates got a job and is now doing all his course work at home. That leaves the class total at 4 students. Shortly after that I also got a job so my attendance became poor. Then 2 people always showed up at whim so there was really only 1 person that showed up consistently for the rest of the class. So the last few weeks the class has progressed at a fairly slow pace due to lack of people. The final project is controlling an RC car via a computer. Seems like it will be pretty cool if we can get it to work.
