last weekend at NI
Mood: cheerful
Music: ze frank!
Posted on 2006-08-11 13:20:00
Tags: links
Words: 439

Yikes, that's scary.

Getting beyond our airport security obsession - An "Ask the Pilot" column about why it's fairly hopeless to try to detect dangerous stuff being brought on an airplane.

A the show with zefrank about terrorism. I like zefrank a lot. He never blinks! Here's his ugly myspace competition and the "winners". Another good show, although they're all good from what it seems. ze frank's homepage has lots of neat interactive toys and whatnot. Whee!

I found the evaluation I wrote for COMP 360. COMP 360 was computer graphics. But, and here's the catch, the projects were impossible. We were given little to no direction and not enough time. destroyerj and I worked on project 2, after which he dropped the class (but not before we finished the project!!), and we were up until 5 AM the night it was due trying to get it to work. I don't think a single project in that class I did worked entirely. And I had good partners, but it didn't matter. Anyway, the last day of class I released my anger in the form of an evaluation. Then I released it again by copying over the evaluation so I could save it. Then my hand hurt.


Dr. Goldman made this class an unreasonable amount of work, grossly incommensurate with a 4-hour class. The labs assigned were quite difficult and took very large amounts of time, even when starting early. Compounding this problem was that the only place we were able to work on the projects (Symonds II) was locked to students - to work in there, someone had to be inside or one of the "babysitters" (some students) had to unlock it. This seems like a ridiculous way to handle access to the lab - why not give us all access? Apparently someone thinks we are common thieves...

More often than not, the lecture notes (and lectures) were not helpful in doing the labs, and we had to find some other resource or try to figure it out ourselves. This was extremely frustrating.

Most telling was the fact that around 70 people started the class, and about 20-30 are in it now, and I know that quite a few of these are graduate students who can afford to spend large amounts of time working on projects. Unfortunately, we undergrads don't have that luxury, and this class alone was cause for many stressful days and very long nights.

This class should be heavily revised so it is no longer a "weed-out" class for COMP 460. Never have I been so disappointed in a class in the Computer Science department here at Rice University.


1 comment

Comment from djedi:
2006-08-11T16:11:15+00:00

I just met him and I already love zefrank! Good stuff.

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