Over the past couple weeks I’ve been quite busy with working on Shalom and Joy (www.shalomandjoy.com), school work in preparation of my final for Java 2, my regular job, and of course trying to fit in time with my family. Finally I’ll be taking the first real break that I’ve had in several months.
Last week I was on vacation visiting two friends that I haven’t seen in years. We all had a good time. My friend Keith had to move so we were busy moving stuff from his apartment a few days. Toni had appointments that also burned up some of the time that I was visiting. Of course I realize that we all have responsibilities to take care of things but it’s too bad that we all didn’t have more time to enjoy it together. Fortunately we did have some time just to hang out had have fun. We played Bang! a few nights and The Settlers Of Catan once. We also went to a Metallica concert on Thursday night. That was awesome! Thanks again to my friend Keith who paid my way, making this all possible since there’s no way I could afford it now.
Even though my job would reimburse me for my college class I don’t have enough money to take another class right now. I spent over $300 cash for my last class and books - money that I didn’t really have to spend. Now I’ve just got enough money for gas and a little food this week until payday. Then again, payday doesn’t mean much since my bills will be taking most, if not all, of my check. I still plan to be studying though. I’m going to order a book to study PHP and building database-driven websites. I’ve been asked about building database-driven websites by two people just yesterday and it was something that I was considering for Shalom and Joy and possibly my own website eventually anyway.
My Java 2 class is done. Teech (www.teeech.com[sic]) sent me an email message asking what I thought about the book that we used – Object Oriented Application Development Using Java. Here is the message that I sent to him:
Sent to Don Poling on Sunday, May 2, 2004 10:00pm
The Object Oriented Programming book was pretty good for the majority of the information, but once it got into Chapter 15, 16, and 17 it seems like they were assuming that everything would just work so they didn't go into enough detail to allow a student to troubleshoot problems (especially not one working alone).
The troubleshooting guide for the servlets was vague as it assumed that things would just work. Problems with compiling servlets is one example. They just assumed that their programs would run but apparently there are some variables somewhere that didn't match up. I looked online for some help but even then it seems that people with much more experience than a starting student are having problems with setting up their servlet compilers.
There were also some database issues that they never bothered to explain and even the book says "You won't have to change the database" but how would they know that if they didn't create the database and they didn't give exact instructions on how to make their project work.
I hope things go better for the next class that studies this.