What a Week..

Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal

Man.. what a week it was.. it was really stressful, tough, sleep deprived week.. anyways, I’ve finally got my ASP.Net assignment off my chest and caught up with some sleep.. throughout the week, a lot of thoughts went through my mind..

First.. thing that comes to my mind my friends style of keeping a low profile.. sort of like “pretend pig, eat tiger”.. he sure doesn’t look like a very smart fella in class, but don’t let the looks fool you.. he got a straight 4.0 in Diploma sem 2 while I got a measly 2.8.. the reason behind this is so that he won’t get too much question from friends about assignments and school work.. I totally understand that.. coz like when people know you’re very “geng”, they expect you to help out with their problems.. and it’s hard to refuse a friend’s request for dire help.. he’s really got a point there.. so perhaps I should “pretend pig” more often? haha..

Then there was Denis.. he seems as if always waiting for instructions from me.. not providing anything productive.. I asked him to try using ASP.Net 2.0’s Grid View control.. which looked pretty cool.. but turned out that there were some aspects of it that we couldn’t control, like validation, usage of a textarea instead of textbox..

So I decided, the heck with it.. Denis doesn’t do his own research about it and keeps asking me about it as if I’M the one responsible for it.. so what the heck, we’ll stick to good ol’ data repeaters.. which actually worked without a hitch.. when I asked Denis to redo staff and student maintenance with data repeaters, I was so afraid that he’d tell me “eh, I dunno how to do this part leh”.. but thankfully, he showed me a working maintenance module… that took a hell lot of pressure off my chest…

On to the more important point.. at one point, I was sorta mad at him for not doing any research and expecting me to help him all the way.. but on second thoughts, I act the same way in my Flash assignment too - all I did was the dumb ass intro movie, and I didn’t make any effort in making the background sound play continuously.. sigh.. so am I like him??

Then this afternoon we presented our Flash assignment.. that was the worse moment of my life.. I’ve never felt that way - presenting incomplete work.. sigh.. I thought Yu Bin fixed my sound problem.. I just felt so shitty… didn’t have mood to go lecture anymore..

Now that I’ve caught up with some sleep.. it’s time to really do some good thinking: did I spend too much time working on my ASP.Net assignment? (Anthony would go like: “WAHLAN.. so chun.. CB betul..”) Should I have fixed the sound problem myself?? And most important of all, what have I learned from this assignment?

My brother made me realize some time ago that in college, theory is of paramount importance, technology isn’t. Hence, networking and “object-oriented analysis and design” is on my top priority now. Seriously, what good does knowledge of Flash and ASP.Net do for us? The answer is probably: nothing. 2 years down the road, everything would change.. Microsoft is releasing Vista with WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) come this year-end, there would probably be entirely new controls in the next ASP.Net.. so what have I learned from these 2 assignments?? Probably nothing..

I tell myself the 3-4 days of intensive ASP.Net coding is for experience.. but what’s experience for if it’s not new? All those that I did in my assignment, was a matter of coding the ideas.. no big deal about it.. no mind-boggling problems.. what did my friends learn out of the assignment? I could also imagine this: nothing. Most of them have such poor HTML background, and there’s just no focus on the client-server nature of ASP.Net.

Like what s00kwei said, it’s assignment. I can’t run away from it no matter how much of my time it wastes. So for now, I’ll be tackling the two most important subjects: “object-oriented analysis and design” and “network communication”. These are theories/fundamental concepts that will become our “rice bowl” in the future.. unlike technology, they don’t change in a year or two..

Permalink | August 24th, 2006

4 Responses to “What a Week..”

  1. 拼凑Jeff » Computer Science Course? Says:
    August 26th, 2006 at 12:11 am

    [...] So what is the point learning so many programming languages? And it is not like we are learning the language in depth in college. We’re just like students who attend classes to become a “development machine” to be functional for years. Then when the skills we equiped get outdated in future, we will gotta choose whether to update ourselves to the new technology/language/platform/whatever or just stop working in this area. This is what my friend from “Information System Engineering” said in his blog post : My brother made me realize some time ago that in college, theory is of paramount importance, technology isn’t. Hence, networking and “object-oriented analysis and design” is on my top priority now. Seriously, what good does knowledge of Flash and ASP.Net do for us? The answer is probably: nothing. 2 years down the road, everything would change.. Microsoft is releasing Vista with WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) come this year-end, there would probably be entirely new controls in the next ASP.Net.. so what have I learned from these 2 assignments?? Probably nothing.. [...]

  2. Jinny Says:
    August 27th, 2006 at 10:34 am

    What have you learnt from the two assignments? Nothing? I beg to differ :)

    You definitely would have learnt at least something, even if it is so small and seemingly insignificant and you never realize it till you need to do something larger and go, “Hey! I’ve done something similar before - and get a better headstart” :)

  3. Jonathan Ng Says:
    August 27th, 2006 at 10:44 am

    Yah.. it\’s so small.. but at least it\’s not a complete waste of time.. as they say, practice makes perfect..

    Oh, one thing I did learn is how to make searches search without certain keywords, through the use of WHERE Column NOT LIKE \'%word%\'. I thought it\’s as simple as that, but still needed to use a sub-select in my query.. Hm, perhaps I\’ll post something about it..

  4. Reginabally's Blog Says:
    August 27th, 2006 at 5:25 pm

    Computer Science Education

    Definition of Computer Science from Wikipedia is:
    “Computer science, or computing science, is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their implementation and application in computer systems.[1][2][3] Computer …

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