StewStuph

I can't believe this is the end of my first semester since 1996.  It has been exciting, educational and, at times, very challenging.  I was hoping to keep this blog updated more regularly, but I am now employed full time again.   While that is nice, it has made keeping up with classes more difficult. Making it also more difficult is family life.  Four boys, a wife, my own hobbies of playing soccer, scouts and a normal social life have left me struggling to find time to get it all done.  With four boys comes four mini-gamers.  One of the games they play is Roblox .   This summer we have scheduled a trip to New York City so the kids can attend  BLOXcon 2013 .    So it seems that life is not going to slow down anytime soon for me.  Work continues, soccer will be more frequent with two games per week in the summer and we are taking a trip to NYC!   One thing did get easier.  I joined Dollar Shave Club  (op...

I would like to thank Santa Claus for bringing my son, Brendan, his Nerf basketball set Christmas 2010.  Without having that in the house I would not be half the Nerflete I am today.  I would like to thank my step-children, Cameron and Mason, for always playing tight defense (literally crawling all over me) and making the free throws  simple by comparison.  To my wife for giving me “that look” when I am upstairs playing basketball as if to say “grow up,”   I say to you “Nah nah nana nah nah :P”

Midterms are over.  I did not do as well as I had hoped.  However, I still have good grades, high B or A in all my classes.  It has been WAY too long since I have taken any classes.  I am not sure yet what lessons to take away from the exams.  I feel like I am learning but as with most things, I do better in actual, real world situations rather than in a class. The volume level in the house has increased to it's previous levels.  All four boys are back home now.  Gina drove 18 hours round trip this past Saturday to get her kids.  They started school yesterday.  It is hard to believe we are less than four months  away from the end of school. This is week 2 of soccer.  Last week did not get rained out as I feared.  Instead we played on a soaked synthetic grass field.  Diving on that field after all the rain we had was very wet and cold.  We won despite the fact that four goals were allowed.  Not my best showin...

Mid-terms are here!  I am a little nervous about taking the midterms.  So far my grades are good I just hope I my midterms reflect what I have learned/re-learned accurately. I am now a full time employee.  This is the first time since January 31, 2011 that I am a full-time employee.  The first time since May 14, 2012 that I am employed and not an independent contractor.  I am working at J Davis Architects and so far, the last two days, it has been a good experience.  I hope to get busier soon as right now I am not doing too much work.  Tomorrow night I am going to the NC Revit User Group meeting and will spread the good news of my employment. Finally, the spring season of soccer starts tonight, if we don't get rained out.  This season we are in the same division as last fall.  Hopefully we can move to the top of the table and get promoted for the fall season.  New gloves, new jersey....  clean sheet?  We will see.

As mentioned in my last post, Sunday morning I was under the house running some cable so the kids could have a better connection for playing their games on the internet.  Gina was inside feeding the cable while I was in the crawlspace pulling.  So, 260 feet of cable and all the kids are hooked up.  I asked them this morning if they could tell a difference and all but one said they could.  I'll take a 75% satisfaction from kids any day.  If I could just get that for dinner time...

Another week has come and gone.  I think I kept up well with the school work.  I am current on all  my classes, though now I have some work to do for the coming week.  I've also been doing some paying work this week, which is good for a change.  Doing some Autocad drafting, not Revit, but it is work. Read this to see my comments about the work. The kids had their pinewood derby this weekend that was postponed from the previous weekend due to the weather.  This year we had two kids doing the derby.  They both did well, each car doing better than the previous years cars.  Check out a couple of the videos. Tomorrow is soccer with the fun pickup group.  I hope we have a better turn out than last weeks total of five people. After that I have some network drops to run in the house.  I'll be going into the crawlspace to run some Cat5e Plenum cable to the four Minecraft junkies computers.  Hopefully having them wired vs. wireless ...

Things are falling into place.  I am able to keep up with the assignments.  I am taking more time to read thoroughly the assignments.  Now my side work job has picked up a little bit and I may have more work to do this next couple of weeks.  Gina is upset because she finished her Lord of The Rings game on Xbox and now she has nothing to do when I am doing my school work.  I will admit it is a little hard to concentrate and do timed quizzes with four young Minecraft addicts always getting excited and being loud.  If the quizzes included questions about "Creepers, Enderman and Griefing" I think I would be OK.

So, this has been week 2 at Wake Tech. In my DBA 120 class I had to uninstall and re-install Oracle 11g.  Apparently, I forgot to unlock a user account during the setup. In my WEB 100 class, I moved ahead to Week 3.  I submitted my assignment and took the quiz.  Creating the webpage was pretty simple.  I did not do as well as I would have liked on the quiz.  I think my lesson there is I have to read more in depth to understand all the terminology.  All my years of writing webpages and I think I have forgotten a lot of that. In my NET 110 class things are progressing nicely, except for the OSI model lessons.  I am going to go back over those and see if I can really get a grasp on all of that. An overall lesson I learned is that I am not a fan of Blackboard.  Each instructor uses it a bit differently and sometimes the links are disguised.  Also, I have been told that since Blackboard was recently updated, some of the instructions the in...

Hi, my name is Eric.  I am in my late thirties.  I am married, for the second time and this is going much better than the first time.  I have two boys and my wife, Gina, also has two boys.  They love to play Minecraft.  We need more bandwidth.  We also have a dog, Maynard, and a cat named Outback.  Both of the furry ones are rescues.  I suffered a layoff in May.  I was working as a building modeler and drafter for a prominent architecture firm.  Now I am looking for a new job in the IT field.  This past summer I became A+ certified while "interning" for a local IT consulting company.  I did some work for the company and they paid for the tests.  So I am back in school taking some classes to try to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life.  Well, I know I want to play soccer and listen to music.  Those are two of my favorite activities.