It’s been almost another two weeks since my last post on May 17. It has been a very busy almost two weeks. This time, I’m going to split up my post in sections based on school, work, and other.
I hope everyone had a great Memorial day weekend.
Onward to the daily busyness of me myself and I.
School
Last Week: Data Visualization Project
Last week I added bar graphs, both static and animated, to my program that takes restaurant data from a MySQL database and displays it to the user in a prettier format. Basically, this project is to improve our data visualization skills and C# skills. It took around 5-7 hours of frustration, but I finally got everything working. Yay!
I created three options for last weeks project, a listing of all the restaurants with their ratings in #/10 and static bar graph format, displaying a random restaurant with its ratings in #/10 and animated bar graph format, and listing the top 10 rated restaurants in #/10 and animated bar graph format.
Last Week: Custom App (Penny for Your Thoughts)
Last week I also coded the app and filled in the database for the note-taking app, Penny for Your Thoughts, I had created the flowchart and EER diagram for the week before that. This took about the same amount of time as the data visualization project, but it went much smoother and easier because I wasn’t learning how to display something other than text on the fly and I had already created the structure of the app in the flowchart.
It was really neat to learn how to transfer data from an excel spreadsheet to a SQL database. Apparently, once you have the columns set up in the excel spreadsheet in the same structure as the database all you have to do is add as much test data as desired, export the spreadsheet to a csv file, then import the csv file into your data table through Sequel Pro. If you know how to use Excel or Google spreadsheets, this makes inputting test data much quicker than manually entering data directly into the database.
Last Week: Research Essay
Last weeks research essay was on remote data, data storage, and data sources so I learned a lot about that. A shortened version of my essay is that remote data is data taken from a well remote location (somewhere other than your local database/app), data storage is the storing of data (no really) in an electronic sense such as through a database, and a data source is something that provides data like a polar bear with a thermometer that sends the thermometer results back to you. Incidentally, the polar bear with the thermometer is a data source and the data itself is remote data as it is being sent to you. I also researched a few data storage solutions such as DAS (direct attached storage) and NAS (network attached storage).
Last Week: Time Tracker App
Last week I also created the Time Tracker app which we’re using to look at the way we’ve spent our time throughout the past month of class. So, from the first day of class one of our ongoing projects has been to enter our activities as pertaining to the class, and if we want life outside of school, on a daily basis. This includes the category of activity, specific activity, date, day number of the 26 days of class, and the time we spent on the activity. We will be moving this recorded data from the spreadsheet we’ve been filling in to the database for the time tracker app later this week.
Coding the time tracker app itself went fairly quickly as we were provided with the menu and menu options that are required. I only really needed to code the menu and menu options for last weeks assignment, but I like to do things all the way so I went ahead and added functionality to the menu options and login functionality so this week all I have to do is import the spreadsheet data to the database. Overall, the app took about 8ish hours to code including debugging.
This Week: Movie Presentation
One of the assignments for this week, as it’s the last week of the class, is to create a movie/presentation discussing the custom app we’ve created throughout the course and the app it’s based on that we reverse engineered in the first week of class. My custom app, Penny for Your Thoughts, is based on Apple’s note-taking app, Notes. So far, I’ve written out the presentation script, recorded a video of my app working in the console with commentary, and created the slides with transitions and animations in PowerPoint. I plan on recording over the slides tomorrow.
Unfortunately, as we go straight from class to class, the last week of class always has an early deadline, in this case Friday at midnight EST, due to the fact that teachers need to grade everything and have the grades submitted by Sunday at midnight so we can start out next class. This means I’ll be very busy working my ass off for the next few days as I have several more assignments to complete before Friday night.
Work
Last Week: Writing
Last week I decided to enter the Reedsy weekly short story writing contest. There were several prompts to choose from all of which were dialogue based. I chose a prompt, and then began to build my characters. I had an idea for the storyline from the moment I read the prompt so I quickly jotted that down then spent the next several days creating my characters.
Why did creating characters take several days? Well, I wanted my characters to feel realistic even if most, 98%, of the effort I put into their creation wouldn’t been seen from the short story. I ended up filling about 7-9 pages, on paper, with details about my two characters. I fleshed out an entire background and personality for both of them before I let myself begin writing the story.
The story was written within a day and after a few minor changes, I emailed it in. I didn’t win the contest, but the point of entering was to get myself to write from start to finish a short story. I’m very satisfied with the result and just entering the contest was a great experience. If you want to read my short story it’s here: Alice & Tom – First Date.
Last Week: Art
I haven’t been drawing lately, and I really really should because I can’t get better at something I don’t practice. I have been doing something somewhat artistic though. Last week I customized my writing site, changed the CSS and color scheme, and created a logo for it in Photoshop. The logo is the image displayed for Perfect Little Words under my Projects page.
This Week: World of Frosting (World-Building)
This week I’ve been planning to work on my world, World of Frosting, but due to the amount of schoolwork I’ve had lately I’ve been unable to do much. I have begun creating an overview for each of the kingdoms within it though and I plan on using some of those details and an image for each kingdom as the home page for the World of Frosting site.
Once I’ve hammered out the kingdom details I plan to get started on in-depth character sheets (for lack of a better word) for my three main World of Frosting characters: Cupcake, Almond, and Berry.
Other (Dancing, Fun, Dog)
Dancing
I love ballroom dancing and I LOVE my dance studio. I usually go dancing on Fridays as that’s social dancing night and I always have so much fun. I decided that, even though I’m being Chinese with my money as I don’t have a consistent pay check, I was going to go to this months intermediate dance class. The way my studio does these dance classes is that they have a beginners and an intermediate class on Tuesdays that are each an hour long, one after the other. These classes teach the same dance for 4 weeks then change. This months intermediate class is intermediate Waltz and I love waltz, it’s my favorite Ballroom (not Latin) dance, so I felt like splurging a little, $32 for the month, to go.
Today was the first class and already we’re learning fun new moves. The teachers/studio owners are amazing and I love watching them dance as well as learning from them. I can’t wait to practice my Waltz steps some more with a partner on Friday.
I was so excited for tonight, and I had bought myself a dress that could be a business dress, that I dressed up all fancy (dress and hair up) for dancing tonight. I even braided my hair and pinned it up!
Life Stuff
I also celebrated a birthday recently and I learned my Chinese birthday for the year hasn’t happened yet so fingers crossed for more money presents birthday luck…?
I’ve also been enjoying watching WWE in the evenings when I’m not working aka my brain has ditched me and working became impossible. I’ve been watching old (2015) pay per views on the WWE network but now that I’m almost done with the 2015 pay per views I really want to go back and watch the pay per views from 1999 when Undertaker had his dark ministry era. I’ve heard of it briefly and I love Undertaker, but I haven’t seen anything older than 2015 apart from short promotional flashbacks. It’ll be really fun to start watching WWE from when it was still WWF.
Well, I spent quite a bit of time and words on this post and it’s getting a bit late again. Goodnight~