My daughters go to a public school in rural Ohio. This last year we stopped packing their lunches and found it was cheaper to just let them buy at school. We were spending about $40 every 2 weeks on stuff for them to pack (lunch meat, cheeses, vegetables, etc) and it was the same price for them to just buy at school.
They also get a free breakfast at school. I believe this is because our district has x number of people below the poverty line or something like that.
Regardless, I've had both breakfast and lunch with them, and am very satisfied with the meals they are having. The breakfasts are generally high carb and fat, such as french toast, but with a side of fruit. But this is what kids their age need for breakfast. They are growing, and need the fat and calories.
Lunches are quite healthy, generally with side salads or other fresh vegetables.
I've read about some of the regulations that Trump is rolling back, and I don't disagree with it. Eg, one of the articles I read cited that in the south they wanted to serve grits with breakfast, but the whole grain grits had black specks in it that turned a lot of the kids off and they wouldn't eat it.
I know at my kids school, they offer whole grain breads with their meals, but its not super grainy type breads. At home we eat hearty 8 grain type breads, but at school its just slightly browner colored white bread. I really see no difference between that and regular boring bleached white bread. Does it really matter?
What matters is getting calories into hungry kids.
Some smartphones that are coming off of 2 year contract have mini-HDMI ports on them. I just sold a DroidX that did. If so, install the XBMC apk, and use it as a home theatre PC!
You can use a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and have the perfect home theatre experience.
You can blame HTC and Verizon for that and not Android.
My wife has the same phone. MISERABLE battery life.
Last weekend I rooted it and tossed Cyanogenmod7 on it, which is about as vanilla a rom as you can get. Her battery life has improved drastically. From dying around noon every day, to having 70% battery life left at dinner time.
Its because Verizon just loves to load your phone up with useless crap. Same reason Windows used to come preinstalled with MSN, AOL, etc.
It connects to my home network, then I run a program called "PlayOn" on my PC. This shows up as a upnp server on the WD Live, and lets me watch Hulu, CBS, netflix, Amazon VOD, MTV, and a crap ton of other networks for free. I think playon costs like $20 a year.
The WD-Live will also play.mkv and.avi files up to 1080p off network shares.
Worse is O'Reilly auto parts. They want your name, address and phone number. They told me it was for "warranty information". I was buying a quart of oil.
I walked out and went and bought it at Walmart instead.
This reminds me a lot of that Corey Docterow novel about the kid who was blamed for being a terrorist in San Francisco. Used TOR and xboxs to make an ad-hoc network. Was actually a bit of an interesting read, although a bit worded for younger people.
I can tell you exactly what I would have told someone if they told me my computer use bothered them. And it wouldn't have been nice.
I know I surfed through a lot of boring lectures. Probably shouldn't have done it, but it was mostly either filler classes, or classes I cared nothing about. Do wish I would have paid a bit more attention on the class on regexs.
I guess this story would make more sense if I said it was my dad who ran the other side of the business (labor / running the equipment). So when they divorced, the business was dissolved.
My mom ran a very profitable business for about 20 years, from before I was born until I was 16 or so.
When I was 16 my parents got a divorce, long story short, my dad was to blame.
She had a hell of a time finding a new job, because the only job she'd ever had since highschool was as the office manager for her own business. At times they'd had up to 10 employees, she did all the payroll, bid on jobs, everything on the office with the help of one secretary, etc etc.
No one wants to hire someone when they can't verify their employment. She finally found a job (which was was laid off from 2 years ago) as a phone answerer / secretary for a small business. Took her forever to even find that.
Its crazy buggy and the java in it slows my computer to a crawl. I have a fairly modern machine, and Quake 3 was making it bog down. Seriously?
Not only that, but I wanted to play with a friend of mine who lives about 100 miles away. Neither of us could figure out how to start a game that was just private for the two of us.
Yes, I feel like I got my moneys worth. The degree took 10 classes to complete (33 semester hours), and each class cost about $2,220. So $22k total. My work picked up about $15k worth, so it really didn't cost me all that much. The loans are lumped in with about 60k in undergrad student loans, and they all go to into repayment here in a few months. It works out to about $350 a month.
I chose walden because I liked the sound of the Information Systems Management degree, thats essentially the job I want to try to go into. I have a bachelors in programming, but I'm really not a great programmer. I figured this out too late to change degrees without being in debt up to my eyeballs and another 3 years in school. I enjoy technology, I just get bored and frustrated with programming.
I also like Walden because its not as well known. It only comes up that I went to school online when people notice dates don't match up. IE, in an interview it was noticed I went to school in Baltimore (where walden is located) while living in Ohio. A simple explanation of (oh, the school offered that degree online) was all that it took.
Its unfortunate that he will most likely win (atleast, we all hope) and will probably end up getting some money out of the state for his trouble. But the thing is, the people that made those decisions won't be punished, its the tax payers that will be punished because now the defecit due to the lawsuit has to be made up for.
I just finished my Masters degree with Walden University in "Information Systems Management".
So..my couple of cents:
What I didn't know when I signed up was that I would be in the first class through the program. A lot of the classes were very badly layed out, as in what we would be doing one week would not match up at all with what we'd done the prior weeks or would be doing in the next weeks. It was very obvious the courses had been built by a bunch of outsourced educators in possibly another country, right down to the spelling errors or idiosyncracies in the language in the project descriptions. If we had problems with any of the assignments, or were unsure of the wording, we'd bring it up with the professor and it would be fixed quickly. I think they all understood that some bugs were still being worked out, and I received a nice discount ($600 a semester) for being a guinea pig.
I do feel like I got a decent education for what I paid for and it being an online school. We never learned anything specific about any one product, ie IBM cognos, or MySQL or anything like that, but we learned in general what products like these were capable of, how to shop around for them, etc. Same sort of thing I learned in undergrad, we never got any certifications but I could easily pick up a CCNA, A+, etc because I've had all the ground work laid out for me and understand computers, networking and programing very well.
I was kept fairly busy with the assignments, in an average week I would work on 2 papers, usually 4-8 pages in length, and a group project usually around 6-8 pages, as well as group discussions, reading discussions and some classes required we keep a blog of what we were doing. We had quite a bit of group work, which was some what challenging. Its kind of funny, I had no idea what my group members looked like until in the last class we all found each other on facebook. Nothing like what I expected. I was also the only male, and am fairly young (24) while everyone else was in atleast their mid-30's it seemed.
I did have one really bad professor. I emailed him prior to the class starting and explained I would be on my honeymoon the first 2 weeks of class. I asked if he would rather send me the material early and I turn it in before I leave, or if it was ok if I did it when I got back. He said when I got back was fine. Well, I turned everything in the week I returned, only to get really bad grades for it being "late". I email him and am told "well I had to give you a bad grade for it being late, its only fair to everyone else.", and of course he stuck to his guns when I brought up the email where he said it was ok to turn everything in after I returned from vacation. He graded erratically throughout the class, never offering explanations for grades he gave. The class was badly laid out, and expected us to have a deep knowledge of Java in order to get an Apache Ant (I believe, its been a year and half) project built from the ground up, which I did not, and Java was not on the requirements for the entrance into the degree nor did I expect it, the degree was "how to be a programmers boss" not "how to be a programmer". The professor refused to help fix any of these problems, and I had to get in touch with the dean, who took care of everything for me and apologized for the problems we'd been having. After I got in touch with the dean, examples were added to the assignments involving Ant, so that instead of creating a project from a ground up, we had something to work with in order to get what we needed done.
They advertise that it works with network shares. The pains I had to go through to get it to work with windows 7 was crazy. It just wouldn't recognize the shared drive. I'd be able to see it from my wifes PC just fine, but the WD Live wouldn't see it. Had to go through 3 or 4 howto's online to figure out how to make it work. Finally got the right combination of settings and it worked, but if you disconnect the network cable from it (I only have one cable ran to my living room and it has to share with my 360) it takes about 15 minutes before it'll start talking to shared drives again. It'll get online and let me watch youtube, so I know it has access, but it won't talk to the drive on my laptop.
This is going to sound kinda dumb, but I also really hate how small it is. It doesn't look like it fits in my TV cabinet with everything else.
In order to use Hulu and netflix, I have to use a program that runs on my laptop called Playon. It essentially transcodes the video and acts as a media server. So I use the WD Live, go to media servers, then Playon, then select hulu, and I can search TV shows. It also works for netflix, amazon video, ESPN, Comedy Central, and a few others. The interface is really bad, it looks just like folders in explorer in windows. Actually searching for something is impossible, you just have to look through alphabetically. And no way to make playlists or anything. I'd like to make a playlist that has my favorite shows on hulu so I can check it quickly, but instead I have to check each show for new episodes individually.
Dropped my iPhone in the toilet last week. It got lodged in the S turn, and it took about 30 seconds to get out. It was on the whole time.
Took it apart and sprayed it out with some electronics cleaner to displace the water. Everything seems to be ok now except a splotch on the screen and the speaker isn't working. A new screen is $30 and a new speaker is $5 off ebay, I plan on ordering the parts today and fixing it back up.
Its because on some phones, the GPS map data is stored server side. I know my old Pantech Slate offered this, I could download a GPS application, but all of the maps and roads were stored on a server at AT&T, and it wouldn't work outside of a data connection via the cell service.
I applied for several a few years ago when I was a junior in college.
Many payed 10-12$ an hour doing crap work. Others payed the better part of $20 and were still crap work. Really depends on the company and the level of student they expect to get in.
I was 2.5 years in my college degree when I applied at a computer shop as an intern, this was in 2007. They offered me $4 an hour, UNDER THE TABLE. I laughed, grabbed my resume back out of the bosses hands and walked out. That was half of what minimum wage was.
Ok, maybe I should rephrase what I was trying to say.
I'm not necessarily saying he should brownnose. But try to get on his good side, and if this means picking a crap job over a cake job, then do it. Make yourself visible. The majority of managers don't see the guy that sits in the corner and makes beautiful code, but the guy sweating and working they think is working his butt off.
And have worked here about 2.5 years now, including my year as an intern. It was alot of fun, and I learned an immense amount.
Plain and simple, kiss your bosses ass. If your lucky enough to be liked, you may end up getting a job offer when your hired, and in this economy, you'd be considered lucky.
Expect to be doing alot of grunt work. Your coworkers are going to use you as a "gopher". Don't take it personally, but also be insistant on wanting to learn their jobs, not just get their coffee. Alot of people are going to be afraid to give you an indepth look at what they do, their afraid if someone else knows their job, they'll be fired. This not much you can really do about it, besides just pick up what you can from the sidelines.
Be outgoing, and don't slack. If that means working through lunch everyday, it'll be worth it in the end when you come away with a better knowledge of whats going on.
Try to ask intelligent questions. You'll catch people off guard and look alot more intelligent by asking "How could I use cat and grep in order to do..." instead of "Whats grep?"
I do think I should folow this up with a bit more of an explanation of my beliefs as far as where this is heading for universities.
I cringe every time I see Devry's school of video game design add come on the TV. Its two college age guys sitting on a couch, playing a game. something is said like "oh, we need to tweak this a bit more here" and he does something with the controller, then they go back to playing the game.
I was in a game design degree, and it was hilarious seeing the incoming freshman and their beliefs as to what the courses were going to be like. They were convinced they'd get to play games non-stop and not do any real world work. 90% of them game in with the idea they were going to be video game testers and make 100k a year sitting around playing World of Warcraft.
To make it worse, the school got a big grant and spent it on Dell XPS's and a bunch of games for one of the labs. The idea was to get us together, form frienships, and have some fun in between doing homework. It failed miserably and pretty much gave students the idea they could sit around and play games during class. They tried locking the lab down, saying games were off-limits before some time like 8pm. Again, students threw a fit, convinced it was their right to use school property to sit around and play games.
I think games are a great way to teach people how to program. It lets you have some fun while learning the concepts. But teaching it like a trade, and telling students "oh, you can graduate and go work for Sony or EA" is wrong. Market it as a CS curriculum, not as a video game programming trade curriculum.
I learned matrix math, working with vectors and 3d points and so on from using it to work in OpenGL, Direct3D and later Ogre. It wasn't something abstract, because I could make a change, and see the result on screen. This helped me to connect together what was going on and what the final output would be, and helped me to grasp a much better understanding of it.
I have a bachelors degree in Game design, and using games was a big part of how programming was taught at my school.
A lot of people are going to say "but how are they going to learn, games are complex, etc etc"
They don't have to be. A few examples from how I learned...
In my networking fundamentals, we covered opening sockets, threading to take care of the sockets, passing information back and forth, etc. At the point in a normal course, you'd probably do something like...make a lame chat client, or an FTP program or something. Instead the professor said, ok, I want you to make a game that uses these concepts to pass information between computers. I wrote a pong game that used a client / server type setup. One computer ran the server and both ran the clients. The server computed all the stuff and returned data to the clients on where to place the ball, paddles, and the score. I also had a lot of fun doing it.
Another good one. For my programming fundamentals class (eg, first class the freshman took to learn programming) they used python. After we covered the basics, such as arrays, if statements, loops, and so on, we got into user input. Then the instructor turned us loose on a simple header he'd made that let you move ASCII characters around the screen and asked us to make a simple game, such as a maze the user had to move through via the directional keys. It was amazing, because the next class students came in with some really awesome games using pretty complex stuff they'd looked up and taught themselves. By the end of the year long series of classes, freshman were making sprite based games on par with Super Mario Brothers 3 and other scrolling type games using PyGame.
I also learned Direct3D and OpenGL and wrote a few simple games with them to learn how to work with a rather complex API. Then we picked up Ogre and a physics engine (I can't remember the name off the top of my head). My final project was a bowling game that head realistic physics, and you controlled the spin and movement of the ball via the mouse. I showed it to my current employeer (I started out as a co-op) during my interview, and it really set me apart. Granted my job requires very little programming, but it still really made me stand out when I was able to show them something flashy, rather than a program that did a lot in the background but not much in the userland end of things. Not that theres anything wrong with that, but people tend to like flashy cool looking things.
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My daughters go to a public school in rural Ohio. This last year we stopped packing their lunches and found it was cheaper to just let them buy at school. We were spending about $40 every 2 weeks on stuff for them to pack (lunch meat, cheeses, vegetables, etc) and it was the same price for them to just buy at school.
They also get a free breakfast at school. I believe this is because our district has x number of people below the poverty line or something like that.
Regardless, I've had both breakfast and lunch with them, and am very satisfied with the meals they are having. The breakfasts are generally high carb and fat, such as french toast, but with a side of fruit. But this is what kids their age need for breakfast. They are growing, and need the fat and calories.
Lunches are quite healthy, generally with side salads or other fresh vegetables.
I've read about some of the regulations that Trump is rolling back, and I don't disagree with it. Eg, one of the articles I read cited that in the south they wanted to serve grits with breakfast, but the whole grain grits had black specks in it that turned a lot of the kids off and they wouldn't eat it.
I know at my kids school, they offer whole grain breads with their meals, but its not super grainy type breads. At home we eat hearty 8 grain type breads, but at school its just slightly browner colored white bread. I really see no difference between that and regular boring bleached white bread. Does it really matter?
What matters is getting calories into hungry kids.
I did some research.
Apparently Plasmas don't use motion compensation due to the 600hz refresh.
I will try it in game mode though to see if that helps.
I recently bought a 60" LG Plasma TV.
I get headaches when watching it.
I can also hear a high pitched sound coming out of it when its on. A bit of googling told me this is the transformer it uses to power the plasma with.
I'm a bit concerned the two are related.
Kind of mad I just spent $900 on a TV that gives me headaches.
Some smartphones that are coming off of 2 year contract have mini-HDMI ports on them. I just sold a DroidX that did.
If so, install the XBMC apk, and use it as a home theatre PC!
You can use a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and have the perfect home theatre experience.
You can blame HTC and Verizon for that and not Android.
My wife has the same phone. MISERABLE battery life.
Last weekend I rooted it and tossed Cyanogenmod7 on it, which is about as vanilla a rom as you can get.
Her battery life has improved drastically. From dying around noon every day, to having 70% battery life left at dinner time.
Its because Verizon just loves to load your phone up with useless crap. Same reason Windows used to come preinstalled with MSN, AOL, etc.
For the last 2 years I've been using a WD-Live.
It connects to my home network, then I run a program called "PlayOn" on my PC. This shows up as a upnp server on the WD Live, and lets me watch Hulu, CBS, netflix, Amazon VOD, MTV, and a crap ton of other networks for free. I think playon costs like $20 a year.
The WD-Live will also play .mkv and .avi files up to 1080p off network shares.
Worse is O'Reilly auto parts. They want your name, address and phone number.
They told me it was for "warranty information". I was buying a quart of oil.
I walked out and went and bought it at Walmart instead.
This reminds me a lot of that Corey Docterow novel about the kid who was blamed for being a terrorist in San Francisco.
Used TOR and xboxs to make an ad-hoc network. Was actually a bit of an interesting read, although a bit worded for younger people.
I can tell you exactly what I would have told someone if they told me my computer use bothered them. And it wouldn't have been nice.
I know I surfed through a lot of boring lectures. Probably shouldn't have done it, but it was mostly either filler classes, or classes I cared nothing about. Do wish I would have paid a bit more attention on the class on regexs.
I guess this story would make more sense if I said it was my dad who ran the other side of the business (labor / running the equipment). So when they divorced, the business was dissolved.
My mom ran a very profitable business for about 20 years, from before I was born until I was 16 or so.
When I was 16 my parents got a divorce, long story short, my dad was to blame.
She had a hell of a time finding a new job, because the only job she'd ever had since highschool was as the office manager for her own business. At times they'd had up to 10 employees, she did all the payroll, bid on jobs, everything on the office with the help of one secretary, etc etc.
No one wants to hire someone when they can't verify their employment. She finally found a job (which was was laid off from 2 years ago) as a phone answerer / secretary for a small business. Took her forever to even find that.
I've played around with Quake Live now and then.
Its crazy buggy and the java in it slows my computer to a crawl. I have a fairly modern machine, and Quake 3 was making it bog down. Seriously?
Not only that, but I wanted to play with a friend of mine who lives about 100 miles away. Neither of us could figure out how to start a game that was just private for the two of us.
Yes, I feel like I got my moneys worth. The degree took 10 classes to complete (33 semester hours), and each class cost about $2,220. So $22k total. My work picked up about $15k worth, so it really didn't cost me all that much. The loans are lumped in with about 60k in undergrad student loans, and they all go to into repayment here in a few months. It works out to about $350 a month.
I chose walden because I liked the sound of the Information Systems Management degree, thats essentially the job I want to try to go into. I have a bachelors in programming, but I'm really not a great programmer. I figured this out too late to change degrees without being in debt up to my eyeballs and another 3 years in school. I enjoy technology, I just get bored and frustrated with programming.
I also like Walden because its not as well known. It only comes up that I went to school online when people notice dates don't match up. IE, in an interview it was noticed I went to school in Baltimore (where walden is located) while living in Ohio. A simple explanation of (oh, the school offered that degree online) was all that it took.
Its unfortunate that he will most likely win (atleast, we all hope) and will probably end up getting some money out of the state for his trouble. But the thing is, the people that made those decisions won't be punished, its the tax payers that will be punished because now the defecit due to the lawsuit has to be made up for.
I just finished my Masters degree with Walden University in "Information Systems Management".
So..my couple of cents:
What I didn't know when I signed up was that I would be in the first class through the program. A lot of the classes were very badly layed out, as in what we would be doing one week would not match up at all with what we'd done the prior weeks or would be doing in the next weeks. It was very obvious the courses had been built by a bunch of outsourced educators in possibly another country, right down to the spelling errors or idiosyncracies in the language in the project descriptions. If we had problems with any of the assignments, or were unsure of the wording, we'd bring it up with the professor and it would be fixed quickly. I think they all understood that some bugs were still being worked out, and I received a nice discount ($600 a semester) for being a guinea pig.
I do feel like I got a decent education for what I paid for and it being an online school. We never learned anything specific about any one product, ie IBM cognos, or MySQL or anything like that, but we learned in general what products like these were capable of, how to shop around for them, etc. Same sort of thing I learned in undergrad, we never got any certifications but I could easily pick up a CCNA, A+, etc because I've had all the ground work laid out for me and understand computers, networking and programing very well.
I was kept fairly busy with the assignments, in an average week I would work on 2 papers, usually 4-8 pages in length, and a group project usually around 6-8 pages, as well as group discussions, reading discussions and some classes required we keep a blog of what we were doing. We had quite a bit of group work, which was some what challenging. Its kind of funny, I had no idea what my group members looked like until in the last class we all found each other on facebook. Nothing like what I expected. I was also the only male, and am fairly young (24) while everyone else was in atleast their mid-30's it seemed.
I did have one really bad professor. I emailed him prior to the class starting and explained I would be on my honeymoon the first 2 weeks of class. I asked if he would rather send me the material early and I turn it in before I leave, or if it was ok if I did it when I got back. He said when I got back was fine. Well, I turned everything in the week I returned, only to get really bad grades for it being "late". I email him and am told "well I had to give you a bad grade for it being late, its only fair to everyone else.", and of course he stuck to his guns when I brought up the email where he said it was ok to turn everything in after I returned from vacation. He graded erratically throughout the class, never offering explanations for grades he gave. The class was badly laid out, and expected us to have a deep knowledge of Java in order to get an Apache Ant (I believe, its been a year and half) project built from the ground up, which I did not, and Java was not on the requirements for the entrance into the degree nor did I expect it, the degree was "how to be a programmers boss" not "how to be a programmer". The professor refused to help fix any of these problems, and I had to get in touch with the dean, who took care of everything for me and apologized for the problems we'd been having. After I got in touch with the dean, examples were added to the assignments involving Ant, so that instead of creating a project from a ground up, we had something to work with in order to get what we needed done.
All and all, it was a pretty good experience.
And am really unhappy with it.
They advertise that it works with network shares. The pains I had to go through to get it to work with windows 7 was crazy. It just wouldn't recognize the shared drive. I'd be able to see it from my wifes PC just fine, but the WD Live wouldn't see it. Had to go through 3 or 4 howto's online to figure out how to make it work. Finally got the right combination of settings and it worked, but if you disconnect the network cable from it (I only have one cable ran to my living room and it has to share with my 360) it takes about 15 minutes before it'll start talking to shared drives again. It'll get online and let me watch youtube, so I know it has access, but it won't talk to the drive on my laptop.
This is going to sound kinda dumb, but I also really hate how small it is. It doesn't look like it fits in my TV cabinet with everything else.
In order to use Hulu and netflix, I have to use a program that runs on my laptop called Playon. It essentially transcodes the video and acts as a media server. So I use the WD Live, go to media servers, then Playon, then select hulu, and I can search TV shows. It also works for netflix, amazon video, ESPN, Comedy Central, and a few others. The interface is really bad, it looks just like folders in explorer in windows. Actually searching for something is impossible, you just have to look through alphabetically. And no way to make playlists or anything. I'd like to make a playlist that has my favorite shows on hulu so I can check it quickly, but instead I have to check each show for new episodes individually.
I am disaapointed that Nintendo is doing this.
I quit enjoy my Wii, and have played a bit with the homebrew channel.
Dropped my iPhone in the toilet last week. It got lodged in the S turn, and it took about 30 seconds to get out. It was on the whole time.
Took it apart and sprayed it out with some electronics cleaner to displace the water. Everything seems to be ok now except a splotch on the screen and the speaker isn't working. A new screen is $30 and a new speaker is $5 off ebay, I plan on ordering the parts today and fixing it back up.
Its because on some phones, the GPS map data is stored server side.
I know my old Pantech Slate offered this, I could download a GPS application, but all of the maps and roads were stored on a server at AT&T, and it wouldn't work outside of a data connection via the cell service.
Interships really vary in pay.
I applied for several a few years ago when I was a junior in college.
Many payed 10-12$ an hour doing crap work. Others payed the better part of $20 and were still crap work.
Really depends on the company and the level of student they expect to get in.
I was 2.5 years in my college degree when I applied at a computer shop as an intern, this was in 2007. They offered me $4 an hour, UNDER THE TABLE. I laughed, grabbed my resume back out of the bosses hands and walked out. That was half of what minimum wage was.
Ok, maybe I should rephrase what I was trying to say.
I'm not necessarily saying he should brownnose. But try to get on his good side, and if this means picking a crap job over a cake job, then do it. Make yourself visible. The majority of managers don't see the guy that sits in the corner and makes beautiful code, but the guy sweating and working they think is working his butt off.
And have worked here about 2.5 years now, including my year as an intern. It was alot of fun, and I learned an immense amount.
Plain and simple, kiss your bosses ass. If your lucky enough to be liked, you may end up getting a job offer when your hired, and in this economy, you'd be considered lucky.
Expect to be doing alot of grunt work. Your coworkers are going to use you as a "gopher". Don't take it personally, but also be insistant on wanting to learn their jobs, not just get their coffee. Alot of people are going to be afraid to give you an indepth look at what they do, their afraid if someone else knows their job, they'll be fired. This not much you can really do about it, besides just pick up what you can from the sidelines.
Be outgoing, and don't slack. If that means working through lunch everyday, it'll be worth it in the end when you come away with a better knowledge of whats going on.
Try to ask intelligent questions. You'll catch people off guard and look alot more intelligent by asking "How could I use cat and grep in order to do..." instead of "Whats grep?"
I do think I should folow this up with a bit more of an explanation of my beliefs as far as where this is heading for universities.
I cringe every time I see Devry's school of video game design add come on the TV. Its two college age guys sitting on a couch, playing a game. something is said like "oh, we need to tweak this a bit more here" and he does something with the controller, then they go back to playing the game.
I was in a game design degree, and it was hilarious seeing the incoming freshman and their beliefs as to what the courses were going to be like. They were convinced they'd get to play games non-stop and not do any real world work. 90% of them game in with the idea they were going to be video game testers and make 100k a year sitting around playing World of Warcraft.
To make it worse, the school got a big grant and spent it on Dell XPS's and a bunch of games for one of the labs. The idea was to get us together, form frienships, and have some fun in between doing homework. It failed miserably and pretty much gave students the idea they could sit around and play games during class. They tried locking the lab down, saying games were off-limits before some time like 8pm. Again, students threw a fit, convinced it was their right to use school property to sit around and play games.
I think games are a great way to teach people how to program. It lets you have some fun while learning the concepts.
But teaching it like a trade, and telling students "oh, you can graduate and go work for Sony or EA" is wrong. Market it as a CS curriculum, not as a video game programming trade curriculum.
Exactly. See my parent post about 3 above yours.
I learned matrix math, working with vectors and 3d points and so on from using it to work in OpenGL, Direct3D and later Ogre. It wasn't something abstract, because I could make a change, and see the result on screen. This helped me to connect together what was going on and what the final output would be, and helped me to grasp a much better understanding of it.
I have a bachelors degree in Game design, and using games was a big part of how programming was taught at my school.
A lot of people are going to say "but how are they going to learn, games are complex, etc etc"
They don't have to be. A few examples from how I learned...
In my networking fundamentals, we covered opening sockets, threading to take care of the sockets, passing information back and forth, etc. At the point in a normal course, you'd probably do something like...make a lame chat client, or an FTP program or something. Instead the professor said, ok, I want you to make a game that uses these concepts to pass information between computers. I wrote a pong game that used a client / server type setup. One computer ran the server and both ran the clients. The server computed all the stuff and returned data to the clients on where to place the ball, paddles, and the score. I also had a lot of fun doing it.
Another good one. For my programming fundamentals class (eg, first class the freshman took to learn programming) they used python. After we covered the basics, such as arrays, if statements, loops, and so on, we got into user input. Then the instructor turned us loose on a simple header he'd made that let you move ASCII characters around the screen and asked us to make a simple game, such as a maze the user had to move through via the directional keys. It was amazing, because the next class students came in with some really awesome games using pretty complex stuff they'd looked up and taught themselves. By the end of the year long series of classes, freshman were making sprite based games on par with Super Mario Brothers 3 and other scrolling type games using PyGame.
I also learned Direct3D and OpenGL and wrote a few simple games with them to learn how to work with a rather complex API. Then we picked up Ogre and a physics engine (I can't remember the name off the top of my head). My final project was a bowling game that head realistic physics, and you controlled the spin and movement of the ball via the mouse. I showed it to my current employeer (I started out as a co-op) during my interview, and it really set me apart. Granted my job requires very little programming, but it still really made me stand out when I was able to show them something flashy, rather than a program that did a lot in the background but not much in the userland end of things. Not that theres anything wrong with that, but people tend to like flashy cool looking things.