Category: Life update

One of the best scenes ever:

“Um, thank you. I’m not much for public speaking. Or much for speaking. Or, come to think of it, much for the public. And I’m not very good at lying. So let me just say that, in my experience, high school sucks. If I had to do it all over again, I’d have started advanced placement classes in preschool so I could go from eighth grade straight to college. However, given the unalterable fact that high school sucks, I’d like to add that if you’re lucky enough to have a good friend and a family that cares it doesn’t have to suck quite as much. Otherwise my advice is; Stand firm for what you believe in, until and unless experience proves you wrong. Remember, when the emperor looks naked, the emperor *is* naked. The truth and a lie are not sort of the same thing. And there is no aspect, no facet, no moment of life that can’t be improved with pizza. Thank you.”

It was a not so fine morning today. I wasn’t feeling all that well and all of a sudden my best friend in the whole wide world decided to question our bonding process. After all this time it is still very hard to determine why we are still so close… Our story is really a rather boring one I think. Nothing extraordinary with how we met, at least not to my knowledge. We were just two teenagers trying to get away from our boring-ass town. It was a on Xmas night, I was bored and had too much to eat and I was just passing in front of her house so I decided to stop by. That was the point were it all started. One stop on a night drive and I was hooked and even after all this time the question still remains “what made us that special that even after all this time we are still best friends?” I have given this a lot of thought and I came to a simple conclusion. It’s all about the coffee and how you take it. We know exactly how the other takes his/her coffee, what he/she likes and what one would prefer to avoid.

There are two things I say make us work. The first one being that we hold a very very deep admiration for one another (at least I do for her). It really impresses me whenever she gets into a conversation about what she does. I really don’t know that much about her professional world for that matter but I sense passion for the subject in her and that’s what you really want to find in someone, passion. It’s like whenever I hear her I know something mind blowing is about to be said. She has the capacity to make her world so simple even though it’s not. Make connections where you thought no connections could ever be made. You just want to go an read everything about the subject just so can participate in those conversations. She also has this Socratic way to her which makes talking with her all the more interesting.

The second thing is that we managed to grow our friendship from the school yard to the real world. We went from talking about expectations to talk about realities. Back when we first met we focused on what we wanted to do, all the places we would like to visit and the places we wanted to drink coffee at. We talked about how it would be great to end up in the same city and just be completely awesome in it. Neither “Friends” nor “Will and Grace” would have anything on our life experience. It turned out that we ended up in the same city and we were indeed awesome but in a not so sitcom kind of way. I started noticing how our conversations shifted. It was no longer about what we were going to do when we grew up but rather about how the real world can be very sucky. The conversation grew up with us. It was all about what would happen if we actually failed. What would happen if we didn’t finish college, what happens once we graduated. And even to this day we are still intrigued with those kinds of subjects.

I can summarize the two previous points into one very simple and cryptic phrase: we are such good friends because we know how we like our coffee. It goes without saying that we go the extra mile just to make it perfect and I’m very happy with that.

Well this is awkward, just mere two years after my graduation from University I’m back at the same school. Well, virtually the same school and I’m not talking about the changes that the buildings my have suffered but rather the fact that my masters program is a virtual one. Yes, I get to go to school on my computer, so if I thought I couldn’t be any geekier I just proved myself VERY wrong. At first I thought: “well this is going to be rather easy, I just need to make sure that I do all my work like before and I’ll do just fine” and then reality came barging in with a can of whoopass just for me. As it turns out it is a bit harder than just reading and doing my homework.

I really like studying, if I could get paid to do it I wouldn’t think twice about it. But this is very different. “Attending” a virtual comes with its own set of bugs/features, pardon my geek:

Collaborating with people you don’t even know
One of the things that come with being able to go to class on your computer is that there are no geographical constraints any more. Anybody just about anywhere could end up being your classmate which is awesome but at the same time not so much. The main problem is that even at this level of education people don’t seem to be studying because they want to better themselves and you can tell by the lack of commitment. One of the great things of everyday physical interaction with your classmates is that you develop a sense of responsibility towards them when it comes to team work. The fact that you will see them and be working with them the rest of the period makes you think twice about not delivering that piece of work the team is expecting you to do. This face to face interaction is nowhere present in virtual courses, your classmate is reduced to an email address which in my case is just their student number (not very helpful!). When it comes to grading group work it makes it rather difficult to be objective about what grade each member deserves, though a good collaboration tool really helps this part of the issue (more on the issue later).

When is this effing paper due?
This is not a problem with the platform but rather with myself (well the platform does make it very damn hard). A little more background on this: there’s this little ugly platform called Blackboard and everyone seems to love it, I on the other hand have nothing but utter disgust mixed with true and untainted hate for it. Being completely objective is not that bad, but it isn’t good either… ok parts of it really don’t work with my way of life. The calendar module for example has no way of exporting your tasks which in turn makes it really difficult to plan your work ahead. You can either plan your whole semester out front at the beginning of it or you can go back every week and check if there’s anything due, that added to the fact that there’s no real professor reminding you that you have to do your homework leads to me not turning in my mid term paper in time (not me, I always turn my mid term papers in time). It’s hard to think that even today there’s no way to export it to your mobile calendar, or even to Outlook or Google Calendar. Bad, bad, bad!

Where can I buy the freaking book?
At the beginning of the course you get a list of the materials you are going to be needing throughout the duration of the course, and that’s fine. But it’s very hard to find where to buy the books. Most of them are English editions (which they don’t sell in Mexico thank you very much). You can buy them from Amazon and get them 5 weeks later, just in time to study for finals which is in no way a solution. Some of the books have kindle editions or other mobile solutions but not all of them. I really think for this kind of courses professors should make sure that the material for the course is easily accessible.

On and on the experience has been great. Team work while hard is fulfilling (I just threw up a bit). So if you are thinking of going back to study to get a masters me recommendation is to do it. At the end of the day an extra diploma in your office looks awesome!

So I will start a new experiment this week. I’ve always admired morning people, their ability to start their day early. Get up at ungodly hours in the morning, make a cup of coffee and basically start doing shit. So my experiment is I will become a morning person. Tomorrow I will wake up early. I will be reporting my success or failure.