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I'm Such a Terrible Blogger
By Sean Foran | February 16, 2011
I’m sorry, you guys. You’ve been neglected. All I can say is, life got a bit busy.
Let’s start with coming back to campus. Because of a financial aid snafu last semester (my siblings graduated and went on to graduate education, which messed up my FAFSA, which led to me not even knowing how much I even needed to Pay Canisius until mid-October or so) I was unable to register for classes until the weekend I returned to campus. Being a second semester Junior, that didn’t exactly leave me with a lot of options for classes. Actually, it left me with precisely two classes I could take. Seeing as I need four classes to be a full-time student, and need to be a full-time student for financial reasons, that was not ok. So I spent two weeks chasing down professors, department heads, and classes (and, at the height of this, was speaking with three deans, three department heads, and two professors all at once, trying to get into classes) to get myself registered. The deans and department heads were extremely helpful and supportive, and worked with me to resolve the problem, but it was a stressful two weeks.
Once I was registered, I settled into classes and work. I’m working roughly 16 hours a week for ITS, currently, on top of 15 credit hours. Which kind of fills my schedule up. Maintaining an Open Source application on the side cuts into that time some more, as well as something else I’ll hopefully be able to talk about shortly. I had barely gotten into this flow, however, when it came time to register for Google I/O. Google I/O is Google’s developer conference they hold every year, and I’ve always watched it live from the web before. This year, I have the means to go, and professors ok’d me taking exams before/after exam week (which is, of course, the week of the conference). So I got myself all set to register and fly down to San Francisco in May. When registration opened, I was one of the first ones to hit the servers. Unfortunately, it was me and thousands of other people, and the servers went down. It was harrowing and nerve-wracking, but I managed to register. I was one of 5,500 people who registered, selling the conference out in 59 minutes. Last year, it took 5 weeks.
Once I/O was taken care of, it was back to normal for a week or so. Until Digital Day popped up again. We went from a tiny little event in the library to a full-day extravaganza, open to the Buffalo public. We had well over 100 people come in for our presentations, workshops, and tables of information this year, and it was stressful, but fun. I made friends with a group of software engineers from Fredonia, the Android for Academics gang, who made the event a lot of fun.
And now here I am, sitting at the help desk, helping people plot data into a graph in Excel, and eagerly awaiting the five day weekend that starts at 5 pm tomorrow. It can’t come quickly enough.
Topics: Sean '12 | No Comments »