Almost done…

Whew!

I am almost nearly entirely done with semester five. I can’t believe that a year ago I was only wrapping up my first full semester of school (bootcamp doesn’t really count). Man, time flies when you don’t really have a social life.

I turned in the last IML assignment yesterday. I have very mixed feelings about it. I think I did fine on writing the XML document. I’ve done that before and it validated every time I tested it. My problem, as usual, was the short answer questions. My dilemma was again between depth and brevity, with my natural inclination towards brevity and my professor’s desire for lots of depth AND brevity. This assignment was particularly hard because I get all the concepts in this unit – document modeling – but I don’t get them– you know what I’m sayin’? I totally understand the general concepts and benefits and such of descriptive markup, OHCO and the like, but when the prof starts really getting into the nitty-gritty of it, I get lost. Like with his current research – I’m like, “Okay, I guess I get what you’re doing.” So anyway, I feel like I fudged the answers a bit, even after re-reading all the articles, slides and stuff.

As for DIL, I’m pretty pleased with how my final project turned out. Behold: Befuddled by Beer.

There were several lessons learned about workflow and communication on this project and one little technical glitch that I couldn’t get resolved, but still, I’m pleased that we finished it. Since I was the “tech person,” I’m particularly proud of building this thing and making nearly all the interface decisions. I want to thank Phil for all his help – he wrote a classifier script for me and helped me when I got too exasperated or lost to dig myself out of a problem.

I also want to thank my group mates, Alisun, Erin and Kristin for their work. I guess you could say that they got the easier end of the deal – making the content and metadata – but they did a great job and were really supportive. These ladies also drank A LOT of beer for this project. That’s dedication to the profession for you: sacrificing livers for a good grade.

Lastly, I’m happy to report that I’m walking sorta. I use a cane to get up and down stairs and to just help balance me a bit, but no more brace or crutches. I can also sit in a chair like a normal person. Hopefully by the time I head back to Texas for the holidays, I’ll be moving entirely sans cane and will be able to negotiate escalators without hurting myself. I really don’t want to be pushed around the airport in a wheelchair.

Anyway, here’s to 5 semesters down, 1 left to go.