Greetings and Salutations!
 
My new fall schedule can be found here: http://www.machiningconcepts.com/dan/msoe/

To print my schedule, click the "Printable Schedule" link found on the bottom of that page.
 
After 3 years in the dorms, I am finally in an apartment! I live at Yankee Hill, which is just one block from the Science & Engineering building.
 
Click here for pictures of my townhouse: http://www.machiningconcepts.com/dweb/yankee/

Note that I am not living in the towers; I am living in one of the two-floor townhouses right on Jackson St. I have two roommates. And yes, I have a pool and hot tub :)
 
Okay...that was the good news. The bad news: Classes!

My first class is Informal Logic, a humanities elective. It is the closest classroom to my townhouse--probably about a 2 minute walk. (Pretty much all of my other classes are in the Campus Center, which is farther away.) My professor for this logic course is the same one that I had for my other humanities course when I was a freshman. He has been voted teacher-of-the-year many times, and is one of my favorite professors. He looks identical to Richard Dreyfuss. I am tempted to call him Mr. Holland at times. The classroom could better be described as a "dungeon." It has no windows, and it super tiny, with many many small desks. There are over 20 girls, and less than 10 guys... which is very perplexing. But I must admit, all of the girls are SUPER annoying and I really just want to tell them to shut up. (Same for the guys.) Anyways, while logic can often involve mathematical symbols, my professor said that we won't discuss any of that. So far the course has been more of a philosophy class. Even though it is a logic course, the professor emphasizes the importance of feelings over reason in many instances. Taking everything with a grain of salt, I am really enjoying this class, as I expected.

My second class is American Government. A good third of each class period is spent discussing politics, and the other two-thirds are spent discussing our government. About one-third of the class is republican, one-third is democratic, and one-third doesn't say much. The political debates that we've had so far have been pretty good, despite many dumb arguments. I have gotten the feeling that my professor is democrat, though it is hard to tell. I heard him quibbling about the 2000 election. But other than that, he seems pretty down-the-middle. I think this may be my favorite class, because I am extremely interested in learning about our government, and debating with other students. I can't go on without mentioning a quote from one of my classmates: "I disagree with Bush on almost all issues, but I think when I grow up and have to worry about getting a job, and perhaps running a business, then I might become a republican." Enough said.

Next up is Data Communication and Networking. This class is taught by Barnekow, the same professor I had all of last year. He is another one of my favorite professors--and that's only partially because he's a republican ;) On the first day of class he told a story about his summer vacation with his son: They went fishing, and as they were trying to hook the boat up to the hitch on the van, the boat pulled the van into the water, and it sank. He called triple-A and asked about his emergency road-side assistance. They responded: "Yeah, but that's emergency ROAD service... you're in a LAKE." Later, when a local towing-company came out to try to pull his van out of the water, they encountered problems because the parking break was on. To quote Barnekow: "How could the parking break be on--the van just rolled into the lake!"
 
Anyways, in this class we will be creating a tiny, slow computer network between our car-in-a-box's that we built and programmed last Spring. This will be a very low-level programming course, often working with single bits. I have not done too much work in this class yet, but it should be very fun. It is pretty much an extension of last term's Car-in-a-box class.

My last two classes are taught by the same professor: Dr. Welch. The first of the two courses is: Introduction to Database Design. Because this is what I've been doing at Machining Concepts for the past four years, this class should be very easy. It is slightly different however, in that it involves more programming (C++ for example), and less GUI (Graphical-User-Interface) design. Programming is more tedious, but also more universal, because the GUI version provided by Microsoft Access is not as universal, nor is it free.

My last class of the day is Software Engineering Design. For the past five years, I've been learning how to make more and more complicated programs using different programming languages. This course is completely different in that it is designed to teach us not how to write complicated programs, but instead, how to write GOOD programs. We will be writing very very simple programs, but we will have to write them extremely well. We have to keep a detailed log of all of our time spent, and we have to keep a detailed log of all bugs and errors in our code, and when they were fixed. It is very frustrating, but I understand the need for the course; Have you ever used any bad (read: Microsoft) software?

Well that's about all I can think of right now. If you want to come see my apartment, give me a call or stop on by!
 
Remember, that which does not kill just postpones the inevitable.

"Democrats believe kids shouldn't pray in school, especially not during moments of silence because silence can lead to thinking and thinking causes people to become Republicans." P.J. O'Rourke

"Americans are possibly the dumbest people on the planet... in thrall to conniving, thieving, smug pricks."
Michael Moore - The Daily Mirror, November 3, 2003