Jayson's Blog

Spring semester at UNCC has ended, and compared to previous semesters, this one was quite the crusher to say the least, even though it was only 15 credit hours. My GPA for the semester was a 3.53, so I’ll make Dean’s List again, but I was a bit disappointed by one particular B in my Chemistry lab…the TA said I was extremely close to an A, but that there would be no curve. My most surprising comeback story was Calculus I; bear in mind I haven’t had a college level math class in about a decade, so all of those skills had long disappeared. Combine that with the fact that about halfway through the semester our professor fell gravely ill, and we got a new professor that although very smart, hadn’t taught a low level math class in years so he was way above our heads. I found some fantastic online lecture notes and basically locked myself in a room for an entire weekend and taught myself everything I needed to know for the final exam. I went from a 67 on the first exam to a 92 on the final, good enough to get an A as my final grade.

One thing this semester taught me is that I no longer want to be a Chemistry major. My first round in school, before I discovered computer science, I was absolutely fascinated by Chemistry and had a natural knack for it. The knack is still there, but the interest…well, not so much. Of course my end goal is medical school so the major doesn’t matter per se, but I have to be interested in the work I’m doing. This round, my interests are much more towards the biological sciences. I have decided to change to either a B.S. Biology should I decide to stay at UNCC, or Biomedical Engineering should I decide to transfer to a school that offers an undergraduate degree in that area. I have also decided that UNC-Chapel Hill may not be an option for various reasons that I won’t go into…it’s mainly a matter of timing. As such, I’m going to apply to other schools in the region that offer a competitive BME program such as NC State and GA Tech for consideration of a Spring ‘10 transfer. A BME degree will be a fantastic fallback degree should my physician aspirations not work out (which of course I have complete confidence that they will, but there are so many places where pursuing an M.D. can abruptly end).

The end of this semester was complicated by some strange medical issues I’ve been having. I won’t get into a lengthy diatribe nor will I play armchair physician in this post about what’s going on, but it got severe enough last week that it warranted 2 physician visits, a smattering of chest x-rays, and a CT scan. The findings are leaning towards gallstones (which I suspected all along), but aside from that I’m a perfectly healthy 30 year old according to test results. I have a consultation with a general surgeon tomorrow morning to discuss a further course of action. I will say that I wouldn’t wish the amount of pain I’ve been experiencing on my worst enemy. My last 2 exams of the semester, I was basically writhing in pain throughout them feeling pretty close to death, and still managed to do well on both. Mind over matter I guess. It’s also safe to say that dye contrast CT scans are quite interesting…the barium sulfate shake given beforehand provides you with about 18 hours of severe cramps and diarrhea, and the IV injected contrast dye also has some interesting physiological properties…feels like your skin is on fire and like you’ve peed all over yourself. Highly recommended.

First summer session (aka 5 weeks of Organic Chemistry pain) starts in just over 2 weeks. I was planning on enjoying my break, but it looks like it’ll be consumed with physician visits until we get the pains resolved. It’s all good, I have faith in the system (even though it does move pretty slow). Watch this space for more updates.

So another semester has drawn to a close…this semester was my first full one; I did 17 hours and I can say one thing for certain: It’s a lot easier to focus at age 30 than it was at 18, and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Finals were pretty gruesome, but overall it was a successful semester, and I’ve loaded myself up with 18 hours for Spring. One thing I learned about myself is that at some point, I stopped being able to do consecutive nights of 4 hours of sleep…I paid dearly for it during finals week and it caught up with me at the end. Yet another thing drastically different than being 18.

I also learned that a decade of cube life spoiled me in some ways…I haven’t put pen to paper (e.g. taking notes) in many many years having always used a computer for all of my document generation needs. The problem wasn’t with the note taking itself, but rather being able to quickly find information I had written down for later studying. Over the past few months I had gone back and forth on whether to get a laptop, or get a tablet. Since I’m a chemistry major, a good portion of my notes include drawings, charts, and equations with lots of symbols involved…so a regular laptop was not going to be a feasible solution. The obvious choice was then a tablet, but to get a decent one is a sizable chunk of change. A friend of mine reminded me about the Dell outlet site, and since the Latitude XT is the tablet I was interested in (namely due to multi-touch capabilities), it became a matter of checking the outlet page on a daily basis waiting for the configuration I wanted. It took a couple months, but the one I wanted finally showed up yesterday. To say I got a great deal would be an understatement. Brand new, the configuration I got would have been around $3,500…I ordered mine for $1,500. The main component I was holding out for was an SSD, which apparently are really hard to come by on the outlet site. Regardless, it gets here on the 22nd, and I’m beyond stoked to be getting rid of all the paper notebooks I would have had to keep up with next semester.

So the question now becomes, do I stick with XP Tablet Edition, or do I use the free upgrade coupon it comes with to move to Vista Business? I’ve read reports on the web of Vista’s tablet capabilities being less than stellar, with many reviewers preferring XP for tablets. I personally love Vista, and would see going back to XP as a huge setback, but of course I want to use whatever works best. Any readers have experience with one or both?

Anywho, I’m all caught up on sleep, have a week of family obligations, and am off to Vail for a week right after Christmas for a well deserved vacation. I keep telling myself I’ll blog more, but school is keeping me fairly hemmed up. Perhaps I’ll make a better effort come next year. Have a wonderful holiday season everyone!

Barack Obama has chosen UNCC (University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the university I'm attending) as his last stop before the elections on Tuesday. It's pretty telling when a state that can only be described as historically very red is not only a democratic candidate's last stop, but is also seemingly going to go blue, exactly what kind of change people actually want.

We're honored to have you here on the eve of the elections.

In my previous CS Tidbit, I outlined how to add an archive page to your blogs to free up some sidebar real estate while still giving readers access to our post history. Of course, now that we have this in place, how do we let our readers know where it is? In the past, adding links to one of the standard sidebar widgets meant manually adding entries to various skin files, and doing it in each theme on our site. There was also really no way to control security on the links either without adding some more customizations, ie if you had a link that you only wanted displayed to logged in users, or to owners of a particular section (Sharepoint calls this Security Trimming, I'm not sure what CS refers to it as).

Fortunately for us, CS now supports creating nested navigation bar items via the control panel, and also allows us to specify security attributes to control what audience gets to see these links. In this tidbit, I'll outline how to accomplish this. Our end result is going to look something like this:

This is just the standard navigation bar that you'd see in CS2008.5's Hawaii theme, along with 4 nested navigation bar items. To create these items, navigate to Control Panel and select Site Administration, and then head over to Site Theme. The url to this page will look something like http://<yourSite.com>/ControlPanel/Settings/ThemeConfiguration.aspx. In the theme configuration editor, select the Header tab and look for the section called Navigation Bar. You'll see a box similar to the one pictured here:

In this example, we'll add a link to the archive page we created in the previous CS Tidbit. Click the Add button, and then fill in information similar to the following:

Once you're done putting in the correct info, click save. You can then click and drag the newly created link to the section where you'd like it to be nested under. It's actually a pretty slick control. Once you have it where you want, click the save button in the lower right hand corner and navigate back to your site. The newly created nested navigation item should be displayed under the section you placed it in. All of this adds some nice navigational touches for your site visitors to be able to find stuff in an easier more consistent manner.

Community Server 2008.5 was released recently. The half dozen or sites that I've upgraded over the weekend went without a hitch; the new Windows Client upgrader application is very easy to use...the toughest part is waiting for all of your site files to finish FTP'ing back up to your site. The only downside I've seen for CS 2008.5 is that it only ships with one theme, which is called Hawaii. I was initially underwhelmed by this theme, but after getting to know it a little better it's grown on me. Total time to get JK.com upgraded and customized was about 6 hours total, although I do have a few non-standard tweaks that I always have to re-implement for new CS releases.

I do plan on starting up my CS Tidbits post category again as well with some common tweaks, plus outlines of new features in CS 2008.5. I can say that my first reaction to this release is that performance has been improved quite a bit. Kudos to Telligent for a fantastic CS release!