Christmas Break

Wow what a semester. My first one at DSU has gone well and I learned quite a bit. For Xmas I get to sit and learn SQL reporting services in an attempt to save my company some money. I also get to relax a bit and catch up on fun things again, at least for a few weeks.

I am already registered for Spring, Management and Evaluation of Information Systems and Applied Statistics. More stats....sound like fun. Although I did learn a lot more than I anticipated in my project management class. I am quite surprised by how intuitive the Visual Studio Express editions were to use and work with.

In the meantime I'm gonna be resting at home playing my old fav. Fallout 2, catching up on my large pile of unread Asimov monthly, and watching Avatar.

DSU and all the things I will learn

So I got my student ID number yesterday, and unless something terrible goes wrong with financial aid (which Lord knows is probable), I am officially a doctoral student.

I am looking over all the things I will get to learn and write and do over the next 6-7 years and I am mostly excited and partially frightened. This is the big leagues and I have been waiting a while to take my shot.

I am really looking forward to learning more about these subjects in information systems than what I have previously done in the past, which most commonly was just enough for me to get a project done or familiarize myself with a subject. I am super excited about getting a real fundamental classroom instruction about security (beyond what I know from the security+), network intrusion, data warehousing, decision processes, and most of all, how to do research in this field.

I have always loved being a student and I am really looking forward to the material and to some degree (let me be honest, I'm not masochistic) the challenges I will overcome to accomplish this.

HAM radio

I passed my Technician test on Saturday and got my call sign today. I waited so long to do this but it is done.

I am transmitting as KF5BDN and will probably be on Echolink for a while until I actually get around to buying a handheld or mobile.

Drop me a line if you are a net friendly ham.

Twitter and Firefox and Facebook oh my

I just spent some time this morning integrating my facebook account with twitter, firefox with twitter, facebook with blogger.com, and blogger.com with Google feed burner.

Man that was kinda exhausting....but the work is done and is nice. Since Google syndicated and burns my feed I simply used simplaris blogcast to put my syndication on facebook. I also took the opportunity to link my sms service with twitter, so I can finally have all my information I want syndicated and fed to facebook and my web page on my domain at chriscopeland.com.

Then I installed twitbin to have an easy mashup for firefox, which I now consider one of my must have firefox extensions.

So all in all the linking was kinda a pain, but I think the end result is nice and easy. I like being able to update my status using my sms on my phone, I'm sure when I get around to getting an iPhone it will get even better.