Favorite Song of the Week: "Dreams"

According to my iTunes play count I have listened to "Dreams" by The Cranberries 233 times since I downloaded it Tuesday night. The counter would probabily be higher, except I am still listening to "Ice Cream". Anyway, moving on...

Have a bit of homework to do this weekend. I have been busy getting ready for class on Tuesday. I am covering reading a file in Visual Basic, input boxes, message boxes, and output this week. I am also beginning review (they have an exam in three weeks). Funny, I am giving my class an exam on the same week as my presentation. I have working on writing up a review sheet for the exam - give them a place to start.

I have been getting a lot of questions regarding "Dim" in Visual Basic. It is a difficult to explain "optional" to a bunch of new programmers. Dim in visual basic is used to "declare" variables. However, it is not a requirement of the language (unless you state so using Option Explicit which we haven't covered yet). To make things even more interesting I program in a very different style then the other grad student I am teaching with. OK, so I know that none of you are surprised by this - but the students in the class find this (at times) confussing. I am some what of a "if it works its good" type where the other grad student programs in a very structured manner.

The horrible part - I didn't realized that this was a issue until I was helping people in the lab on Thursday and a student mentioned that the other grad student's code looked totally different than my examples in class. I just hadn't even thought about it. I am use to working with several people who code differently from me and the thought hadn't even crossed my mind in the least. So I went and change all my examples for Tuesday lecture on Friday afternoon. Then I realized that I didn't want to because that was going to compound the problem. I decided it would be way better to show them that both parts of the code of equal. Now if I could just figure out a way to make strings clearer to the class... well I have until Tuesday morning to figure something out. I already tried by example (in lecture and part of the homework). Maybe if I just explain it again and use another example. Anyway, enough about my class.

Some links:

Noooooo......"Palm to unveil cell phone with Microsoft software" (everything is becoming Microsofted...grumble, grumble)

I saw this ("Top 50 Science Fiction TV shows") over on Slashdot.