• 23 hours of class a week
• Hundreds of hours of RA responsibility
• 4 hours of tutoring a week
• Miscellaneous computer work (such as Pre-Med Club)
• And all the other normal college student responsibilities

It was a tough semester, to be sure. But with 5 out of 6 classes reporting, I was still able to keep all A’s… although one of them was very close (and it’s a good story too). Here’s how it came about.

One of my 6 classes was Pathogenics— the study of infectious diseases and the organisms that cause them. We studied pathogens such as Yersinia enterocolitica and Staphylococcus aureus, as well as nastier stuff like Neisseria gonorrhoeae and Clostridium difficile. I really enjoyed the material (it’s related to what I hope to work with, after all), and I didn’t find the class very difficult. However, for some reason I could just never get a handle on the tests the professor gave us. I would go in feeling as if I knew all the material, and come out with a mid-to-low B on each exam.

Going into the final, I had three Bs and a C on the 4 exams… not an A in the bunch. The C was dropped, but I still needed a 95% on the final to make an A. I doubted that could happen, since I hadn’t made an A even on the “easier” tests. But then, the professor told us that not only would the final not be cumulative, but that he would add 10% to each person’s final exam score. At that point, I needed only an 85%, which I thought was doable. I studied an obscene amount for the final, and went in feeling good about it. However, as I started answering questions, I left more and more blank. I ended up leaving 35% of the test blank on the first run-through (in which I answered only stuff I knew immediately). Not good. I went back and started working the problems that were left, and got many of them answered, but had to guess on a few. I walked out of the test unsure of how I had done. It was graded that night, and I got… 82%. This gave me an 88.13% for the class, and an 88.5% was needed for an A. Only 0.37% away! I e-mailed the professor out of desperation, just to see if there was anything that could be done.

It turned out that he remembered a day of class a couple months back during which I had noticed an error in his lecture notes and corrected it. He told me that I would be given 2 bonus points for catching the error, which pushed me up to an 88.6%! Enough to round to the A. More grace than I deserved, probably, but warmly welcomed.

Work on ZetaBoards continues mostly on-schedule. We’ve hit some frustrating setbacks, but all in all it’s shaping up very well. I think the beta testers have had a good time working with it and I’m definitely looking forward to the reactions of those who said it would never come. Plus, it’s going to remove so much workload from our moderating team, with the new moderation features that are in place. We’ll be able to concentrate more on building and less on maintaining.

This is one of the most open breaks I’ve had in awhile; not much is going on, and I don’t have any specific plans, other than ZetaBoards development. So I decided to start with something I’ve wanted to do for awhile: invest in the stock market! I’m opening an account with TD Ameritrade (although if someone has another suggestion I’d be happy to listen), but I’ll start small with only a few companies that I’ve personally researched and looked into (mostly ones from which I own products). I’ve taken quite a few hours to research things before even opening an account. It seems that expected return, as per the S&P 500, is about 11% yearly. Thus, if you can beat 11%, you are “beating the market”, and if you can’t beat 11%, you might as well have your money in a SPYDR (Ticker: SPY) or similar. I tend to have fun with games in which one tries to outsmart the {opponent, AI}, so the market isn’t much different. Since I’m not looking to invest in high-growth items that fluctuate wildly, as long as I don’t try to get out immediately I should be all right. The principle of buy-and-hold tends to work out in the long run.

In addition to all this, I’d sure like to get my site redesign in place. I’ve talked to Nicola about helping me with it, but I’m afraid it has to wait until after ZetaBoards, which might mean this summer. I have some new ideas to implement, including OpenID integration (another post soon about this), better scheduling and visualization of where I am throughout the day, and overall making the site more interactive.

This break will be fun

Yes I promise to blog more soon. RA Training is insane and leaves no time for blogging.

One of my favorite parts of the new skin is its semantic correctness. The emoticon list? It's a list, not a table. The custom profile fields? They're not <span>'d and <div>'d to all ends; they are simple yet elegant definition lists. Table headers aren't just <td>'s with classes applied to them; <th>'s are used where they were intended.

Let's have one example of the elegance semantic HTML and a bit of unobtrusive JavaScript offers. Here are the first six emots of the IPB 1.3 emoticon list:

<table class='tablefill' cellpadding='4' align='center'>
<tr> <td align="center" colspan="6"><b>Clickable Smilies</b></td> </tr>
<tr align='center'>
<td><a href='javascript:emoticon(":huh:")'><img src="http://67.18.37.14/html/emoticons/huh.gif" alt='smilie' border='0' /></a> </td>
<td><a href='javascript:emoticon(":o")'><img src="http://67.18.37.14/html/emoticons/ohmy.gif" alt='smilie' border='0' /></a> </td>
<td><a href='javascript:emoticon(";)")'><img src="http://67.18.37.14/html/emoticons/wink.gif" alt='smilie' border='0' /></a> </td>
<td><a href='javascript:emoticon(":P")'><img src="http://67.18.37.14/html/emoticons/tongue.gif" alt='smilie' border='0' /></a> </td>
<td><a href='javascript:emoticon(":D")'><img src="http://67.18.37.14/html/emoticons/biggrin.gif" alt='smilie' border='0' /></a> </td>
<td><a href='javascript:emoticon(":lol:")'><img src="http://67.18.37.14/html/emoticons/laugh.gif" alt='smilie' border='0' /></a> </td>
</tr> <!-- table continues -->
</table> And the equivalent HTML in the new skin:

<ul id="emotlist">
<li><img src="gfx/emots/happy.gif" alt=":)" /></li>
<li><img src="gfx/emots/sad.gif" alt=":(" /></li>
<li><img src="gfx/emots/whoa.gif" alt=":O" /></li>
<li><img src="gfx/emots/meh.gif" alt=":/" /></li>
<li><img src="gfx/emots/cry.gif" alt=":'(" /></li>
<li><img src="gfx/emots/fear.gif" alt=":ph34r:" /></li> Notice how clean the HTML is (no inline JavaScript or repetitive elements) and its accessibility (alt tags are used for their intended purpose). The new emot list is usable even from things like my PalmPilot browser.

Having this project made so easy for me has even made me want to redesign this site! I have some rockin' new ideas based on the things I've researched and learned while working on this project. And you know that's something, because normally I view web design as a burden, because of that pesky design element. I would like to do a layout that makes better use of the screen space that most of my visitors have, without this fixed-width and whitespaced column. Something a bit bolder-colored, but not too much so. Of course, that's only if Nic will lend me a hand again :angel:

So the moral of the story is this: If you're talented in one area, but not another… find someone who complements you. And you might find that you become ten times better and more productive.

I took our new website template and ported it to DokuWiki in a matter of hours. And most of that time was spent redoing part of the header to add more functionality that the website didn’t need. Things worked just by dropping in a few PHP tags here and there. The only other software this easy to skin is WordPress.

There are a few hundred plugins written for DokuWiki, and the syntax is extremely simple should I choose to make more. I picked a couple and installed them on our installation in about 20 minutes. The notes plugin is amazing. The entire codebase is PHP-Doc’d so I can understand what everything does, and make changes where I need them!

The 2005-9 release I was using lacked a little bit on user management, but that’s all been fixed with the 2006-3 release that I just finished upgrading to. I have full control on access permissions, user groups, everything. And the new release also added some great AJAX goodness like an AJAX quicksearch. I also successfully installed aspell to my home directory and now the AJAX spellcheck it features works flawlessly.

There are no databases needed; it’s all flat-file and fast. I can move the directory around and nothing breaks; all that’s needed are some CHMODs. It’s drop-dead simple, gorgeous, well-written, featureful, and fast. How does it get better than this?

If you need a wiki software, this is the one for you.

Zeta is the first software to be built from the ground up specifically for hosting in a multi-forum environment. It features page execution times up to 6000 times faster than our old InvisionFree software, and over three hundred new and improved features. From a central resource database that everyone can submit into, to inline moderation and an enhanced PM system… ZetaBoards will allow forums to be easier and more fun.

We’re coming up on five years of operation… here’s to another fifty!