Entering the home stretch for this semester as I graduate with an associate degree in Computer Programming from San Jose City College in less than two weeks.  Ceramics I is pretty much finished as I need to glaze my four pieces—a self-portrait bust, a large water jar, a square bowl, and a Egyptian figurine—this week to be ready for the potluck and critique next week.  A Directed Study (CIS 098) course is being substituted for Object Oriented Programming (CIS 059) that's not being offered this semester or next was completed in less than ten hours.  (The record for completing an entire course in the fewest hours possible was a online HTML class that took me six hours to complete all the assignments on the last day of school.)  Data Structures (CIS 055) is proving to be problematic; I want to do something else than figuring out how to link data nodes this way and that.  I might wait until the very last day to finish all the assignments for that class.

I'm still planning to take Ceramics II for fun next semester.  But this is the last semester  I can qualify for academic pricing on certain software packages.  I got Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium and Photoshop Lightroom for $600 USD (retail is ~$1,800 USD), and I got Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional on order for $99 USD (retail is ~$800 USD).  These are heavy duty programs if you're going to have a career as a web developer and programmer.  I'm currently using Dreamweaver to prototype a complete redesign of this site over the summer, and Lightroom to organize my photo collection.  As for all the other programs in CS3, I'm waiting for the how-to books to be published this summer as this software package is so new that there's nothing on the web about using the new features.

[Note: The website redesign was abandoned in January 2008 with the switch to Joomla! CMS.  When I finish converting the legacy content, I will try my hand at creating a custom template to finish the redesign.]