End It All

It’s tremendously sickening. I can’t stand it, and I wish it would just end all together. Each day it scratches my nerves and makes my insides flip over. I simply cannot take any more. If I didn’t only have three months of school before my degree I might quit right now and never go back. I hate it.

Right now I am in Ethics class (3 hrs) and SQL and Relational Database Management Systems (9hrs). Ethics is okay. I am learning some things. It’s important to remember that an ethics class isn’t like a church sermon; they don’t tell you what is right or wrong. As a matter of fact, they almost tell you that nothing is right or wrong. The author of this text is pretty adamant about pointing out that she is not attempting to do that. http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Story-Introduction-Ethics/dp/0767429109

The discussions are also okay. They were really good early on. I got in a huge argument with someone (we’ll call him Cooper) over Andrew Carnegie. The discussion was about whether we thought he was an altruist or an egotist. Cooper had the notion that he was an egotist, but all he cited was Carnegie’s trouble with unions, specifically the Homestead Strike of 1892. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie#1892:_Homestead_Strike

The problem I had with his post wasn’t that he was necessarily wrong. He was simply stating what every other classmate was stating. Since the Homestead Strike (sometimes seen as a lockout and not a strike) was made against Carnegie’s business, and since strikers died in the incident, Carnegie must have been driven to succeed at the cost of others’ lives. I struck against Cooper with all I was worth because he made more sense of this slippery slope argument than anyone else. I had a very strong urge to show the class that not everyone who is rich is also evil.

I am good at arguing. Ask any one of my friends who have “had it up to here” with my stubbornness. Ask that guy at work who now knows that Carmello Anthony led the NBA in scoring when he wasn’t elected to the All-Star game, even though I don’t follow basketball.

So I struck against Cooper. And I won. Anytime I get someone to point out that Mussolini, Stalin, and Castro were doing something right, I win. I had some really good points that centered on the fact that Carnegie publicly supported unions, and that he was out of town (home in Scotland) when Homestead took place. http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~phall/05.%20Wealth.pdf They didn’t exactly have the modern rush back in a jet when you get an email saying something’s wrong ability back then.

After a brutal week 4, I have simply not been generating any responses to my posts in other discussions. It’s my own fault because of my arrogant slamming of Cooper in such an efficient manner. No responses make my respond once by Wednesday and twice more by Sunday requirement extremely difficult.

But that’s not why I hate school. I get sick of posting in every class by week 6 anyway.

No, the reason I hate school is my Database class. By Sunday I will have had to post on these topics 24 times. Please keep in mind that I have ZERO database management experience, and that in week one I posted ALL of my ideas about why good design is important, and bad/no design is bad. Enjoy:

Week 1: “…give us a short background of your experiences.”, “…post your thoughts about why database design is so important.”

Week 2: “How can better database design assure accurate information…?”

Week 3: “Please, share with us one or more of your experiences with bad database design (no normalization)...”

Week 4: “…give us an idea of what you believe to constitute good database design… Please, share a few personal experiences and/or observations...”

Week 5: “…please give us a short background of your experiences with normalization…, Please share a few real-life examples.”

Week 6: “Describe the importance of creating the physical database properly from the database design…”

Week 8: “…please elaborate on the pitfalls of creating a database or a system without a plan in place”, “…backing up your idea with real life examples when a plan was, or wasn’t used, and what happened to that project...”