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Being a commuting student and a computer repair consultant I often end up eating out for lunch. This normally isn’t a problem, being that I love eating out, but when money gets tight or I am trying to save up some extra funds to buy something I switch on my brain and figure out some pretty neat ways to cut down on lunch cost. An average meal out these days costs anywhere from $6-10 depending on where you eat and if you get a soda. That means on an average week I consume almost $40 for one meal out a day, that’s as much as my car eats in that same amount of time. So, to cut back on costs for the moment I have begun doing several things differently:

1. I buy sodas or bottled waters in bulk and keep a flat or box of them in my car. They actually stay pretty cool and this takes the cost of your soda fetish down to a quarter a can. A normal fountain soda costs roughly $1.39 or more these days for a small.

2. Don’t buy lunch at restaurants. Now this may seem contradictory, but when someone speciallizes in something they mark up the price. Instead go to a grocery store like Albertsons or Trader Joes (I prefer Trader Joes myself). Not only can you get fresher healthier foods, but they cost nearly 75% less than a normal meal.

3. Buy your food in bulk too. Once a week purchase a food item that is individually wrapped and sold in bulk. My personal favorite are granola bars. You usually get 6 allowing you an extra snack at sometime during the week, or for you die hards one less day you need to buy a granola bar for the next week.

Following these steps I’m able to cut my typical $8 lunches down to around $2. Now, some may call me crazy, but when you price it out this is completely doable. For $2.14 I can get, a can of soda ($0.25), a granola bar ($0.50), an apple ($0.50), and a cup of yogurt ($0.89). The best part is that you don’t have to pay tax on these items either since the grocery store doesn’t provide you a service and since food isn’t taxed (at least in CA). Even in these tough economic times you can still get lunch for around $2 if you put your mind to it.

Here’s a bonus tip, for those of you lucky enough to work near a grocery store. I have a Giant Halfway bike. It’s a bike that can fold in half. Since I have a sedan, I fold the bike in half and keep it in my trunk, that way I can ride over to the grocery store to pickup my food and then eat it back in my car or at work. Small jaunts across the street or down the road are when our vehicles are least efficient, so not only do you save some gas you save the environment and get a workout all at the same time.

I felt the sudden compulsion to write a quick post, whether it is to distract me from my task at hand or an actual heartfelt plea for a break I can’t be certain. My second day of school was roughly equivalent to the first. I hated stats as I always have. My teacher is very quiet and this will make it even harder to understand him once we move onto real material. My second class like on my first day was quite enjoyable. I had computer networking. The teacher has been at the school for quite some time and I’m glad to see he hasn’t lost his passion as so many teachers I’ve come across have. He has a few strict rules that I don’t completely agree with, but I’m willing to make some exceptions to the norm for a good teacher. 

On another note, I had hoped to be more productive this weekend. I seem to find myself in a rut. The one good bit of news is that I started to stop drinking caffeinated beverages again. I don’t know if this is a blessing or a curse. I do feel that I accomplish more while I drink them, but I can’t ignore the terrible headaches that I get when I stop. I think moderation will be the key. I wasted my whole day on Saturday just lounging around the house. I definitely see looking back that this was a terrible mistake. I was much more productive today. I played tennis in the morning, grabbed lunch with my brother and a friend, and returned a clients laptop. I’ve done a bit of light coding which I hope to accomplish more of in the next half hour to hour before bed. I have found it quite difficult to will myself to do the things I need to do recently and this not only bothers me, but also bodes unwell for the start of the new quarter. I have to figure out what is preventing me from just being like I used to. I think there are several factors that maybe playing parts in this behavior including my current drop in income from starting school along with a slippery economic climate, and a recent desire to be social. Those that know me well, know that I am not a social person, but recently I enjoy interacting with other people. I can’t explain why this desire is there, but everytime I’m around someone that I don’t know very well I have had a compulsion to know more about them or just to talk with them for the sake of talking. I hope this isn’t a sign of my nerdiness getting the best of me.

As a side note, to keep myself stable during these strange economic times, I have decided to revert to something I did while working at Starbucks. I found that by eating lunch from a grocery store I was able to cut the cost to only $3-4 a day. I think it is time again to turn to this practice as I do not like my current situation. As well as my desire to acquire a new server since I ran out of storage space this weekend also adds a new bit of pressure on me. We’ll see if I can make a serious difference in my spending habits this week. It’s strange to have so much that you want to do, and yet to be completely unmotivated to do any of it. Something has to change.

Today was the first day of classes at UCI. I had two classes, my Programming Languages course and my Digital Image class. Based on what I saw today, the Programming Languages course is going to be the hardest to stay awake in. The room was 90 some odd degrees with no air conditioning and the teacher was going over these seemining unimportant, and basic concepts that were taught in ICS 51. That class went from a glimmer of hope while reading the syllabus to down right boring in a very short period of time. On the other hand, I am very much looking forward to my digital image processing course. We will be writing algorithms for facial recognition, smoothing, and many other neat programs. This course will definitely take a good amount of work to complete successfully. There will be a lot of statistics, probability, linear algebra, and calculus involved which are all not my areas of strength, but I feel very excited about the material and course, so I hope that I might finally be able to learn these concepts that seemed so pointless in a math class room and put them to good use. Only time will tell.

Today marks the final fee deadline for class registration at UCI. I have enrolled in three classes and will be adding myself to the waiting list for a fourth. I’m going to be cutting it extremely close to complete in the next year. I have a gut feeling that I will have to fork over the money for one extra quarter to fit everything that I’m required to complete for my degree. I decided to see what the ratemyprofessor site had to say about my professors this quarter, just for kicks. I have been guessing in my head what my past teachers would have been rated as, but reading the ratings for my new teachers has me a bit worried. Every computer science teacher I read about on ratemyprofessor had the worst reputation. I think this is a paradoxical thing, where computer science people in general are not very social and so when they try to be by teaching they don’t come off as being all there. The other issue, is that most computer people that are truly passionate about what they do often speak very quickly when teaching about various subjects. I know I’m guilty of this, when someone asks me how do you do X? I will often run through it at a million miles an hour and be done explaining the idea in full detail by the time they get out their pad of paper, at which point I have to go through the whole shpiel again. The sad part is by the time you go through it a second time you are a bit flustered that the person didn’t listen the first time and leave out much of the “bonus” knowledge you were willing to share. I think the same is true for computer science teachers. I’ve had two really great teachers that I can recall, both were workers in the field and taught on the side.

The biggest bummer about UCI is that with their scheduling you don’t get to pick your teacher, there is usually a single section of each class available and you have to just roll the dice and see which teacher you get. Saddleback was much more open, they had easily 4-5 sections of each class with different teachers so that you could pick and choose who you wanted to take the class with.

There are several things I find lacking at UCI having been there for a full year now. The first is the number of languages taught to Computer Science students and the inflexibility of professors to allow students to use languages more suited to a given task. Everything has to be JAVA whether you like it or not. This is setting a lot of students up for failure. Java is not the only language in this world and for good reason, if we all had to write Java swing interfaces for every program I’d have shot myself a long time ago. I feel it’s a good language to branch out from because it’s cross platform compatible, but for so many of the projects given to students web languages are much more suited. Another big thing missing in the school is the business side of programming. There are no classes offered on how to start your own programming business or for that matter any independent study class for starting your own business. Something I would really like to see happen at the school would be to have each student pick a large scale project that they will work on for a full year during their upper devision classes that each class can take a little piece of and make that much better. Then when the year is up each student would have some large program that is something they wanted to work on, and can use in their portfolio or to sell. This way each student comes out with something to show for all their hard work, rather than 20 little programs that can sort a CSV file. It’ll be interesting to see what this next year at UCI holds for me.

I have always been a big movie buff, I memorize the lines of my favorite films, and relate them to life or try to live life through them. Recently life has slipped into the stereotypical shift of focus. For comparison today, we have “The Devil Wears Prada”. In the movie, Andy must choose between her relationship and her career.  As she begins to accel at one, the other must suffer. I always wondered why she couldn’t just be good at both, I have always been able to handle several things at once in my life why can’t she. I have now begun to see this delema in my own life. The bottom line comes down to time. It is not our unwillingness to succeed at multiple things, it is our time limitation. As I have begun to shift my focus towards my business and work, my education has slid rapidly down the hill. This never used to be a problem, and this is my cause for concern. I have always been able to juggle school and work without a problem. Why now, when the cost is so high must it become an issue. I have been working since I was 14 and attending school at the same time. Seven years of experience should make anybody good at something, but I fear I have only gotten worse. Is it that one consumes me more, that I’m more driven to succeed at one than the other? Am I giving 100%? In my head I want to blame someone else, and yet I can’t logically select any individual except myself. In order to confront this behavior I have decided to keep track of how much time I spend doing various things. Perhaps I can shed some light on what is utilizing the most time in my day. How did I come to this point? Everything I want to get done isn’t, and everything that needs to get done isn’t, and everthing I have to get done isn’t. What is???