Desert Travels and the End of Extension

As those of you on the RSS feed might have realized, I am having issues with the new blogger editor. Working in the HTML view, when I save and reopen the draft multiple break tags are added for no good reason. Then I discovered a red banner will appear telling me my HTML tags are unbalanced when I am in the middle of writing the tag. This might be hard for Blogger to believe, but people who write posts in HTML know what they are doing. While I am on this rant, anyone who needs a button to bold or italicize text in HTML should not be writing in HTML. Blogger should put the spell check button back, keep the upload image button, and throw out the other ones.

I was on a trip last weekend; before I get to that I should cover the weekend before that.

Two weekends ago I was in the desert to set up a radio relay network. It is for the annual Baker to Vegas relay race later this month. I learned a few things about radios and drove a couple hundred miles in a stick shift truck. I was assigned my job for race day later this month. I will distribute radios to ambulances, fix any problems they have, and check the equipment back in.

Even more exciting than the desert, two Sundays ago was the end of my UCI Extension classes! While my final project did not work, I did well enough on it to get a B+ in the class and earn my certificate in Digital Signal Processing Systems Engineering.

I took five classes through UCI Extension. My last two classes had some horrible moments. I wanted to quit and give up multiple times. However, I did not give up. I kept working on the classes with their assignments and projects, even when they were past due. In the end my persistence succeeded.

While my experience with UCI Extension engineering ended on a bad note (and in general I do not recommend it), it was not always this way. When I started it was great. In the spring of 2010 I took a class on MATLAB. I had never used it before, so I learned a lot. The experience of taking the class was fun and civilized. My homework was due on Sunday nights so I would spend several hours on Sunday solving linear algebra problems in MATLAB. While working, I listened to classical music and drank cocktails such as Jack and cokes. My class project was one of the most exciting projects I have ever worked on. I even celebrated the completion of it in great style.

After a few more classes, some anger, frustration, lost time, and money spent, I am finished with the certificate. I am happy to put it all behind me.