after thoughts

Well the course is over now. I just though I would be a good time to write some things that I feel need saying.

About the last few posts: as you can tell I did them all at once (except the very last it was 1 day later.) as I said in the first few, I didn’t think this was for marks so I didn’t really devote to much time to posting after every class. That is why I did them all at the last minute.

As for the topic of the last five: I ran out of class related info and needed to fill 1500 words with something. I originally had planned to keep to ranting about the course but I just didn’t have the ammunition to do it.

About the course in general: I didn’t like the “wired” class room. It was too hot. There was way too much incentive to be “distracted” by the computers. Notes were not as “note” like and I found I didn’t take notes that I though were useless. It turned out that there were a lot of useless notes the made up the whole lecture. Then it was too late to go back and take them.

About life: I think that this course will help me a lot. It is part of getting my CIS diploma. Without that no one will believe I really know my stuff. I will be taking the next course in the series: Business Communication II (2 for those not in the know… :) … ) I might even keep posting here who knows!?

Final Blog: The end of life?

Damn, I had hoped that distraction would have got more of the zombies away from me. I was running for the car I saw idling on the highway. It was still four rows of parked cars and a sidewalk away. The undead were coming at me from both sides and I was stuck between two cars. I used the pistol I had from the school and shot three zombies to clear a path. It took four shots but I was through. I still had two rows to go. I ran one car to the left to get around a zombie that was in front of me. I almost had a heart attack when a zombie inside the dodge caravan smashed its head into the passenger side window. It was trapped in the van still, I was safe.

I made it to the side walk without running into any more zombies. My legs were hurting. I was glad that someone had left the keys in the car and the engine running. I ran around the car and found the driver side door open. I climbed into the driver seat and put it in drive. Thank god for automatic transmissions, I knew I couldn’t dive a standard. The car was a Honda; I think one of those newer ones. It was sporty and I wondered why someone would just bail out of this thing.

That’s when I felt the sharp jab of teeth on my arm. There was a zombie in the car. In my mad rush to get out of there I hadn’t even considered that possible. I was racked with pain as my flesh was torn from the bone in my upper arm. Then everything went black.

I opened my eyes only to realize I was still in class. Jie Lin was poking me. We were presenting our final presentation. It was all a dream. Man my arm is still sore though.

blog #12: mall rats

I had already been to the house of knifes to grab a good strong axe and the health food store to get some meal replacement bars. I was heading to the Wal-Mart to get some camping stuff and good foot ware. I grabbed a nice hiking backpack and some Coleman’s camp accessories. I saw the perfect survival knife behind the glass case in the sporting goods section and knew I had to have it.

I noticed that there was some panic from the front door of the store and I knew the undead were here. I smashed the case with my nice new battle axe and grabbed my new knife. I noticed a hunting bow and some arrows on the display and stuffed them into the pack with a set of camp cook ware; you never know when cook ware will be important. I was out of time three zombies were walking towards me and I didn’t think that shooting the gun inside was a good idea. I turned and headed for the emergency exit. Just before I got to it I saw some little key chain laser gun toys and formed a plan to get back to my car. I grabbed the toy and some party ribbon stuff from the shelf to my left, and then I was out the emergency exit. The alarm went off just like the sign on the door had foretold. The loud noise attracted many zombies from out side and I had to put my plan into action early to avoid being mobbed by them. I tied the trigger of the toy gun down and tossed the little blipping buzzing gun past the front line of zombies. It worked; the zombies turned and attacked the toy. I ran towards the nearest street in hopes of finding a car with the keys still inside.

blog #11: the journey

The run to my car was exhausting because in am not in good shape and was going all out. Turns out the zombies were slow and had some trouble with trying to walk through glass. I made it to my car and found it was not working so well, I had to give it lots of gas before it would even start. I quickly sped out of the parking lot and down to the corner by the school. It was too late; it seemed every one I saw was dead or being eaten. What amazed me was how even after watching others get bitten and turn to zombies, there was still groups of people just gawking at the mayhem until it came after them.

It looked like this was it, the end of the world as we know it. I had no idea what caused this to become so wide spread so fast. Most zombie experts agree that zombie outbreaks occur slowly over time. But this was at least city wide within minutes. I knew what I needed to do, get weapons and get supplies to survive the apocalypse. I headed for the local mall and they would have everything I needed.

On the way there I saw nothing but carnage; some people had panicked and drove right in to almost every thing. Ambulances trying to get to people who had been bitten or who had just turned were flipped over and burning. I saw someone in the fruit stand beating some of the things to re-death but I could also see the dozens of zombies coming after that poor guy. Once I got near the mall I found that this part of town was still ok. It seemed that the epidemic had not reached this area yet and I would have some time to prepare and get supplies.

Blog #10: the escape

That’s right I was in the middle of a zombie outbreak. I had heard about this sort of thing form TV and the movies but to be right there in the middle of it was almost too much. I felt my stomach turn. I was going to be sick. That’s when Wilma tried to take a chunk out of me. My zombat training kicked in. I dropped to the ground and rolled to avoid the falling corpse. Raising quickly to my feet I and drew my Glock 9mm. It felt good to be holding a weapon, with such dire times on the horizon. My thoughts were cut short by the thing that was once Wilma crawling toward me. I had no choice. I pointed and the corpse was motion less again.

How had this happened? Why here? Why now? Surely there were other more boring things going on around the world, this can’t the only spot people were becoming zombies, could it? I didn’t have time to ponder the meaning of this right now; more of my old classmates were shambling towards me. I didn’t have enough ammo to put them all down and my only exit was blocked by the janitor who was being eaten by Hiro. I had to run. I had to escape. I saw the large window in the corner lounge thing and I had no choice. I shot the glass and jumped fully expecting to break something. But any place was better than a zombie infested school.

I hit the ground hard, but not as hard as I though I would hit. The undead were still following me. They fell right out the window; some even broke their own necks and didn’t get back up. The majority however got up and came after me again. I took off running for my car. I was hoping to get away from the corpses and warn the rest of the world.

Blog #8

Wow I am way more that half way done my posting now, only 5 more to go… damn. Well I remembered what I wanted to rant about for my last post. As I recall this blog stuff was meant to be about the course and what we did after each class. That is the part that really annoyed me.

I could have lived with writing in my blog after every class if I was free to write what I wanted. Instead we have to review each and every class, for the benefit of whom; the other students, the teacher, maybe people who don’t go to OUC so they can see how cool our classes are? Really it doesn’t even matter who it was for, there is no need to waste 300 words to describe each class. I could sum it up much more concisely: I got there late it was boring we got an into groups answered a silly question and tried to guess what Stan wanted us to say to his next question, after 2 hours of that we got a break and I got some pop. Then the guessing fun started again until he reviled to us that he was talking about “the topic of today’s class” and we all felt stupid for not reading the note he posted in the discussion board 10 minutes before class. He told us the secret of power sentences and why we need them, again. At exactly 8:59 he gave us an assignment about “the topic of today’s class”. We then went home.

See I don’t need 300 words to describe that every class. That was about 100 words and I was being long winded. I would have almost enjoyed my blog if I didn’t need to talk about anything in particular.

Blog #9: zombies

I arrived late, Stan had just started to tell us to get in groups with people we didn’t know, this was hard because I have worked with almost every one by now. Then Stan asked us a question, it doesn’t matter what it was, he was looking for a specific answer but the class was deadly silent. One of the more talkative people in the class offered an answer feeling confident they knew what he wanted. It was not the answer Stan had been hoping for, instead of saying so he accepted and even recorded the answer in his notes, he then repeated his question with more emphasis. Now others realized that maybe their answer was right, several people began saying what ever came to mind and all ideas got recorded but none were the right answer. After several minutes of this Stan became impatient and decided that Hiro (I think it was Hiro) knew the answer but he was just not saying it. Hiro of course, was just as lost as the rest of the class but he tried to guess the answer but failed. Fed up Stan demanded the answer again but now no one could even come up with a totally wrong answer to give. Finally, after what seems like hours Stan exclaimed that is was a trick and there was no good answer. He then talked about the meaning of some simple word like ‘reference’ or ‘relationship’ for the better part of three days. After that we were all starving and dehydrated he said we should take a ten minute break. I left to get a drink of water and was accosted in the halls by all the people from the class who felt they had learned so much and wanted to hear how I too had been enlightened, I of course could see through the shroud of power sentences and open ended questions. I knew all too well that these people I once considered classmates had truly become zombies!

blog #7

My presentation, or should I say my partners presentation, because she came up with the idea and hopefully will be doing most of the art stuff, will be on quilling, I think. It was described as rolling paper and using that to make larger images. I looked on google.ca for it anything matching that description and quilling came up so I guess that is it. The description I got was actually exactly right; you roll paper into cylinders and glue it to a backboard to form larger images. It sounds interesting but hardly useful; I did get approval to present it so it should be ok. I still think that we should have gone with our first idea and shown people how to make a nice website. Jie Lin could have show HTML basics like the head and body tags and I could have shown linking meta tags auto redirects and other stuff maybe even php if I could get a server up and running. But alas, it was all for not, Jie Lin and I were informed that the first idea is always wrong. She was then very confident that the website presentation would fail and came up with our new topic. I feel bad that I might cause Jie Lin to get a bad mark on the presentation because of my bad time management skills, but I am sure with pictures from the internet and my marvelous charisma that we can pull of a great presentation. Well I am fifty words short as of the start of this sentence so I am trying to fill up as much space as possible to get to my three hundred word minimum before I run out of interesting and valuable data to present to you, the reader of this site.

Blog # 6

Yea! I am almost half way done these stupid blog posts. Yea that’s right. They are stupid. If that pisses you off, too bad. At first I was going to only say happy and good things on here but I don’t think that is going to happen any more.

When I first found out I had to write this blog I was very upset, I came to this course thinking I would learn how to write business reports, letters, memos, and resumes. Instead I get to create a lovely on line journal. Yea! After the initial anger I realized that it wasn’t for marks, it was just to help improve your writing skill. Well that’s nice but I think I can write creatively enough.

I just treated the blog like something I could do if I needed to. I wrote in it several times in the first two weeks. Then there was the memo, that was not too bad, I just had to summarize an article on some on else’s webpage, nothing too hard. 3 blog posts and the memo we had to do and every thing was good. Then real life started to cut in to my time again and I put off writing for a few days, then a few more because if no one missed it that week why do I need to rush in to any thing?

The BAM! Third last class and now I learn that we should have had 13 posts on our blog. Well no problem it’s not for marks right? WHAT!? It is for marks now!? Why didn’t you tell us at the start of the course? So here I am typing out 9 blog posts in one day, with the analytical report still due and a presentation to do tomorrow too.

Blog # 5

Wow… just wow. I just looked at my blog and realized that I only have 4 posts and I need 13. I was under the impression that we only needed to write a post after Wednesday’s class, not every class. Oh well I will just bite the bullet and write some posts. I really felt swamped when I found out that all this stuff was due at once next Monday.

We have an oral report to do, with a person we have never seen before, about some random topic, and only 1 and ½ classes to plan and prepare. I would have felt better about this if we had been able to pick a partner closer to the start of the course, in stead of 1 week from the presentation. I also would have liked it if we didn’t do it in pairs, groups just mean that there is one more chance you get the weak link. Not that I am saying my partner is a slacker, if anything it will be me that ruins our presentation, but I don’t think my laziness should harm any one else’s marks.

I also learned that we have a two page analytical report due the same day as our presentation. That was unpleasant, to say the least. I guess I should have seen it coming, what with it being on the outline and all. I just don’t like it when we have to wait, to find out the topic of our 2 page report, until the week before it is due. While we are on the subject, how do we know how to write an analytical report if we are never taught it? I am sure I didn’t miss a class but I don’t recall ever learning how to write one.