I’ve been taking a Pre-Calculus course at Seattle Central, did I tell you that? There’s a couple reasons for this. One thing that’s always kept me from taking college courses is the requirements for the ones I wanted to take. I’ll be taking the two computer science courses at Seattle Central starting this summer, and pre-calculus is a requirement. I talked to the instructor over email and he’s confident he’ll waive the other requirement, which is some silly “microcomputer applications” class.

This gives me flashbacks of having to take “Computer Literacy” and “Computer Applications” to take “Advanced Computer Applications” in high school, the latter of which was really “Desktop Publishing with Pagemaker”. I caught a bunch of flack from one of the computer literacy instructors and from my uncle who was the computer instructor at the vocational school for doing really poorly on the computer literacy final. In retrospect, whoever thought that testing on keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Word for DOS and which finger’s were supposed to hit which keys should have been flogged. It just alienated me from them anyways, the third teacher was really nice to me and I ended up helping her out in the computer labs quite a bit. Anyhow, there’s a great story about applying to my uncles program and officially getting turned down due to lack of space, but unofficially being turned down because of my “lack of maturity”. Whatever cock muncher.

The plan is to take the two computer science courses that transfer to UW, as well as whatever math I can that transfers, at Seattle Central. Perhaps I’ll take some introduction classes in other subjects, but this is time consuming enough as it is with a full time job and multiple full time hobbies.

The second reason for getting into the computer science courses is to put a little more padding behind my conversations with Adam Jacob about software design. Times like when he pointed me to MVC as an explanation for why Chef did something a certain way (ruby code in the recipe, not in the template) remind me that these things would be more obvious if I knew more of the terminology behind software design.

Also a lack of formal mental process outside of computer science is sometimes missing when talking to some friends, but I doubt I’ll have the time for classes outside math and science in the near future.

Class is funny, as in funny terrible. The class itself is fine, but some of the students stick out like a sore thumb. There’s one who thinks out loud, my biggest complaint of him is when the instructor writes homework problems on the board he starts groaning loudly for every additional problem over ten or so. There are hip kids chatting up the girls, a couple girls announcing very vocally that the class is too hard for them and that they’re dropping it. The teachers handwriting is atrocious, but it’s livable except when you get caught up doing a problem by hand and don’t hear what he is saying to reconcile it with what he is writing. The other day while doing some reading just before class I could hear a couple guys laughing in the study area over my headphones while every one was giving them an evil eye. It’s just amazing how unaware folks get of their surroundings, or their lack of concern/empathy for others.

Hardest part so far was filling out the application for in-state tuition, which was pretty quickly approved once I finally got it all assembled and sent in. I lucked out on a few things, like having a copy of my voter ID card which had the date of registration on it. Not everything had start dates, but I think the pound of other evidence was satisfactory.