The end of this semester was eagerly anticipated. I have completed all of the coursework for my major. I will enroll in the last class I need to complete for my degree this fall. And, if everything goes as expected I will graduate in December of 2020! It has been eight years since I resumed my education, first at Santa Fe College and now at UF. What a journey it has been.

Xronos is an interesting project that I have been supporting for over two years. It is an open-source fork of the Ximera project of Ohio State University. The pronunciation uses a hard ‘C’ for the ‘x’ at the beginning.  The’X’ represents the greek letter ‘chi’, so that Xronos is pronounced like ‘Chronos’ and Ximera like ‘Chimera’.

The project allows content and course creators to prepare one base document using LaTeX. That document is then processed to allow the web server to render interactive content that students use to learn the course subject. Teachers use the results of the student interactions to assess their performance and also to collect statistics about how students interact with the content. Analysis can lead to improved teaching methods and more effective learning tools for students.

The Xronos project also integrates with the course management system in use at UF called Canvas. Xronos is also free for students to use and doesn’t require an activation key unlike other services. The benefit for students is that they will not incur any additional expense, thereby lowering the cost of their education.

Migrated all of the content for the CLAS web servers this evening. If this posts, then everything seems to be working.

Another semester finished and one about to begin. My major challenge recently has been time management – deciding what receives my attention among multiple, competing interests (i.e. new hobby, new girlfriend, consulting activities, extracurricular learning, and so on.) I received a wake-up call in late April which could have been very inconvenient and expensive concerning my participation in the UF Employee Education Program. Fortunately, I was able to recover somewhat and will focus on better  time management which will be critical to achieving a balance and success in my education going forward. Lesson learned.

Well, just completed my first semester. I ended up with A’s in both of my classes which I’m very happy about.  Summer semester has just begun and I’m certain I will be very busy keeping up with the fast pace.  I was impressed with the resources that the instructor has provided to facilitate note-taking during the lectures for MAR3023!  Thank you, Dr. Lutz!!

Yesterday I began attending classes at UF again after a thirty year hiatus. I encountered a bit of nostalgia as I was walking through the Turlington (GPA for those who attended UF in an earlier time) breezeway. I observed students leaning against the outside walls. I recalled a time when I had a class there and did the same thing while waiting for whatever class was in progress to end, so that I could go in.  So, a trek over to Heavener Hall and returning to my work location in Bryant Hall will be a twice-weekly occurrence. I know I can use the exercise!

I recently completed the first week of Red Hat Systems Admin training. Mostly basic stuff and items I was fairly familiar with, with two notable exceptions: Logical Volume Management and SELinux.  I only had a rudimentary understanding of their use and usefulness and I anticipated that I would not see the need for either one or both of them. I am now convinced they are very useful and not as difficult to manage as I thought. I have already put some of the skills I learned to very good use on one of our departmental file servers — and saving a great deal of time — rather than doing what was needed without using them.  What would have taken possibly hours was accomplished in 15 minutes or so.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!! So this is my first blog post on this site. “What’s next?” as in “where do I go from here?”

I earned my Associate of Arts degree from Santa Fe College last December and have begun the process to apply for readmission to UF.  There are a number of programs for which I have completed the prerequisites but I am having difficulty in deciding to which program I want to apply. Some of the programs in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences are Economics, Classics, Geography, Japanese, Linguistics and Political Science. I think my first choice is still the College of Business Bachelor of Science in Business Administration – Information Systems Management.  Decision…  Decisions…