But first, should any of you lost souls be interested in a rather long-winded story behind why I’m about to say what I’m about to say, you can do that here. Go ahead, I’ll wait…

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Now down to bizness.

Here we are, a scant 5 months later and I can guarantee you I’m a lot more chafed by this whole ‘school’ thing. I’m sitting here now with a headache, not believing what I’m seeing from what is supposed to be our educational system.

Having just started my second year of school, I’m just…appalled.

I’m in the process of surviving my seventh semester (13th class) in this place and, frankly, I’ve not learned much of anything from more than a handful of my classes. Nothing that we’ve covered so far is anything I didn’t know. Oh, except for Stats – and I have a math Geek at my beck and call so why the hell would I need that?

General Ed BS aside, I’m almost done with class 7/9 of what I’m guessing is supposed to be the Web Graphic Design portion of the Multimedia Core. ‘Advanced Web Design.’ In the earlier courses, we covered all the goodies like web standards, accessibility, information design, etc. Two classes yet to go and we were tasked with the first of what I’m guessing will be a few team projects. I figured I’d be slick and get myself nominated team lead, saving myself the trouble of being embroiled in a fiasco. MISTAKE. It became that much more apparent how ignorant ‘we’ are becoming.

I have a question. How in the hell can you teach anything related to the web without at least a crash course in HTML? Srsly. These people are supposed to be making graphics for the web and the best DeVry can do is offer two courses on how to use Dreamweaver of all things?? (Two so far – I told one of my advisors to get me the hell out of WGD classes for at least a few semesters and she was most accommodating – and apologetic that my educational experience with them has been so craptacular.) Classes 8 and 9 will include ‘Instructional Design’ (do that plenty well enough, TYVM!!) and ‘Media Portfolio’ (got one – no SIX!).

I’m almost willing to bet they won’t be offering HTML – even in their Web Development track. These kids are at such a disadvantage. Sure, learning how to use Dreamweaver is all fine and good BUT why bother if they’re not going to have ANY idea how to read what’s in the Code view?

While I get that the degree involves more than web coding, I’m just at a complete loss here. When I was at Lively, the first book we read for our web design certification was a book on XHTML and CSS. Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML, to be exact. (THEN we got into graphics, scripting, and all that other good stuff.) It’s a good book, easy to read, and with as quickly as these classes go, it would be nothing for DeVry to at LEAST do HTML for ‘Web Design’ and save Dreamweaver for Advanced. At least then all my wonderful teammates would at least have an idea of how to fix what Dreamweaver fux up!

I seriously don’t know how much more I can take it.

I DISAGREE!

Yeah, I said it.

I’m talkin to you, Flash, Photoshop, Premier, et al.

My time in school is givin me more and more reason, too.

So I think I’ve mentioned I had to dump Winblows again. Which means I’ve lost my GRUB and all my Linux goodies until I can get that fixed or reinstalled. Probably reinstalled. I want to do different mounting, need one more partition to be happy.

Meanwhile, I had to focus on getting Winblows right because I have finals next week. And heaven forbid I be able to learn under Ubuntu. That’d be wretched! Anyway, one of the first parts of that process is is backin up my files. Since I’m schmart like that, I know how to find all the program defaults so I don’t have to worry about trivial ish like losing all my mail and RSS feeds so lovingly stored by Thunderbird and all my Firefox settings. Stuff like that. So, before the dump, I went to copy this folder to a my storage drive and was promptly told I needed more room.

…huh? And to give example here, now that I’ve freshly reinstalled Winblows, my roaming folder hasn’t even touched a gig – and most of that is my mail. Keep this in mind now. 900 measly megs!

So I cruise the list, looking to see what all’s there. Nothing unusual, just the programs I needed to have on here, nothing more. So which was the suspect? My first choice, knowing how much I loathe it, was the Adobe folder. Right click, properties…

35 fucking gigs???

I just shook my head, got the one file I really wanted out of roaming, and left the rest to be blown away. I looked through the Winblows default folders (docs, vids, picts, etc) to make sure I hadn’t left something set to default for too long.

Hmmm…

There’s another Adobe folder. Right click, properties…

15 gigs.

-sigh-

Now, again, ’cause I’m schmart, I have my hard drive divided into partitions. A few for Ubuntu, one for Winblows, and one that is a storage drive that both can access. This is where all my ‘I need this handy no matter what’ files go. This is what houses all my video projects while I’m working on them. Once I’m done with a project, it – and all it’s related files (I thought) – gets moved to my external. (That houses all my video files – worked or not – and other various odds and ends.

Looks like not only was that not the case but Adobe has straight been raping my C drive – which is just as big as I need for programs and a big ass page file – nothing more! All said and done, between the program files (which I knew would be big cause their suite is HUGE) and all these hidden and mysterious data files, Adobe had 52 gigs of my system.

Why, oh why, Adobe, do you fuck up so??? First off, if you’re going to cache the video files and stuff, that’s great. I like that you take the time to process it and only do it once. I sat patiently through the conforming process – that often times took at least an hour! – because I, rather mistakenly, thought this information was being saved with the rest of the project!!!

But you go through all the trouble of adding your little two cents to my project file, making two folders with a few files each – and a few other files too! – and can’t put that cache in THOSE folders? Can’t delete whatever you put on my preciously small Winblows installation so it can run like it’s SUPPOSED TO since I’m stuck usin it – AND YOU!?? How ’bout the option to change where you put that shit, huh? That’d even be lovely.

-double sigh-

I just got done unleashing on my classmates by way of a similarly amusing (and ‘milder’) rant and figured I’d make one here, too. Heh. At leat the few of you who made it this far probably know what I’m talkin about where the majority of them will sit there scratchin their heads. LOL

Procrastination at it’s best. I suppose I oughta get on to Stats and stuff ’cause I’ve got a longgg week ahead of me. Heh.