Week 12: Muddy

Two muddy posts in two weeks. I didn't quite understand all the different planning systems that Systems Analysts use. That would not be a good career for me if you have to do so much planning. Call it a personality flaw, but I've never been one for well-thought out planning.

The change management idea was kind of muddy as well. I understood that changes are difficult to make, one of the reasons why IE6 is still ~20% of internet users I've read is that companies have been too lazy to upgrade their intranets to work with anything but that. I can also understand that there can be a lot of 'noise' when the commands come down from the top, through middle management to the main workforce. Most of the time at my job, the only way I hear of rule changes is through other employees warning me. Sometimes they get things wrong and it just makes the situation worse. Properly informing people is definitely important when making major changes.

Week 11: Muddy

When starting the lectures I had no idea just how little I knew about Access. I had opened it up before but never really done anything with it, and most times when installing Office, I'd uncheck the box for installing Access. New names for rows and columns, and the tables are nothing like I've seen as a table before. This was going to be an entry into foreign territory.

I kind of understood the idea of a primary key. That is what I understand to be the unique object to which all other things are relevant to. Everything else is just describing what is in the primary key. However I am using Office 2010, and getting to the default design view that I saw in your lectures was a trial in itself. It defaults to database and didn't realize that there were 4 different types of views. Then you get to the different types of data that can go into the fields. Access obviously has a lot of features, most of which I'll probably never learn. However I did make sure to play some Access games http://www.happy2-island.com/e/access.shtml

Week 5: Muddy

I feel like the book didn't really go that well into the technical parts of most of the storage devices, hard disk drives especially. While it was better covered in the lecture I was befuddled on certain questions on the quiz.

However, while I've heard of degaussing (used to love pressing that button on my old CRT monitors and see the screen go wild), I didn't realize it's application to recycle hard drives. I assumed that it rendered it useless afterwards. Also, looking up the picture of a degausser was a very interesting machine.