I could look back on my college career and say that I didn’t learn a whole lot that I can use. I certainly spent a lot of time becoming familiar with Java, a language with, perhaps, a questionable future. I learned how to program a Beboputer and I wrote a paper on the (now defunct) BeOS. Sure, I took a class on databases and learned some Oracle, but I’m not sure how much of it I remember.

My experience with General Education is littered with failures (like my health class). Why didn’t I just skip school and get a job doing what I’ll start doing in two months anyway?

Pondering a question like that really makes apparent the true purpose of college. I don’t want to minimize the effect of college on my knowledge base, or my ability to learn new things, but the biggest effect going to four years of college had on me was entirely internal. I am a completely different person now than I was four years ago, and there’s no way I’d be where (or who) I am today if I hadn’t had the experiences I had at JMU. Again, I don’t want to minimize the educational aspect of college, but I found the woman with whom I want to share the rest of my life: that alone was worth the price of admission.

And so it is in that spirit that I roll out my new design for Maximum Aardvark. It’s not perfect, as I still need to finish a few details and work some mod_rewrite voodoo to preserve my old permalinks, but it was time to stop stalling and get something out here. It’s always been a work in progress anyway, and it’ll never be perfect, but we’ve all got to start somewhere.

ENG 384 - Great Film Directors

It was cool to sit around and talk about movies, and I got the chance to see some films I might never have otherwise seen (some good, some not so good). Still, it was an English class, with all of the papers that such beasts entail, so I’m glad this is the only film class I took.

GEOL 200 - Evolutionary Systems

We met about five hours every week for this class, and it still wasn’t enough time to cover everything we should have. The stated goal of the class was to be sure that we never look at the world the same way again, and they certainly succeeded in my case. I now realize that I’ll need to read for approximately the rest of my life before I have a firm grasp on some of the things we discussed, and even that won’t really be enough.

For the record, we discussed the ‘Dawkins is entirely full of shit’ comment on the next-to-last day of class, and Dr. Fichter’s explanation seemed to be that Dawkins is just too full of himself. We dealt in nuances in this class, and Dawkins’ views are absolute.

Should any current JMU student stumble across this looking for a recommendation, take this class.

SMAD 330 - Multimedia Law

This class wouldn’t be the same without Professor Gilliam. My sole complaint was that it was a very practical application of law, while I was looking for a more theoretical look at the basis of copyright and patent (and other) law. Still, the lectures made it worthwhile, and should I ever become a “creative professional,” I’ll have a good legal background.

SMAD 498 - One Nation Under Television

I’ll never watch TV the same way again. This class made me mourn the lost opportunities of the “American System of Broadcasting” and made me wish I was entering the industry, so maybe I could make a difference. There was some great class discussion every week, and though coming to campus for two-and-a-half hours every Wednesday sucked balls, it was still worth it.

TSC 210 - Introduction to Technical & Scientific Communication

Ask any Computer Science major, and he’ll probably tell you that this isn’t the greatest class on campus. Most of it just isn’t applicable, and the stuff that is applicable is covered in such an introductory fashion as to make it useless. On a positive note, it forced me to write my resume, which I will maintain for probably the next forty years of my life.

I’d like to thank Verdana for helping me make it to the 10-page mark.

This new paper on copyright…is not going so well. I assumed that, because I’d read a few books on it in the past, and I naturally try to keep up on the issue, I wouldn’t have a problem. As a consequence, I began writing it tonight, and I realized that I really don’t have anything to say. I’ve done no real research since the paper was assigned, it’s due in five days, and my family visits this weekend.

This could get very interesting.

The Fairness Doctrine in the 21st Century

But I digress.

In addition to being named for noted computer scientists, the special awards were presented by various members of faculty. Dr. Bernstein presented mine, and turned the presentation into something of a roast.

“AJ is subtle,” he began (this was later translated by Amanda to “AJ is a wiseass”). “When they write programs, most of my students name their variables something like BernsteinSucks. AJ, instead, created a Caribbean Stud Poker program so that, whenever I played it, I lost.” Big laugh. “Now AJ has a website called Maximum Aardvark, where he writes things like ‘I spent three hours writing this paper and got a B+ on it so I might as well not put any effort into work anymore.’ I knew that when he started writing things like that about me that it was time for me to work a little harder.”

It was an absolute honor to receive such an award from Dr. Bernstein, who of all the professors I’ve had in the past four years is one that I respect the most. His comments, though, were a little ironic coming last night, because I’ve spent the past two days writing 12 pages for the SMAD paper that is due on Wednesday. I’m pleased to announce that it is finally finished, and I’m actually quite proud of how it came out. It needs to be edited, but I will probably link it here when all is said and done.

Now I need to start my research for my other SMAD paper, due in nine days, on Eldred v. Ashcroft, the Sonny Bono CTEA, and the Eldred Act.

• Major term paper (15 pages) on the Fairness Doctrine for my television class. Due April 14.
• Criticism (1500 words) of the films of M. Night Shyamalan. Due April 15.
• Research paper (10 pages) on the Sonny Bono CTEA for my law class. Due April 28 (plus an in-class presentation due the week before).
• Two projects of unknown difficulty for my technical communication class (though, if the previous projects are any guide, they will be more of a nuisance than anything else). Due April 13 and April 29.

It seems so simple when everything is condensed to a few lines like that.