Nov 8, 2004
The end of the semester is rearing it’s ugly head with tests, quizzes, assignments, and projects. I take my classes online and one of my projects happens to be a group project- me and some random person that I will never know or meet. What irks me about these group projects is the communication factor. For instance, on August 28th I received an email from my professor telling me who my partner would be. We have made no contact with each other until 2 days ago when I emailed him to see if he had given any thought to the project that would determine a good portion of our final grade and take up a reasonable amout of time to finish (a c++ program). So now, I sit here waiting for a reply which I assume will be “no, I have given it any thought, what do you want to do?” I’m hoping that this partner of mine is actually doing well in the class and understands what we’ve been learning or else I will be one angry woman.
Group projects suck because it usually ends up all in one person’s lap. Last semester I was grouped with 2 other people and one of them didn’t bother submitting a single thing- we had broken down the projects into sections, then when our sections were done, one person would organize it and turn it in. So there we were, 3 strangers, stuck with two-thirds of a project. We never did hear from the unsubmitting partner, and luckily our professor was somewhat understanding of the problem, especially since we had set specific dates as to when our sections were “due” to the “organizer.”
Aside from my c++ project, I have a project for my Web Design class. We were offered groups/partners, I declined and was set to do it on my own. So far it is underway and nearly complete- mostly waiting for the content and then final tweakage.
The last day of the semester is December 15- 1 month and 1 week from today. In this next month and 1 week I will be stressed, tired, pissy, and overall disinterested as I am a chronic procrastinator. It’s not that I don’t want to do the work, it’s just that sometimes it’s much more fun to watch “Love & Sex” for the 800th time, search for Kate Beckinsale news and pictures, or re-install Linux for the umpteenth time just to see if I can get everything working again. I’m an odd creature, what can I say.
What bothers me most at the moment is the fact that I am owed $555.00 for web design work I did back in July. Supposedly my client was incarcerated, yet was still able to respond to one of my many emails with “quite F-ing spamming me” while in the joint. Now what pisses me off more than anything is the fact that I did work for his Dad and was in contact with him nearly everyday, for a mention of my name in a still unpublished book, yet his Dad has made no attempt to contact me to tell me about his son or to settle his debt with me. For months and months I have been stressed and angry over this. I could go to every forum that existed and spread their names around for being untrustworthy and for not fulfilling their end of our deal, yet I have chosen to be professional and wait. $555 is a lot to a 21 year old student with no job and credit card debt up the wazoo. Will I ever see the money, probably not. Is my work being used and has it been used for the past some odd months and will it continue to be used, without a doubt yes. Perhaps it is my naivety in thinking that a deal with someone online- someone that you have chatted with and befriended for almost a year, could actually be legitimate and that online dealings could/would have some honor and trust behind them. As I sit waiting, going on month 4, I hope that yes, some people in the world are still good.
For the above reason I had placed Google ads on my site in an attempt to gain some revenue from visitors’ clicks. However, that went awry (as I posted a few weeks ago) because of “fraudulent clicks,” so now my attempts at making money are minimal (just that Donate button which nobody clicks).
They say that money doesn’t bring happiness, but having the outsourced Arab financial collectors from Dell calling me each month asking where my $44 ($8 of which goes to the laptop, $36 going to their credit department) for my laptop is certainly puts a damper on things.
I’ll end with a quote from my Mom, “if it weren’t for bad luck, you’d have no luck at all,” and one from my Dad, “don’t let the bastards get you down.”
Hello! My name is Katie, I'm 26 and from Houston, TX. I am a hardworking and passionate freelance web designer with a degree in eBusiness Web Development who creates clean and professional looking websites of the highest quality. I specialize in standards-based XHTML and CSS web development. The sites I develop are built to be search engine friendly!