I've been lurking on the Brock Facebook groups for awhile. I really don't know what to expect. Nearly all the posts are about partying and drinking. And while I don't have a problem with that… isn't university supposed to be about education? The more I read, the less that seems to be true.
One of my required classes in first year was recommended on a thread for people to take as an elective because it is super easy. I mean, a cheat sheet on the exam? In university? Honestly? Maybe what they say about Brock is true.
I've read so many things about Computer Science degrees. They're useless, they're not useless, they're useless. It all depends on where you go, I guess. It's looking more and more like I made the wrong choice. I should've picked Waterloo, even though the campus is overrun with Canadian geese (and by extension, Canadian geese crap). And the residences there were terrible, but considering what I've got now, it would probably be about equal.
I think it's possible for me to learn something in university. I love learning new programming languages, but I can't learn them on my own. There are no websites that show you how to get started. Sure, you say, there must be! But most of these so-called "beginner" tutorials assume you have some knowledge of what you're doing, which is not always so. Learning Java and Visual Basic and Turing was a snap because I did it at school. The teacher supplied you with a program to write the code in and a compiler. I'd like to learn C and other languages, but none of these beginner guides tell me that I need a compiler first, they assume I just know it!
Have I mentioned that I hate my university's website? The whole account section is crazy. We have one place to login for email and one for courses and one for everything else. Why not have them all as one, huh? And I'm not even going to get started on the design…
I woke up this morning with "No Rain" by Blind Melon stuck in my head. Quite ironic, because it has been raining quite a lot lately and I woke up at like 8:30, so I'd hardly call that sleeping all day. Anyway, I thought of how that's a good song and how "Wonderwall" is a good song and I thought "hey, I should check out some more 90's music".
And then I realized the magnitude of what I just thought. I knew it was coming, but I didn't realize it had already happened!
It started with The Monkees, the sixties. The Beatles, which was still the sixties, but gave me hints of the future with the solo albums. Then The Who, again, sixties, but also into the seventies and a foreshadowing of the terrible eighties. And then Van Halen, ending the reign of the "The"s (though it would have been Led Zeppelin that came next, had I not realized what was happening and resisted), and the eighties. An eighties hair metal kick came and went. And now? And now, the nineties doesn't look as bad as it used to.
Obviously, I'll be caught up with popular music today in a year or two.
…but then what?
That's what makes me want to go on, what makes me not want to resist this change. Where do I go when I've exhausted the past half century? Do I go back, start over? Or do I go back even further? To the fifties, the roots of rock 'n' roll? Early blues? Classical?
Maybe then I'll be sufficiently satisfied that I am well-versed in music and will jump around from artist to artist, decade not being any restraint. Maybe get into some old underground and indie bands. Or maybe even new ones.
I couldn't possibly be satisfied, once I've caught up with today, to just go on listening to whatever new music comes out… could I?