Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

In the second meeting of the first of my two Engineering Computer Aided Drawing and Design classs for the second week of the first term, the computer technician was not in the lab room when I got there.

This has something to do with the wi-fi system of the campus being reconfigured by the most if not all of the school's IT staff (I was erroneously about to say "rewired") and with the fact that the Integrated School computer labs are needing a rush fix before their classes start in the second week of this month.

So only those students who were able to get their terminals activated while the technician was there (in other words, those who were early for my class) got working computers, which was about half of the class. That meant two or more students had to share one computer for that particular meeting.

Besides that the technician in one of our dialogues earlier had told me that he was still going to reformat the computers in that lab, then install the software we were going to use for the ECADDES classes. So I had the prospect of having another relatively unproductive class just like the first meeting when I talked about the class policies, or I could give the students a taste of three dimensional rendering using the software already existing in the computer.

I'm talking about the advanced chart functions of the standard spreadsheet program, which I last used on students way back when the engineering fourth years were just freshmen.

This one has its own advantages and disadvantages in that completely connected surface mapping is not possible, but bar graphs that can be made to look like cityscapes was possible, and triangular surface mapping only possible for "strips".

But as I told them, one of the important aspects of computer aided drawing and design is knowing how to translate numbers into figures.

That, in my book, certainly beat just sitting around waiting for the latest NBA updates.

Session 1147 got a flat surface. Class dismissed.