Joel Hainley

In May, when it looked like I was going to continue to go to school, i went to a drop-in appointment at the Diablo Valley College counseling center. I wanted to make sure that the classes I were picking made sense for what I wanted to accomplish at DVC.

I signed in and was told that they couldn’t see me before 5pm ( it was 4:15pm ), but that I was the first appointment for 5pm. I thanked the person working at the desk and said i’d be back in 35 minutes. She got indignant and informed me that it was policy of the counseling center that students remain present after they have signed in, in the event that a spot opened up earlier. I asked her to confirm that I had an appointment for 5pm, and she said yes, i had an appointment for 5pm.

I said that i was happy to be seen at 5pm and that if someone else wanted to wait they could go ahead of me if a new spot opened up, but that I would be there 10 minutes before my 5pm appointment. To which she replied : “if you’re not here when we call your name, your name will be removed from the list”

I thanked her, suggested that she might want to get a dictionary and look up the word appointment and left.

Returning at 4:50 I sat down, and waited, at 5:05 i hadn’t been called. Then at 5:10pm a counselor walked by yelling across the room to the woman working the counter.

counselor : “What do I have on my schedule at the moment?”

counter: “You have drop-ins starting at 5pm”

counselor : “They’ll have to wait a few minutes I have something I want to do first”

5 minutes later, the counselor walks past the counter to her office, gets a cup of something or another and strolls out and calls my name.

I grab my bag and head to her office, the counselor starts talking to me over her shoulder as we’re walking

counselor : “what did you need to see me about?”

me : “well i’d like to talk with you about….”

counselor : (interrupting) “please hurry, we have a lot of people waiting…”

me : “right…so as i was saying, i would like to talk with you about confirming my choices for what i’m trying to accomplish at dvc”

counselor : “well we don’t have a lot of time to be doing things like that, since this is a drop-in, if we didn’t have a lot of people waiting i could go through things in more detail…”

( at this point we had arrived at her office, and there was papers, coffee cups, and shit all over the floors her desk, the shelves, it was a disaster, she started in again on not having a lot of time, and if I didn’t have specific questions i should just make a regular appointment. I didn’t even look at her at first, i just looked around the office while she was blithering, and when she got done i turned and looked at her and said “this place is a pigsty”, and sat down )

She completely changed her demeanor, answered all of my questions, except for one that she said would require some research, but it was easily done in a regular counseling appointment. I thanked her and left.

Not sure what that was all about, it was very strange.

Today I added a contact page to hamtesting.com, so as people begin to use the site for studying for their amateur radio licenses they can contact me if they have problems. ( i suppose that’s obvious enough but i’m tired. So leave me alone )

I’ve also added in support for displaying images to the users while they are taking their practice tests so that they don’t need to have sheets of paper at their side while they are taking the tests. This is an obvious feature and I knew it needed to be done before release, but I didn’t have the images ready to deploy to the website so I didn’t implement the feature.

Additionally, I have added in answer selection highlighting, and adjusted things so that the user can click on either the submit button for an answer, or click on the answer text that is highlighted to answer their questions. Not really a whizbang feature but easy enough to do, and eases the burden for the mouse challenged .

The practice tests are certainly useful, but they weren’t the main point of what I was trying to do when I built this site. I wanted to put together a web-based version of the tools that I wrote for my own use when I was studying for the tests. Unfortunately, I think that the way I chose to go with the practice tests isn’t necessarily reusable for building the review tools that I want to put together.

I suppose it’s not a big deal, I can deal with it, things are clean enough that I can rewrite the parts that need to be rewritten with ease, i’m just a little annoyed with myself. See, I knew this was going to be an issue when I started writing the other stuff, but I chose to avoid it, I didn’t want the question sets stuffed into a database ( I don’t have a good reason for that, I just didn’t want them in there. )

However, I’m starting to realize that to do most of the rest of the stuff I want to attempt I’m going to need a database, or spend a bunch of time in file reading/writing hell. I’ve come up with some other interesting ideas that I want to fiddle with once I have the question review stuff all knocked out.

Due to some confusion on my part when I struck out on my own, I had a month lapse in medical insurance coverage. As a result, I didn’t want to get out on the roads and train for fear that some overzealous teenager might bump me off the road with their automobile.

I now have coverage again and got out for a few days this week, I only put about 50 miles on the bike so it’s been a slow start. I am amazed at how quickly I lost my edge, I don’t know if I could ride the fixed gear to concord and back for a doctor appointment like I did two months ago. So I definitely have some catching up to do, i’ve got to get into better shape before school starts up again. The fixed gear is the transportation of choice for school days, so I need to be able to function after i ride it to pleasant hill.

The great thing about the riding this week? I got all of the tar/gravel off of my tires! See, I rode down Leland at the end of May and they were putting in some new AC, and the traffic was backed up. I jumped onto the sidewalk and rode down the sidewalk to bypass traffic, but at one point I rode on the new tar. This had the brilliant consequences of putting a 1/4″ to 3/8″ layer of tar and gravel onto my tires.

This had the effect of making my bike feel like what I imagine Fred Flintstone’s car felt like when he got used tires. It was bumpy as all hell, difficult to coast, etc. I tried to scrape it off while I was riding along with the bottom of my shoe, and it’d work ok, but the sticky tar would just pick up more gravel off of the road. Bumpity bumpty bump.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have luck scraping it off when I got home, and I couldn’t put the bike in the trainer like that because it would really screwup the trainer. I put the fixed gear in the trainer and rode that a few days, and that worked ok, but i would have preferred to have the cannondale for use in the trainer.

Anyways, the 50 miles this week wore off almost all of the tar. So i’m pretty much back to where I started from. Except now I’m really out of shape.

If you’ve been reading the updates that I post here then you know that I recently received my Amateur Extra ham radio license. You are also aware that I studied using some software that I put together to study for these tests. I decided to take the software that I wrote and make it web-based, so that others that wanted to try it out could do so.

I looked around on the net and saw a few places that had free tests, but none that simulated the actual test conditions accurately. The actual tests have the answers scrambled so that you can’t just memorize the answers, this website presents the questions in the same way.

In addition, this website will also have the question pool review tools that I wrote, this will allow the user to go through the entire question pool, and save out the questions that they have problems with from the ones that they don’t so that they can focus the study on their problem areas.

I will try to make regular updates here about the progress over at hamtesting.com, if you’re really bored at work, you could even study for your ham radio license. It won’t hurt you any to have one