Send Ken To College

I just had an e-mail from someone asking what I was really going to do with any money donated.  They answer to that is exactly what you would think.  Every penny will go to my educational expenses, whether it be tuition, books, lab fees or whatnot. 

The person that e-mailed me seem to think this site was generating large sums of money.  Nope, that it isn’t,  So far no one has found me a worthy cause to use the donate button and the Google ads really do not generate an substantial sum.

I currently attend a college where I pay a little over $10,000 a semester (which just so happens to be a little less than I have earned at my job this year).  I have one more semster to pay for and then I will be attending grad school at UNI next fall.  UNI will cost me about 1/3 what I am paying now but in these tight economic times, we all have to get creative in how we fund things.  This website is my creative way of funding my education and trying to prevent accumulation of any more student loan debt.

I will need it.  Should I manage to get into the grad school of my choice, I will be driving 51+ miles each way to campus.  This is not alot to some people but considering I hate driving, it is nearly forever to me.  I am also a stingy person.  I refused to go any further than work and school while when gas was high.

Just this evening gas was at $2.19 a gallon for the ethanol blend which means I may start traveling a bit now.  I own a 2005 Toyota Corolla which gets about 30 mpg on the highway.  Even if gas were to stay close to the current price that would still be $9-10 a day on gas.

This is not a thought that I relish so I hope a graduate degree makes me a significant amount of money over a BS.  Notice that little donate button on the right?  Please feel free to make frequent use of it.

EDIT:  Ok, so I wrote this post in the wee hours of the morning.  When I woke up this morning I was scanning news sites while having my tea. On MSNBC I find an article on Exxon Mobile and their new all time record profit for a quarter.  Over the last 2 quarters they made in excess of $26 billion. And we were paying how much for gas??

Story is at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27453305/

…and now we begin ‘The Kirkwood Years’.

The Kirkwood years started ca 1992 and lasted about one semester, maybe not even that, since I only paid attention until I got my student loan check.  Needless to say the partying was not out of my system yet.

Fast forward 11 years and you will find me with my partying days well behind me.  I was working at Broderbund, which became The Learning Company, which became Mattel, which again became The Learning Company before finally ending up as Broderbund.  I survived 12 rounds of layoffs, and they got me in the 13th.  To get rid of me they sold off the entire education division to Riverdeep.  I just happened to be working schools/network tech support at that time.  The funny things is about 6 weeks after laying me off, Riverdeep bought the remaining pieces of Broderbund.  By that time about all that was left was the Printmaster and Printshop programs.

Now I am about 36 years old and unemployed.  I had my severance package, 197 hours worth of vacation time that I was paid for and 26 weeks worth of unemployment.  Time to figure out what I was going to do.  I ended up going back to Kirkwood.  This time I ended up with an Associate of Applied Science degree only to find out that this two year degree was not going to get me a job.  I ended up spending another year or so taking Computer Science courses with plans of transferring to University of Iowa to finish a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science.

My Computer Science instructor was an alum of Mt. Mercy College and she had spoken highly of it several times.  There also were conversations with my slightly dubious aquaintance, Bob, which led me to believe that Mt. Mercy would be the place for me to go.  I bit hook line and sinker!

Next up, the Mt. Mercy Years….

According to news out of UCLA I could be in some real trouble.  It looks as if my brain peaked at about 39 and now it is all downhill from here!  In middle age the brain suffers from myelin breakdown.  Myelin is needed to assure that we live up to our ‘neuronal action potential’.

Read the story at UCLA Newsroom.

High school in Ottumwa, IA in the early 80’s…

High school was generally boring. I did well or I did badly. There were few C’s on my report cards. My grades were either low A’s or high B’s or they were D’s. I like classes like my history of western civilization class with Mr. Warren, I kind of enjoyed math class and I really like the time that I got to spend on what we would now call a PC.

My junior high and high school both had a TRS-80 Model II computer (one of which my slightly dubious acquaintance, Bob, has locked away). I was one of the few people allowed to lay hands on it and only because I had taught myself programming in BASIC. This was one bad-ass machine with it dual 5.25 inch floppy drives, 48K (yes, K not M) of memory and the cassette recorder so that we could write our programs to cassette tape.

In my senior year in high school they finally built a lab with 8 Apple IIc’s and IIe’s. This was before they became Macs. Mr. Stoneking, the science teacher, undertook a programming class which I happily joined. I was already well ahead of the curve since the Apple BASIC was pretty much what I had already learned. Mr. Stoneking had us do a final project which was to simulate a multiple listing service like a realtor might use. He stated we could use any resources open to us. That was my first professional programming gig. I sold copies of my code to classmates. I made a couple of hundred dollars which kept me in junk food and video games for awhile. I received an A- on that project because in the words of the teacher, “I got tired of seeing your code by the time I got to grade it”. Yes, I was considered a fair resource for this project and as such my classmates were allowed to purchase my code.

Fresh of this triumph I decide college was a good place for me so I packed up my 2.37 GPA and my 29 composite score on the ACT test and headed north to Iowa City and the University of Iowa. Forget computers, I discovered hard core partying and off I went…

To be continued!