All semester we were supposed to be working on this incredibly detailed project for a UI class. Remember, UI. User Interface. Pretty pictures and buttons to help users do shit without tearing their hair out.
This highly detailed project was discussed all semester. Very little UI learning was happening. We did one assignment using the software we had to use to design the UI for our project (10 minutes), one assignment on evaluating other interfaces (not bad, actually), one writing a calculator using PHP on a webpage (the fuck?) and the other 10 assignments were for the project: design documents, specifications, all the piff and fluff surrounding any Software Engineering class project.
Oh wait, THIS ISN’T A GODDAMN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING CLASS PROJECT.
The orject itself was to simulate something called a set-associative cache. Got something to do with how memory is used/allocated. I didn’t get it when I took the computer architecture class in the 90’s, I didn’t get it when I took a different computer architecture class in 2006, I didn’t get it when he explained it all semester. I might be stupid, I don’t know. But when you explain the same thing and change up the terms during the explanation and go off on a tangent while never getting back to the point, I’m not going to understand you. I would dread when people would ask him questions. Namely my group members. Who have done such fun shit as:
- Not turn in an assignment when they said they would
- When, after listening to an explanation of something not project related (like, “when is the status report due?”), asking the same goddamn question that was just fucking answered. This person was in my Tuesday night class as well.
- After not hearing a peep all week, calling me and trying to set up a meeting a 4pm on a goddamn Sunday. Our assignments were due by 11:55pm on Sundays.
- Not reading emails. Like, blatantly ignoring what I just fucking said.
That said, I know I’m not a stellar groupmate, but, fuck, many times I would work hard on a document just to have someone popup and say “Oh, here, I already did it but I’ll add in your comments” and it ends up being complete shit compared to what I wrote.
This project would be perfect for getting a deeper understanding of how caches work during the course of a more hardware oriented class.
Oh wait, THIS ISN’T A GODDAMN HARDWARE CLASS!
So finally, after the pain of the semester where we’re still asking “how in the fuck does the cache work?” in the week leading up to the demo date, I we decide to just demo what we have and turn in the final stuff Friday with the REST of the documentation. Oh, didn’t I tell you? There’s more useless fucking documentation that we had no warning about due Friday (5/15) that he told us about Monday night (5/11). Again, appropriate for a Software Engineering project…which this still isn’t.
The Monday night demo sucks fucking donkey dicks. Greasy, purple, “Scratch n’ Dent Night” at the strip club, donkey show dick. Our project was horrible. Everyone else’s (save maybe two projects) was cool. 15 kinds of awesome. Ours was best demo’d in private. And you burn the machine after it was done. I worked my motherfucking ass off on my part with zero help, zero direction. So I was fucking proud as hell to get OpenGL shit to work. How was I to know that was tanamount to having your teenaged kid run up to you excited because they finally figured out and put together that 25 piece jigsaw puzzle. Fuck. The backend “proper” C++ code got integrated with the UI in QT the day before. THE DAY BEFORE. I don’t think you understand. My UI did NOTHING but show pretty slides I could get this code. I had not seen a fucking lick of it until THE DAY BEFORE THE DEMO. Un-fucking-believeable. So here I am, day of the demo, cramming this shit in to make it do something, anything. I am pissed as fuck. I left class so upset it was unfathomable. The next day, I almost cried, I was still so mad. But at least I thought it wold all be over Monday. OH NO, BITCHES! THE HELL AIN’T OVER YET! I get the priviledge of re-demo’ing this piece of fucking shit Friday. And so do the assholes who’s project worked JUST FUCKING FINE. This is bullshit. Total complete bull-fucking-ass-shit.