Our fine educational system (was: Login on VMS)

From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_mcmanis.com>
Date: Sun Sep 24 22:47:18 2000

At 11:00 PM 9/24/00 -0400, Tim Harrison wrote:
>When I tried
>college, I found that I was learning more through messing around by
>myself. I learned through my own tinkering at my own speed (quicker
>than the classes). Seems to have worked so far (except for my Palm
>incident a year ago ;) ).

Then you were in the wrong college. If you were movitvated enough to "mess
around yourself" then you could have done that at college with better
equipment and in a more structured way. Tell your professors, "Gee, this is
really neat stuff. How can I set up a lab to experiment on this?" Often you
will have labs, equipment, and sometimes even other students available to
make this stuff work. I started a computer club and not only did the
engineering department give us gear, but the profs would listen to our
"stupid" questions and point us in more profitable directions. Do you know
how much "junk" sits around at a college? That is why they are the leading
source for computer collectors! Now what's a computer collector's ideal
position? Infinite space, infinite new toys to play with, all within
walking distance of their bed/kitchen. Get a dorm room on campus and away
you go.

I got to "play around" with a 1KW CO2 laser this way. After getting tired
of cutting circles out of our wallets :-) a couple of grad students and I
hooked up a PDP-11 to the thing to do computer controlled engraving. I did
knick knacks, they did high precision millimeter wave microwave wave
guides. Everyone has fun and you learn just as much and much faster than if
you did it without anyone to explain it to who can say, "Oh that is clever,
now have you considered what you could do if you used a galvo to steer the
beam? Ask Ranjit if he's got an instrumentation amplifier you can use..."


--Chuck
Received on Sun Sep 24 2000 - 22:47:18 BST