C.D. Reimer

After attending San Jose City College on a part-time basis for the last five years, I finally got my associate degree in computer programming. Well, almost.  I missed the filing deadline for the graduation petition by one day. My official graduation date isn’t until the end of the summer session, and my diploma won’t arrive in the mail until late August. I’m finished with my second tour through college (2002-2007), although I’m still taking another year of ceramics for my own personal enjoyment.

Computer programming is no longer the hot field that it once was five years ago. I couldn’t get classes five years ago because there were too many students. I couldn’t get classes in recent years because there weren’t enough students. Now that healthcare is the new moneymaking major that everyone is flooding. That’s fine. I’m looking forward to when China and India will stop exporting their workers to the U.S., and the baby boomers start retiring en masse within ten years. I’ll be making serious money from the forthcoming I.T. crunch where jobs will be more numerous than available workers.

Midterm madness is finally over. My sleeping pattern is returning to normal. The extra weight from eating food at odd hours of the night is burning off at the gym. What brought me back to normalcy was reading “One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School” by Scott Turow, his semi-autobiographical story of being a first year law student at Harvard Law School, which was more insane than my accumulated ten years of college (1990-1995 / 2002-2007). Admissions & Records accepted my graduation petition after the initial paper chase a few months ago, and, if I successfully pass my programming classes this semester, I can pick up my diploma in late August.

My programming instructor returned a 3.5″ floppy disk that I submitted to him in my first programming class in Spring 2002. Now that’s spooky. None of my computers today have a floppy drive installed. I still have a few floppy drive units in storage and a USB floppy drive for those rare occasions where I need access to a floppy. Five years ago I turned in my source code and executable files on floppies. Today I print out the source and/or email the files in a zipped archive. For a directed study class, I turned in the completed project with source code, executable, sample data, and documentation files on a CD.

The Data Structures (CIS 055) class is getting hard. I’ve always relied on the instructor’s lesson and reading the source code to understand the material without reading the textbook. The assigned textbook for this class dribbles out the source code in bits and pieces, and then buries the completed source code in overwritten comments that makes a bad science fiction novel enjoyable. My superficial understanding of the C++ language doesn’t help either. Cruising through my final semester isn’t an option.

I got my midterm worksheet back in Ceramics I (Arts 46A) with an “A” and a comment from the instructor that I have excellent focus and control of my work. That’s being put to the test with the larger-than-life self-portrait bust that will probably weigh 30 pounds in clay when I get done. Mine is the biggest piece in class as I have the biggest head. This week I’ll be carving in the details, getting back a glazed statuette and the other statuette will be ready for glazing.

Project four is stacking three or four separate pieces into one object. My design is a tall Japanese water vase that I saw in a ceramics book. The bottom bowl, sprout and collar will start on the kick wheel, coil building for the middle to combine all the pieces, and using nylon rope to impress a spiral design on the outside. After working in the studio for six hours straight, I come home to collapse in bed as I’m exhausted from all that focus and control.

The midterm for my Ceramics I (Arts 46A) class included a potluck, the firing of the raku pieces, and showing off all the pieces from the last two months. My raku piece was a bowl with legs and handles that I glazed with copper on the top and black on the bottom, fired up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour, placed into a metal trashcan with newspapers that burst in flames and smoldered for 30 minutes, and then cool off in the open air. I had that and seven bowls created on the pottery wheel on display.

My ceramics class took a field trip to the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University in the afternoon. This was my first visit to Stanford even though the university is just 20 minutes down the road from San Jose City College. I didn’t know that the Stanford campus extended so far into the countryside next to the 280. The afternoon was so nice that I wished I had an outdoor kit to do some landscape painting.

As part of our third project to create a larger than life self-portrait bust using the coil building method, we went to the museum to get inspiration from the self-portraits created over the centuries. The base for my self-portrait will be 24-inches wide or so to attain the larger than life aspect. I’ll be using recycled clay at $5 USD per 25-pound bag instead of using the second of two bags of clay included in the class materials fee. I hope to use only one bag for this particular project. I was looking for ideas at the museum on how incorporate a beard into my bust since I’m the only person in the class with a full length beard.

I had no idea that the work of Augeste Rodin was so prominently featured at this museum. The Thinker inside and The Gates of Hell outside are huge bronze sculptures that intrigued me. I did a quick side view sketch of the Gates in pencil while waiting to drive back to school. My instructor thought it was good. Some of the other students who saw the worksheet that I turned in that had a sketch of Rodin’s Victor Hugo, a bronze bust with a nicely sculptured beard, thought that it looked good too.