Arduino Weekend

Obviously I failed my goal of writing over the weekend. I should have been able to write on Saturday morning, but shortly after noon I received my Arduino kit, and before that I was anticipating it too much to concentrate on anything. The Arduino kit is a circuit board with many electrical components that can be set up for many functions. I heard about it many weeks ago, but after looking at some of the projects online, I decided that it wasn’t practical enough to invest in. But then last week one of my coworkers mentioned it in response to my announcement that I was interested in embedded programming, so after looking at it again I decided that I couldn’t really consider myself interested if I didn’t give the Arduino a shot.

So over the weekend I built 2/3rds of the included projects. It is fun and interesting to make things, and gratifying that I can revisit my C++ skills, but I’m still having some difficulty thinking of actually practical applications for it. In the end though, that’s not the reason I bought it—I primarily wanted experience with this type of programming, and I think I got it. To really get my money’s worth out of it, though, I would like to find a few applications.

I didn’t play a lot of video games this weekend, but I did play a bit of Mass Effect and found it less frustrating than before, and even fun, and the story really sucked me in, even though parts of it made me cringe in the same way that most movies do, with unrealistically fast changes of opinion.

Last week I spent a lot of time programming, and even after being fully accepted to Liberty’s MAT program I felt no enthusiasm, and even considered giving up on it. But thinking about it more, I have made my resolution to get a Master’s in education even more firm. I’ve enumerated several reasons before about the value of a Master’s, but furthermore it’s a safety net. I get and lose interest in a lot of things, including programming, but I’ve managed to stay in education for nearly ten years so I know I can stick with it, if nothing else. So now that I’ve decided this, I’m not going to waver on it any more.