Still got it!

Last week was interesting. It was "busy" as usual, but then again, I had a four day weekend to look forward to. This week made me think of 2 things that I am still good at.

Presentations
One challenging aspect of my week was making sure I got all my assignments done on time. In the past, if time is an issue I have been known to stay up late (4:00 AM was the new 12:00 AM for me last semester). Because of this extra effort, I have been able to accomplish many things.

Anyways, on Monday I was assigned a presentation in Web Analytics on Visits, Visitors, and Unique Visits. Interesting enough I was to present it with my partner on Wednesday. Usually I have a lot more than a day to prepare a presentation, but I really wanted to make it "good." There was just one small problem. I was still on east cost time, and my ability to hit 4:00 AM was rather difficult. Even so, my partner and I agreed that what we had on Tuesday afternoon, would be sufficient. Now, I did agree with him since we only had two days, but I really wanted to make our presentation fun and engaging. I mean our topic was rather straight forward, but I didn't want to bore anyone the next day. So, naturally I stayed up looking on YouTube for any engaging videos to use.

By about 1:00 AM I found a video from Avinash Kaushik, but it was an hour long (way too long for a 15 minute presentation). After watching about 30 minutes of it, I found a portion that dealt with our presentation (I must admit, the presentation was quite interesting - he's a good presenter). Yet, by about this time, I was getting tired and I decided to go to sleep (thus, I did not make 4:00 AM). Even with this small victory, I still felt uneasy. I still was wondering how our opening would be. I wanted a captivating video to use. At 6:00 AM I woke up and cut a portion of the video to use. But, I thought that still wasn't enough. However, by the time I finished cutting the video, I came up with a great idea for our opener. It was a video I had seen a few months back. This was our opener - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7dnGo_2tZA. When I added this video to the presentation, I was a lot more confident. The result was a pretty good presentation to my standards. At any rate, I did find it. Interesting enough, I had woken up early for once to finish a project, instead of staying up late to complete it.

Fixing Computers
Being in the Information Systems field has its advantages. But, then again, it has its unwritten duties as well. Once you are known as the ISYS "Guy", everyone who has computer issues asks for your help. Now, I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but it always keeps me on my toes. I do like helping people, and I have been able to solve all but two problems throughout my college career. One was my brother's computer (it was a fried motherboard - which I could do nothing about). The other issue was some networking issue (the IT aspect of computers is actually my weakness).

Anyways, this past weekend, my friend called me to help me fix his computer. He had completely cleaned out his computer and reintalled XP on it. However, that was all he installed. Because of that, I knew exactly what to do to fix his computer. He needed to reinstall the drivers. There was one slight problem, I had to figure out what drivers he really needed. After a bit of guess work and an hour or two, I was able to not only restore all the drivers for his computer, but also help make his computer protected from viruses and have most of his software back. He now has a computer good as new. Yeah, I know that's not such a great feat, but it was good to know that I "still got it!"