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cs456 (software engineering) is a completely worthless class. lecture today consisted entirely of presentations given by other students. these presentations covered the status of their individual projects, complete with use-case diagrams, gui-mock ups, and lots of boring power-point slides. and its important to note that the status of their projects has absolutely no bearing on anyones grade but their own, and further, their projects are all very boring. so basically, at any given moment there are three people standing at the front of the room talking about something they dont want to talk about and about 50 people sitting in the audience completely ignoring them. like I said, it is a worthless class.

however, it afforded me a lot of time to kill, and I chose to draw pictures. during the first presentation (our own group's), I drew up some enhancements to the red robot, depicted below.

I had intended to draw keith bennet running away in fear, but I got bored and moved on to the next drawing.

the second presentation was the Remote Planetary Exploration Testbed group, and for some reason or another they chose curious george as their mascot. so there was a picture of him on every slide. thus, I felt inspired to move away from robots (one of my favorite subjects) to monkeys (my other favorite subject) for my next drawing:

(obviously I added the stars in photoshop afterwards.)

I was still putting the finishing touches on the above drawing when the third presentation began. it started with a graphic of a satellite flying across the screen very rapidly with a "whooshing" sound effect. in retrospect, I should have taken this as a sign of things to come, but at first I didnt really catch on to what a bad presenation it was going to be. of course, I realized this rather quickly when I recognized one of the presenters. I dont know what his real name is, but I know that he is quite annoying, and judging from the nametag at his desk he calls himself "the duke."

unfortunately I knew him from other classes I have had with him, and so I expected some annoyance to follow. and as far as the presentation went, lets just say the duke didnt disappoint. he was apparently very fond of power-point transitions and sound effects. throughout the presentation words were flying all over the place accompanied by a host of distracting noises. much to the embarassment of the dukes co-presenter, chris, and the professor. in fact, when headings began to fly across the screen and chris had to pause for a three-second-long racecar noise ("VRRROOOM--- SCREEECH!") each time, dr. bennet felt the need to interupt. he told the class that sounds and special effects only serve to distract the audience, and that this presentation was an example of exactly what not to do. but to illustrate his point, he would not permit the group to turn off the sound. chris hill and I were cracking up after this.

all in all, I think it was the most annoying and embarrassingly bad presentation Ive ever wittnessed. although, terrible as it was, it did inspire me to do one final drawing:

the idiot on the right with the shirt half unbuttoned is the duke. please note that while the car has yet to collide with him in the above drawing, it is just about to. I assure you of that. as for his co-presenter, chris, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and for that I am sorry.

Posted by on 12 February 2002 at 2:08 AM