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So, I guess I will preface this by saying it may offend some people. I apologize now, but this is something that I really didn’t think I would have to deal with in this day and age.

I guess I should be giving some grounding to all of this, I am an Agnostic. I was raised Roman Catholic, but moved away from that faith when I was in high school, much to the initial dismay of my parents. I believe the word my mother used to describe me was “Satanist” (which, I am not, nor ever will be a worshiper of Satan. In fact, contrary to popular belief, not believing in Christ does NOT make you a Satanist). My religious belief change was not really much of a factor on the people a hung out with. In fact, few of my girlfriends minded, and most of my friends didn’t seem to mind either. In fact, they usually asked me why I became Agnostic… to which I promptly replied “I learned about other religions”.

Now, I should probably clear something up right now. A person’s beliefs are different then a person’s religion. You can believe that Jesus or Mohammad were good people, and their teachings were (in general) good for human kind, and not be Christian of Muslim. Religion is the social structure that is built around particular beliefs. This structure is almost never necessary, but it allows people to be able to unite and say “I am Hindu”, and be able to make certain assumptions about their lifestyle and beliefs because they become standardized in this social structure.

This is why I can say I am an Agnostic (while Agnosticism is not a religion, the word can be used in similar contexts). With that term, you learn some things about me. You can make the assumption that I believe it is impossible to know if there is a God, or if there isn’t. You can also determine that I believe that there is no earthly way for us to ever know if a God exists. You also learn that this flips both ways, because this also means there is no way to prove there is not a God either. If Agnosticism were a religion, you would also be able to derive some inherent moral code from my belief, but it’s not.… anyway, enough about Agnosticism, I could go on for hours.

So, why am I even bringing up religion? When I first got to college, religion wasn’t even an issue for me. It just never really played a role. Well, over the past 6-8 months, several people I have hung out with, met, and socialized with have been religious, and with that, there has come some issues. The girl that I am dating now identifies herself as a Christian. To me, and to her, our religious differences is not a big deal. Unfortunately, this is not always shared by people around her. Yesterday, I had met a friend of hers that she was staying with for the week. After I had left, and Jess had come back from the trip we took yesterday, her friend asked her if I was a Christian. Jess replied that I was an Agnostic. The response (which Jess later revealed) was appalling to me:

Oh Jess, don’t worry. We’ll find you a nice, Christian boy one of these days.

I almost threw up in my mouth after hearing this. I was mad, upset and angry. It is appalling to hear something like this, but it doesn’t surprise me. The problem with religious people, is they don’t understand differences. I have asked people who are very religious about what other religions they have studied. I am usually amused when a Lutheran replies “Oh, I’ve studied lots of religions. Catholicism, Baptism, and Orthodox Christianity”. Right. Lots of religions. For those of you who didn’t notice, those are all essentially the same belief system, just different social structure around each of them. If you want to get mad because I just called Catholics essentially the same as Lutherans, go for it, but only after you study Judaism, Islam (edited for clarity: the Abrahmaic religions), Hinduism (edited for clarity: a non-Abrahamic religion), and a few other non-Abrahamic religions.

It’s so troubling for me to believe that even in America, people don’t understand that difference is good. We see it all the time though, families getting upset if a child marries inter-racially, or outside of their class. Religion is just another social element that is around to for people to become bias against. I firmly believe that if people were to actually study the beliefs and religion of others, they would become more tolerant to other belief systems. Religious tolerance does not mean that you believe that other religions are total truth, but that you can accept that other religions can have legitimate belief systems, even though they are different then your own.

It makes me sad, that people can dismiss others as insignificant based on a difference of religious belief. Religion brings to the table certain elements that some people want, and others don’t. This is how someone can choose a religion (which I highly recommend, over inheriting a religion from your family). The worst thing that someone can do is merely accept the religion they have as total truth without at least understanding that there are differences out there, and they aren’t evil.

So, at last I will get to my point: Religious intolerance is dumb. People that perpetrate the intolerance are usually uninformed about what they are being intolerant towards. There is absolutely no more evidence that your religion is better then their religion. So please, go out, and learn about other religions. Understand why people believe what they believe. What makes their religion attractive? What are parallels you can draw between the religions you study and your own? Knowledge is power.

I have been scheduling a bunch of flights for this summer.  This morning, I just scheduled one through US Airways because I had a flight voucher for them. I checked their website and discovered the voucher ($300) would cover the entire flight for me to travel to Dayton. So, as per the rules of the voucher, I made a call to their telephone reservation number.

I wasn’t even put on hold, and I got a real live person. That was refreshing.

So, I let the woman know what day I wanted to fly out, and I was flexible about the times of departing and leaving. I had the web window open so I could see all the prices, but I wanted to have her pick the flight. Perhaps I would get something cheaper then what was shown to me.

“Flight 7245 departing Rochester at 10:15am”. I gulped, knowing that the flight she mentioned was the most expensive on the list I saw.

“Flight 7745 departing Dayton at 6:10am”. I gulped again, knowing that was the second most expensive I saw in the list.

I held my breath as she “checked the prices”. There would be a difference in cost from my voucher of $734.

Yeah, right.

“I’m sorry, but that is not acceptable. I know for a fact I can get it cheaper on your website.”

“Ok sir, let me try again.”

I let her try again, this time the difference in cost was about $300. I told her no again, and now I let her know I could see all the flights and costs, and listed off the flights I would like.

“Ah sir! Much cheaper! It looks like you can get this trip for free!”

“Awesome. I’d like to book it please.”

So. The moral of the story. Telephone reservations suck. Chances are they are going to give you the most expensive flights possible, so make sure you have the web interface in front of you with the lower cost flights… or at very least know the flight numbers you want to be on.

High quality art this time. Clearly.

Of course, I could have spent the time I spent on this, ya know, doing real work. Thanks RIT for the inspiration for this comic. Actually, I would have been much better off without this inspiration I suppose.

Alright, here comes a rant. Sorry about this, but tutoring a student in PHP is painful. In fact, it’s not just PHP, but I am using PHP as an example.

Don’t get me wrong, I love PHP, but there is a single reason why tutoring people in it is so hard. The people.

People can need help with various technologies, and that’s fine. In fact, I really adore helping someone that knows how to program with a small problem. The problem with PHP is, most of the people that require assistance, don’t know how to program.

Setting people up for failure

PHP is used in the multimedia / web realm here at RIT. Sure, it’s used in database as well, but I rarely get asked for assistance from database students on how to use PHP, and when I do, it is more of a technical issue. The problem is, most students that focus in multimedia / web are not programmers. In the Information Technology program at RIT, you are required to take 3 courses in Java. Once you complete these courses, it is relatively easy to avoid programming in most of your courses for the rest of your tenure here. Students that did poorly in Java tend to go towards multimedia / web because it is easy. You can get away with almost no programming (writing HTML is not programming), and you are not forced to push yourself constantly when it comes to programming.

Enter PHP. As students hit the mid level courses, after trying to avoid programming for a long time, they have a new paradigm, stateless programming. Each time you post to a page, you lose all the data from the last page (unless you pass it along through POST or GET). Students struggle. Constantly, I have to work through basic programming concepts, and these frustrations are made worse by the lack of understanding of the state problem. Combine these weaknesses with a grasp of simple programming with the introduction of a database (which happens in some mid-level courses) only having phpMyAdmin as a guide, and students begin to drop like flies.

What is the problem?

Students pass the initial Java courses, and they are expected to be programmers. Unfortunately they aren’t. In fact, I know first hand that many students that finish the last course in Java couldn’t program anything remotely complicated if they were required to. Beyond this, with a weak foundation, they can not easily grasp another language. They never learned what makes a good programmer, and spend most of their time shotgunning their way through. Professors in later courses never cover the foundations again, and students get lost.

How do we solve it?

I suppose if I had a say, the Information Technology department would be much smaller. What it really comes down to is, students should be flunked in the early Java classes if they are not solid programmers. Yes, it’s a mean thing to say, but if you can not be solid at the core concepts, you are going to be struggling for the rest of your career. Programming is a major part of Information Technology. I will make a claim now that goes against what many of the “higher ups” in the department think, and what they would hate for me to say…

If you can not program, you will not be successful.

I admit, there are likely some people that couldn’t program their way out of a paper bag that are successful in the IT industry, but this is rare, and partly dependent on the definition of ’success’. Someone that gets a job isn’t necessarily successful (my definition may differ from others on this point). However, someone that can be innovative and inventive in the industry is what I would consider to be successful, and frankly, I can not see someone that can meet my criteria for success in IT without being at least a ‘decent’ programmer.

Whole rant aside, I want to make it clear that just because someone is in the IT program here at RIT, and focusing in multimedia / web, it doesn’t make them a slacker or bad at programming, because the concentration is, as with life, what you make of it.

Today was the day. May 3rd, 2008. RIT would open it’s doors to the community, and then some, to show off over 400 exhibits and presentations about what makes RIT an “innovation university”.

Sure. I like the concept. Lets get a lot of people to campus and show off all of our cool stuff. Show that while we are immensely technical and artistic, we can learn how to combined the two. RIT has something that more ‘prestigious’ universities such as Yale, MIT, or Harvard will never have… practicality. Students here are well trained (at least in the fields I am closest with) in how to make things happen. We have the theoretical background, but we don’t spend so much time in it that it takes away from the practical application. This is where me and President Destler disagree with how the university should be going, but I really do believe the idea behind Imagine RIT is a good one. Lets show off what we can do.

Now ideas are one thing, implementation is always something very different (again, another practical versus theoretical argument). I really do believe RIT did the best we could to make this event go awesome, but I’ll be honest, I only saw one or two things today that really made me go “wow. this is cool.” Sure, I didn’t see everything, in fact I was very upset that I missed out a fairly large portion of presentations, including missing Dan’s booth about The College Blog Network, but there still wasn’t much that was amazing with what I did see.

Maybe I am just the wrong demographic? Maybe since I get to see all the interesting technical things anyway, they aren’t that exciting to me? It’s possible. I do think that Imagine RIT is a good thing for RIT, but I don’t believe that it is something that is going to be as big as they want it to be… at least not yet.

So, I guess overall, I commend RIT for attempting to do something that will make us ‘prestigious’ and have us become the ‘innovation university’ that President Destler longs for us to be, but I don’t think today was really worth all the money and the resources that I know were poured into it.