Randy Connolly

Every September in the first week of classes we have an orientation day for our first year students. One of the highlights of the day is a presentation that I and my colleague Mark Schroeder give on how to achieve success as an undergraduate. Rather than make the presentation all preachy, we decided to have a bit of fun. Instead of calling it 18 Ways to Succeed, we called it 18 Ways to Fail Your Courses. This year, I gave it the same treatment that I gave to my other presentations shown in my blog. I've included some sample slides as well as the entire presentation.

This July my family and I flew down to Florida to stay with my sister-in-law a few hours south of Tampa Bay. Beside the obligatory trip to Disney World, we passed the time hanging out at one of the local beaches.

My oldest son Alex's U14 Tier 2 outdoor soccer team won a bronze medal at the Canada Day Tournament in Kelowna, BC. He had a great game (he plays as an outside midfielder), and was awarded the game's MVP by the opposition's coach.

My youngest son Benjamin recently had his yearly piano recital. This year his he played a piece from the Lord of the Rings movie soundtrack, as well as a piece called Monkeys in a Tree, by Boris Berlin. This is part of the standard Level 2 repertoire.

This is the title of a paper I delivered at the 2007 WCCCE (Western Canada Conference on Computer Education) at Thompson University in Kamloops, BC. For the talk, I decided to create a presentation in the same style as the presentation I gave to the High School back in March. I've included some of the sample slides.

I recently gave a talk to students at Western Canada High School about careers in computing. Like most IT-related programs, our Computer Information Systems applied degree has seen a massive decrease in numbers since 2001. These low enrollments have never really picked up, even though the job market for our graduates in Calgary is phenomenal. I put together this presentation in the hopes of attracting a few more students into our program.

I tried a new approach with this presentation. I wanted to make it visually more punchy and not look like the typical PowerPoint presentation. I've included a few captures of some sample slides from the presentation.

The complete presentation is available below. You are free to make use of it, but please do not re-distribute it.

high school session 2007 march.pdf (2.00 mb)

Just in time for my birthday, I've received my first copies of my book, Core Internet Application Development with ASP.NET 2.0, published by Prentice Hall. After all the unrelenting work of writing the book from Oct-05 to Aug-06, and the slower and time-consuming process of editing it from Sep-06 to Dec-06, it was somewhat unreal to actually see the finished product in my hands. It was a great moment, and yet I felt somewhat distant from it all.

My department chair Bill Paterson and the Pearson Ed book rep Shannon Bailey arranged a nice reception at the College for the book, with a cake and free copies of the book for my department colleagues. Thanks you two!