My database project is past the “omigosh are we going to get it done in time??” stage and into the “what neat feature can I add next?” stage, which is a big relief. If you guys want to play with it, I have it here on 3till7.net. We’re doing a demo of it tomorrow in class, even though I have a couple other features to add, including a user’s order history and sales statistics for managers to see. The idea with the project was to make an Amazon-like store named Nile that sells books and toys. Being a project for a databases class, it had to have a database back end; Tom and I chose MySQL with Ruby (straight Ruby, not Ruby on Rails) for the front end.

This week is dead week at UK, which is the week before finals. Everyone has the impression that it’s supposed to be kind of a break from regular schoolwork, in preparation for final exams the following week, but it’s completely not. All kinds of projects and homework assignments are due this week, leading to stress for all of us. People in all my classes, as well as the university newspaper, have been bitching about how professors squeeze in last homework assignments and projects. My logic professor, for example, emailed us homework 9 a couple weeks ago when she assigned homework 7, just because if she had waited to assign it after we’d turned in homework 8, it would have been assigned during dead week, which would have been against school policy, from what I understand. The assignment wasn’t even posted on the class web page with the other homeworks, and I’d forgotten about the email, so I didn’t find out about it till class on Tuesday when the other students were griping about having another homework. I got it done last night, though, so now I’m finally done with homework for that class. I just have a numerical methods assignment left that’s due tomorrow, and other than my databases project, I’ll be done with homework for the semester.