Free at Last
As of Monday evening, March 30, Kellie and I have completed our last assignment for a Bachelors of Science in Nursing at the University of Phoenix. We have not received our last grade yet, but our last assignment was actually a group project and I currently had 79.5/80 (99.38%) in the course prior to this project I cannot imagine not passing. Since we began our program, many things in life have been put hold. We seldom had time to have fun without worrying that schoolwork needed to be done. Even during the weeks we took out of school, between courses, we really did not get to completely unwind. At this moment, I’m not sure about if or when I will continue my education further. If I don’t continue on, this schoolwork would have been a waste, so I’m guessing I will eventually continue on. When I initially started the program, I was wishing to go on to become a nurse practitioner, but I’m rethinking that at the moment. Another thought has been in nursing informatics. On the surface, nursing informatics appears to be exactly what I’d be interested in, but I’ve been looking into programs and it seems that the majority of the programs are not technology related courses. Most of the jobs I’ve seen available for nurse informatics appear to be related to being on committees as opposed to actually solving technological issues from a nursing perspective. I’ll continue looking at options for the future.
Tomorrow, I plan on going to my parent’s house to help my father with upgrading their home network. Where they live, in Waterford, they are too far away to get DSL or cable modem service for broadband Internet. While they have a great physical computer network in their house, their broadband option, up until now, has been with satellite Internet from WildBlue. While WildBlue is faster than a dial-up modem, latency is horrific. In addition to terrible latency issues, it is expensive. I’ve attempted to keep up on alternatives to satellite and finally have an alternative. This alternative is nowhere as ideal as my own broadband at home, but it is better than satellite. This new method of connectivity will use AT&T’s 3G data network, the network that gives their cell phones fast Internet connections. Their home receives a strong 3G signal. As they have a great network already, just need a faster gateway, my father has purchased a CradlePoint CTR-500 and a AT&T USBConnect Mercury device. I will set this all up to allow any computer in the house to access the Internet via this network. One of the biggest drawbacks to using this technology is the 5GB/month cap. As long as my father does not increase his online usage dramatically, it should be OK, but just to put it into perspective, for the month of March 2009, I used close to 200GB at my house. For the month of April, I have currently used 3GB and this is only the second day of the month! I stream a lot of television content via the Internet. I can stream movies and TV shows via Netflix. For a flat rate, I can receive movies in the mail and stream them over the Internet. Some of these are in high definition, which eats even more bandwidth.