Burke Blog for Epics of India

For this assignment, the first article read was  The Myth of "Too Busy"  by Tim Grahl.  He talks about the importance of scheduling time, instead of just referring to one's self as too busy.  He believes this should be called prioritizing our time instead, and it is important to lay these priorities out and formalize them in our lives.  I find that I tend to soft schedule in this matter, I find a pattern of work that allows me to maximize my use of time and tend to stick to it.  However, the rigidity of Grahl's suggestions seem a little out of place in my life, there are just too many unforeseen circumstances in engineering and the fact that an error related to your work can occur at any time means that I need a softer form of scheduling to allow time for emergencies in research or capstone work.  The second article I read was  The Important Habit of Just Starting  by Jory Mackay.  This article references how work goes much more smooth...

The technology required for use in this class is nothing too daunting, due to personal familiarity with most of the tools used.  As previously mentioned, I have experience with content management and user interface design for websites, working with both Wordpress (website and blog functionality) and Weebly based sites.  This is just my first time writing on them rather than ensuring other peoples content is where they want it to be and presented how they want it to be shown.  There is not much in the way of overarching technology related goals for this class, mostly just ensuring I present my previous experience well by maintaining a clean blog and preventing any crashes or other issues within my control.  Bandwidth Error meme from user Tomomi on  Flickr Let us hope we avoid this error, it is a killer for blog and website reputation, although honestly it is something out of our hands and completely in the hands of blogger and google if we crash this w...

For this class, the assignments available are nothing too intimidating, as all the assignments are similar to things performed in other classes.  The most intriguing assignment is definitely the storytelling, due to the high level of creativity that it involves and the wide range of options available.  There is just so much personality to be infused into the exercise it most likely will be one of the most thought provoking every week.  For extra credit, I am most intrigued by the tech tips, due to my background as a web technician.  That is what inspired the following image for this post When your website goes wrong from  Soft9000.com Which is symbolic of one of the many dreaded yellow screens one can see when managing content for a website or blog, and hopefully something that through properly applying the tech tips we all can avoid needing to spend time finding a fix for on our own blogs in this course.  

When I first heard the term "Growth Mindset", I had not had any prior experience with the term, but it felt fairly self-explanatory as to the idea behind the phrase.  It encompasses an idea prevalent in many fields of taking failure and learning from it and making it your success, using the lessons and experience gained to further one's learning and later achievements.  It removes the fear of failure by giving students challenges in order to push them beyond what they think they can do, and if failure comes as a consequence, helping them move on from it.  I definitely appreciate her idea of making learning challenging, because the difficult lessons are the ones that are usually best remembered.  In my own school career, this has definitely been the experience I have had, control theory has been one of the most difficult subjects, but now it is the main thing I study for my graduate work.  This was due to the challenge of it made it an exceptionally rewarding ex...

Hello all, I am John-Paul Burke, a Aerospace Engineering Graduate student at the University of Oklahoma and Research Assistant for Dr. Andrea L'Afflitto at the University of Oklahoma's Advanced Dynamics Laboratory.  My hobbies and work overlap, with most of my current projects being the design, testing, coding, and flying of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) also known as drones.  Personally, I own 3 different UAS models, and enjoy flying them whenever possible.  As an FAA licensed UAS pilot, the ability to fly and allow others to experience the joy of piloting is amazing, because seeing the excitement on others faces when they fly (and crash) a UAS for the first time is infectious.  Below are several of my videos taken of or by my drones, with an apology in advance for the quality of the one taken by the drone, due to the UAS being a restoration project and so the camera is not quite up to full quality yet.  Restored Parrot Drone First Flight Test, personal v...

For this assignment, the goal was to browse through previous years past project, in order to get a grasp on the goals for these projects as well as see examples of what would be expected.  These storybooks provided snippets of information on specific aspects of Indian life, literature, and culture, as well as insight as to what previous students took away from the course.  Furthermore, it also provided a picture as to what to be watching for and noticing throughout the course, in order to form ideas for a successful storybook project for myself later in the semester. The first storybook that caught my attention was Journey of Festivals .  The storybook provided tales explaining 3 festivals of India, Rama Navami, Onam, and Gudi Padwa.  The reason this storybook caught my eye is that due to my roommate, I have had the unique experience of being able to witness the practice and learn some of the history of these festivals.  While lacking an in depth knowledge of ...

As someone descended from a proud German family, I have always felt a strong connection to the Vaterland (Fatherland), in particular to the city my family is from, Munich.  Below are two of my favorite places in Munich, destinations that are must sees on any trip to the capital of Bavaria. Allianz Arena: My favorite place in Munich is the Allianz Arena, home of FC Bayern Munich, German superpower soccer club and 5 time European Champions Allianz Arena at Night Image from Richard Bartz on  Wikimedia commons In addition to hosting FC Bayern matches, the arena hosts the German national soccer team, Der Mannschaft.  My goal is to someday travel to Munich in order to watch a Champions League knockout tie at the arena.   Marienplatz (Mary's Square): This is the central square of Munich, and the host to one of the most famous Christmas Markets in the world.  The central square is famous for the old and new town halls walling it in, creating a stri...

This is a Test post for John-Paul Burke for MLLL-4993-995 as per course requirements.